In the News

Just a quick announcement that Android Console 0.3.0 has been released on the Google Play store.

This release contains a whole lot of fixes, new features, and nicer UI - see the changes file for details, but in summary:

• The UI has been switched to Android's Material Design
• Android Lollipop is now fully supported
• We have added support for contacts
• Various accessibility and usability fixes have been contributed by Nolan Darilek (thanks!)
• We also have clientside GCM support thanks to Leon Handreke! We need to make some changes server-side before GCM can be used, but that's on the current ToDo-list!
• Lots of bugs fixed, as usual, thanks to everyone who reported an issue.

Hi folks,

As of today you can install the basic reference Matrix client on iOS from the App Store. We've called the app "Matrix Console" to try to make it clear that it's very much a developer/poweruser tool for experimenting with Matrix and showcasing the Matrix APIs and an example of how to use the iOS SDK - whilst it can be used as a great replacement to IRC, it's by no means meant to be a glossy polished app like Hangouts or Slack.

Meanwhile you can also get the Android version of Console at the Google Play Store as we mentioned in the last post.

Needless to say, they're both entirely open-source (Apache license) and you can grab the code from https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-android-sdk respectively if you want to play with your own copy.

The mobile apps currently act very similarly to the reference web app - providing group chat (text/images/video etc) in decentralised public and private rooms, with room history kept in sync across all your different Matrix-enabled apps. They don't yet do VoIP, although we're working on it. Please give the apps a go and file all your bugs and feedback into JIRA or #ios:matrix.org and #android:matrix.org so we can make them even better :)

The iOS app in particular showcases one of the coolest new features in Matrix: the ability for homeservers to support highly configurable push notifications, ensuring you never miss messages on Matrix ever again. The way this works is that when you install the Matrix Console app from iTunes and log in, the app tells your homeserver to send push notifications to a simple push server on Matrix.org running the sygnal codebase (you can also run your own sygnal for your own Matrix apps). You can then configure some excitingly comprehensive push settings in the settings page of the web client (we haven't exposed the UI to configure these on the mobile apps yet) to configure what events in Matrix should trigger push notifications - and then you will automatically receive the desired pushes even when the app isn't running.

We think this is incredibly powerful: there are no longer any client-side notification settings. Instead, all your notifications are stored server-side - per-room, per-user, per-word and as many other extensible rules as you desire (plus some helpful common special cases). This means that the rules that determine whether you see notifications on the desktop from the webclient are identical to the notifications you receive push notifications on your mobile devices. We hope this is a huge improvement over the inflexible notification rules that iMessage, Hangouts etc push onto you (so to speak).

To support the new push rules we've just released a new version of the web client - 0.6.5. This implements the new rule configuration UI - see below for example UI.

The full list of changes in matrix-angular-sdk 0.6.5 is as per below. We hope you enjoy the new clients and push settings - thanks for flying Matrix :)

Changes in Matrix Angular SDK 0.6.5 (2015-03-12)
================================================
Features:
 - Push notifications can now be set up in the Settings page.
 - Text entered into the input box for a room will be preserved across
   room swaps.

Bug fixes:
 - Fixed a bug where auto-scroll for images did not work correctly.
 - Fixed a bug which resulted in a partially populated room when another
   device joined a room.
 - Fixed a bug which prevented files with the same name being uploaded
   sequentially.
 - Correctly remove redacted event text from the recent activity list.
 - Firefox: Can now join rooms which have a double ## alias.

Improvements:
 - Modified Settings page layout.
 - Angular SDK now relies on the Javascript SDK for new API features.
 - Transparent images will now be shown on a white background.
 - GIFs are now marked as such on the thumbnail for the image.
 - The web client version is now shown in Settings.

Matrix has been showing off in various places these last months. But whilst drowning in the launch we haven't managed to keep the blog updated with what's been going on! We are now much more back on track and able to catch up at last, as well as start on new ground for upcoming events!

So you'll find here a summary of the 4 events Matrix attended in September and October as well as all the presentations we gave!

🔗Disrupt San Francisco (September 6-10)

 

Disrupt SF was the launchpad of Matrix! We participated in the Hackathon as both a sponsor and a competitor (see our live update!), and exhibited at the conference as a Product Sponsor.

Three teams announced that they were using Matrix to build their hack but eventually only Go Social presented their project: a social network for travelers with a very nice UI! Go Social used Matrix APIs to add chat to their platform. The video of Go Social's presentation is here.

Matrix team worked on Animatrix: a chat app allowing you to build your own 3D animated cartoon and share it with any other friend using Matrix-compliant app using Unify. We had to hack together a basic Matrix Android client in order to do the demo .... You can see our project's presentation here!

The three days conference was great in terms of reaching out to devs and getting good feedback on Matrix! We love seeing people's eyes lighting up and people saying "Eventually someone is doing it!" when we explain what Matrix is about :) So thank you all for your support!

🔗Disrupt Europe (London, UK - October 18-21)

After getting public in SF, Disrupt London was the next steps to release a more stable version of Matrix and encourage even more people to build on Matrix. Again we sponsored both the Hackathon and the Conference and we brought with us a very cool PhantomX robot from Trossen Robotics which was also the price we gave away during the hackathon.

Two teams pitched a Matrix project at the Hackathon this time:

Hujambo is a very cool chat app allowing you to chat in your native language to someone who is going to read you in their own native language.

Movidiam did a very ambitious hack, modelling the trends of conversation in the Matrix ecosystem and displaying them a force-directed graph visualisation using D3.

Matrix team worked on a MIDI to Matrix bridge allowing to share and display music you play in a chatroom and jam together even if in different places. Here is the demo video:

http://youtu.be/LXDBoHyjmtw

Another great time to meet a lot of interesting people and build partnerships!

🔗WebRTC Summit Europe and Rich Communication Conference (Berlin - October 27-29)

Matrix was a Silver sponsor at WebRTC Summit and the Rich Communication events and it was a great opportunity to show the multiple ways that Matrix can be considered.

The first day was the WebRTC Summit where the focus was on the challenges and next steps of the standard. Matthew presented Matrix explained how it can be used as the missing signaling layer to WebRTC raising lots of questions and interest. You can see the presentation here.

The two next days were focusing more on Rich Communication Services (RCS) and again Matrix didn't go unnoticed, and not only because of the lightspeed presentation from Matthew waking everyone up on Wednesday morning! This time Matthew addressed Telcos and RCS vendors with the compelling proposition of using Matrix as the bridge between RCS/IMS/PSTN and the world of over-the-top applications.  The presentation is downloadable here.

Again some great feedback and lots of animated discussions over the future of the IP communication world!

🔗WebRTC Summit (Santa Clara - November 4-5)

Beginning of November Matrix was back on the West Coast  to sponsor the WebRTC Summit, collocated with the CloudExpo. Matthew opened the WebRTC track with another presentation again raising a lot of interest and question, and greatly supported by Hookflash in their following session. The presentation is available here.

And the tour continues: this week Matrix sponsored the TADSummit in Istanbul and next week we will be in San José at the WebRTC World Conference & Expo: meet us there and watch out for the upcoming TADSummit news!