A new release of the iOS SDK and the iOS Matrix Console app is available on GitHub: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk.

If you use CocoaPods to manage your application dependencies, note that the Matrix SDK pod has been updated too.

The changes since the last release are:

SDK

Improvements:

• MXFileStore stores data on a separated thread to avoid blocking the UI thread.
• MXRestClient: Callback blocks in all MXRestClient methods are now optional.
• MXEvent: Cleaned up exposed properties and added a description for each of them.

Features:

• Added API for registering for push notifications.
• Added generic API methods to make any kind of registration or login flow.
• Added Identity server API: lookup3pid, requestEmailValidation, validateEmail and bind3PID.
• Management of event redaction: there is a new method in the SDK to redact an event and the SDK updates its data on redaction event.

Bug fixes:

• SYIOS-5 - Expose registration API
• SYIOS-44 - Credentials persist across logout
• SYIOS-54 - Matrix Console app slightly freezes when receiving a message
• SYIOS-59 - Infinite loop in case of back pagination on new created room
• MXRoom: Fixed [MXRoom sendTextMessage]

Matrix Console

Improvements:

• When long pressing on a message, the app shows the JSON string of the Matrix event.
• On this screen, the user can redact the event - if he has enough power level.
• Use home server media repository facilities to use lower image size for thumbnails and avatars
• Settings screen: show build version with the app version.
• Settings screen: added an option to hide information related to redacted event.
• Settings screen: added an option to enable reading of local phonebook. The country is required to internationalise phone numbers.

Features:

• Push notifications.
• Added a contacts screen that displays Matrix users the user had interactions with and contacts from the device phonebook.
• Contacts from the device phonebook who have an email linked to a Matrix user id are automatically recognised.

Bug fixes:

• SYIOS-53 - multilines text input that expands as you type mutiplines would be nice
• SYIOS-45 - Need to check the thumbnail params requested by iOS
• SYIOS-55 - High resolution avatars create memory pressure
• SYIOS-57 - Back pagination does not work well for self chat
• SYIOS-56 - add cache size handling in settings
• SYIOS-60 - In a self chat, Console takes ages to paginate back even if messages are in cache
• SYIOS-61 - Chat room : cannot scroll to bottom when keyboard is opened whereas the growing textview contains multi-lines text.
• SYIOS-63 - calculate room names for 3+ members if no room name/alias
• SYIOS-44 - Credentials persist across logout
• SYIOS-64 - Chat room : unexpected blank lines are added into history when user types in growing textview
• SYIOS-65 - IOS8 : in case of search in recents, keyboard is not dismisssed when user selects a room.
• SYIOS-16 Add option in Console to join room thanks to its alias

Happy 2015 from everyone at Matrix.org!

We're excited to kick off the new year with a major performance upgrade for Synapse: having had a chance to do some profiling over the Christmas break, Synapse 0.6.1 improves performance by up to an order of magnitude thanks to optimising the way events are constructed and manipulated, DB optimisations, etc. Suddenly things are feeling much more snappy and less of a PoC and more of a real system, which hopefully bodes well for 2015! Please upgrade if you're running a homeserver, or install one if you're not - grab the code from http://github.com/matrix-org/synapse.

The iOS SDK and demo app has also been improving lots in the last few weeks - grab the latest code from http://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk. We have zoomable image support; full support for the new media repository in Synapse 0.6.0; file transfer status UI; offline support; snappy message synchronisation and more...

We also released a new simple Python SDK client library for Python called matrix-client, which is now being used by NEB (our general-purpose Matrix helper bot).

Meanwhile, our (constantly evolving) plan for the beginning of 2015 is:

• Finish v2 of the client-server API based on all the lessons learnt since launch: draft in progress here
• Finish the Application Services API to allow proper gateways and services in and out of Matrix at last:draft in progress here
• Re-release the spec based on the above
• Build robust gateways (IRC, XMPP, SIP and more) on top of the AS API
• Polish and release the iOS, Android demo clients - including push notification and VoIP support!
• Overhaul the identity server architecture and add end-to-end crypto

Given the rate at which Matrix is maturing, the next few months should be really exciting - please come join us on #matrix:matrix.org and get involved!

We're proud to announce the new 0.6.0 major release of Synapse: the Python reference implementation of Matrix - as well as 0.6.0 of the AngularJS example Matrix client, as a special early Christmas present from the Matrix team :)

The main priority here has been hunting down stability bugs whilst also adding in a few more features. The most exciting new feature is the new Media/Content API: this allows every homeserver to replicate, cache and thumbnail any files associated with Matrix rooms, rather than relying on retrieving them from the origin homeserver as was previously the case. This is really cool, as it effectively makes Matrix a distributed content distribution network and gives the same replication semantics to file attachments as to the rest of JSON in rooms.

We've also landed a major new branch which changes the way events are represented internally in order to make them immutable, and fixes a whole range of minor stability issues. In other news, performance issues are still a work in progress...

To get involved, head over to https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse and install and upgrade today!

We just pushed a bugfix update to Synapse 0.5, mainly to fix a memory leak where federated events could get leaked whilst retrying to send them to a remote server which is unavailable. Please upgrade, especially if you've noticed synapse hogging RAM!

Since we exited alpha and released Synapse 0.5.0 last week there's been a flurry of bug fix releases as we ran around firefighting some of the more exciting problems which popped up thanks to merging the federation-auth and event-signing branches.

We released 0.5.3a on Nov 27, which seems to now be pretty stable - if you were holding off on upgrading your homeserver and trying to federate with the new 0.5 release branch, now would be a great time to press the button!

Most excitingly, we believe we have finally fixed the PyNaCL dependency problems which have plagued pretty much anyone setting up a homeserver. This was a problem in PyNaCL itself - huge thanks to Mark for hunting it down and sending the PyNaCL team pull requests to get it fixed. As a result, installing synapse as of 0.5.3a really should be a one-liner at last (please let us know if it isn't!):

pip install --user --process-dependency-links https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/tarball/master

The full changelog of what's been going on since 0.5.0 is as follows:

Changes in synapse 0.5.3a (2014-11-27)
=====================================

 * Depend on a fixed version of PyNaCL
 * Fix bug that caused joining a remote room to fail if a single event was not
   signed correctly.
 * Fix bug which caused servers to continuously try and fetch events from other
   servers.

Changes in synapse 0.5.2 (2014-11-26)
=====================================

 * Fix major bug that caused rooms to disappear from people's initial sync.

Changes in synapse 0.5.1 (2014-11-26)
=====================================
See UPGRADES.rst for specific instructions on how to upgrade.

 * Fix bug where we served up an Event that did not match its signatures.
 * Fix regression where we no longer correctly handled the case where a
   homeserver receives an event for a room it doesn't recognise (but is in.)

We're really excited to release the biggest update yet to Synapse (the python/twisted reference Matrix homeserver implementation) - version 0.5.0 is out!

This effectively concludes our alpha testing phase - Synapse's security model is now feature complete and we are now cautiously encouraging people to run their own Synapse installation on the 'net; federate up; and help us squash all and any bugs as we get beta testing.

Synapse 0.5.0 has huge database schema changes from previous versions as we have landed both the event-signing and federation-authorisation branches and so added full cryptographic signing of all matrix events and unified the client-server and server-server model of events/PDUs.  As a result, migrating history is Hard - we recommend a clean start if possible; if not, come talk to us in #matrix:matrix.org.  UPGRADE.rst has the details.

The full changelog is as per below - please upgrade your homeserver or install a new one if you're new here and join Matrix and help us create a robust open distributed messaging fabric for the web!

Changes in synapse 0.5.0 (2014-11-19)
=====================================
This release includes changes to the federation protocol and client-server API
that is not backwards compatible.

This release also changes the internal database schemas and so requires servers to
drop their current history. See UPGRADES.rst for details.

Homeserver:
 * Add authentication and authorization to the federation protocol. Events are
   now signed by their originating homeservers.
 * Implement the new authorization model for rooms.
 * Split out web client into a separate repository: matrix-angular-sdk.
 * Change the structure of PDUs.
 * Fix bug where user could not join rooms via an alias containing 4-byte
   UTF-8 characters.
 * Merge concept of PDUs and Events internally.
 * Improve logging by adding request ids to log lines.
 * Implement a very basic room initial sync API.
 * Implement the new invite/join federation APIs.

Webclient:
 * The webclient has been moved to a separate repository.

Hi all,

Synapse 0.3.4 is out! The main changes here are a huge fleet of bugfixes to the webclient, and the addition of TURN support for VoIP relaying. This makes VoIP/Video call setup much more reliable (although the UI still needs some love).

Meanwhile, we set an IRC bridge (https://github.com/tm604/Matrix-IRCBridge) running linking #matrix:matrix.org and #matrix-dev:matrix.org to their Freenode counterparts (#matrix & #matrix-dev respectively) - much fun to see innocent IRC users assimilated up into Matrix, and for us to now be using Matrix for /all/ our development chat and interaction (whether it's through a Matrix client or an IRC client).

To upgrade to the latest homeserver, just git pull && ./synctl restart. If you want to start playing with VoIP in earnest on your own homeserver, you'll need to install a TURN server - see docs/turn-howto.rst for details on how to set one up.

http://matrix.org/alpha has already been upgraded to 0.3.4, so feel free to play with all the new stuff there.

thanks,

Matthew

Changes in synapse 0.3.4 (2014-09-25)

This version adds support for using a TURN server. See docs/turn-howto.rst on how to set one up.

Homeserver:

• Add support for redaction of messages.
• Fix bug where inviting a user on a remote home server could take up to 20-30s.
• Implement a get current room state API.
• Add support specifying and retrieving turn server configuration.

Webclient:

• Add button to send messages to users from the home page.
• Add support for using TURN for VoIP calls.
• Show display name change messages.
• Fix bug where the client didn't get the state of a newly joined room until after it has been refreshed.
• Fix bugs with tab complete.
• Fix bug where holding down the down arrow caused chrome to chew 100% CPU.
• Fix bug where desktop notifications occasionally used "Undefined" as the display name.
• Fix more places where we sometimes saw rooms as IDs rather than aliases.
• Fix bug which caused lag when entering text in the text box.

Hello world,

Synapse 0.3.3 was released today, concentrating on both feature & stability improvements on the webclient. The big news is that 1:1 video calling via WebRTC is implemented (although we're still working on some stability issues, and Synapse doesn't support TURN yet. This will be coming in the next few days however!).

Play with the demo server at http://matrix.org/alpha, or update your own homeserver with a git pull && ./synctl restart or by cloning a new checkout with git clone https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse.git

--Matthew

Changes in synapse 0.3.3 (2014-09-22)

Homeserver:

• Fix bug where you continued to get events for rooms you had left.

Webclient:

• Add support for video calls with basic UI.
• Fix bug where one to one chats were named after your display name rather than the other person's.
• Fix bug which caused lag when typing in the textarea.
• Refuse to run on browsers we know won't work.
• Trigger pagination when joining new rooms.
• Fix bug where we sometimes didn't display invitations in recents.
• Automatically join room when accepting a VoIP call.
• Disable outgoing and reject incoming calls on browsers we don't support VoIP in.
• Don't display desktop notifications for messages in the room you are non-idle and speaking in.

We just pushed out a major new release (0.3.0) of Synapse: the current reference Matrix homeserver, swiftly followed by some hotfixes (0.3.1, 0.3.2).

The big changes are:

• Change the VoIP setup API to be more efficient (bundling together media stream candidates into a single setup object). API breaking change!
• Change the Registration API to be more consistent. API breaking change!
• Lots of nice usability refinements to webclient - e.g. per-message notifications; cursor-key history navigation; faster room loading
• More bugfixes and stability fixes on the homeserver

Please reload the page if you're lurking on http://matrix.org/alpha to pull in the new webclient.

If you're running a homeserver - please upgrade with a quick git pull && ./synctl restart.

If you're not running a homeserver... why not? ;D

--Matthew

Changes in synapse 0.3.2 (2014-09-18)

Webclient:

• Fix regression where an empty "bing words" list in old accounts didn't send notifications when it should have done.

Changes in synapse 0.3.1 (2014-09-18)

This is a release to hotfix v0.3.0 to fix two regressions.

Webclient:

• Fix a regression where we sometimes displayed duplicate events.
• Fix a regression where we didn't immediately remove rooms you were banned in from the recents list.

Changes in synapse 0.3.0 (2014-09-18)

See UPGRADE for information about changes to the client server API, including breaking backwards compatibility with VoIP calls and registration API.

Homeserver:

• When a user changes their displayname or avatar the server will now update all their join states to reflect this.
• The server now adds "age" key to events to indicate how old they are. This is clock independent, so at no point does any server or webclient have to assume their clock is in sync with everyone else.
• Fix bug where we didn't correctly pull in missing PDUs.
• Fix bug where prev_content key wasn't always returned.
• Add support for password resets.

Webclient:

• Improve page content loading.
• Join/parts now trigger desktop notifications.
• Always show room aliases in the UI if one is present.
• No longer show user-count in the recents side panel.
• Add up & down arrow support to the text box for message sending to step through your sent history.
• Don't display notifications for our own messages.
• Emotes are now formatted correctly in desktop notifications.
• The recents list now differentiates between public & private rooms.
• Fix bug where when switching between rooms the pagination flickered before the view jumped to the bottom of the screen.
• Add support for password resets.
• Add bing word support.
• Update VoIP implementation to use new API

Registration API:

• The registration API has been overhauled to function like the login API. In practice, this means registration requests must now include the following: 'type':'m.login.password'. See UPGRADE for more information on this.
• The 'user_id' key has been renamed to 'user' to better match the login API.
• There is an additional login type: 'm.login.email.identity'.
• The command client and web client have been updated to reflect these changes.

We're back home from TechCrunch where we had a great time arguing the pros and cons of Matrix versus XMPP with anyone and everyone - thanks to all who came to talk to us!

Meanwhile, Synapse v0.2.3 was released yesterday: the emphasis this week has been on improving stability issues on the server, and lots of cosmetic and functionality fixes on the webclient.

If you're running a homeserver, please upgrade asap - upgrading has never been easier - assuming you've checked out the master branch, simply:

git pull
./synctl restart

...and you will be up and running on 0.2.3. We keep the master branch tracking the latest release.  http://matrix.org/alpha is already on the latest release should you wish to experiment first!

Alternatively, if you're installing from scratch, try:

git clone https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse.git
python setup.py develop --user
./synctl start # to generate a default config
./synctl start # to actually set it running

and then head over to http://localhost:8008 to play with your very own Matrix homeserver!

Changes in synapse 0.2.3 (2014-09-12)

Homeserver:

• Fix bug where we stopped sending events to remote home servers if a user from that home server left, even if there were some still in the room.
• Fix bugs in the state conflict resolution where it was incorrectly rejecting events.
• Many stability fixes

Webclient:

• Display room names and topics.
• Allow setting/editing of room names and topics.
• Display information about rooms on the main page.
• Handle ban and kick events in real time.
• VoIP UI and reliability improvements.
• Add glare support for VoIP.
• Improvements to initial startup speed.
• Don't display duplicate join events.
• Show message sent/sending state via opacity
• Multiline message sending support
• Many other bug & stability fixes