This week, Matthew and myself went to the WebRTC conference and its related Kranky Geek event in sunny London.

Matrix had a speaker slot in both events; the first talk was "Proposing an open interoperable signalling layer for WebRTC" (slides).

As I was talking to people in the tea-breaks between sessions, I was actually surprised at the amount of people who not only knew about Matrix, but who had been following eagerly since the early days, and had questions about specific features and recent developments!

Later in the day it was time for the Kranky Geek, and the talk then was a bit more technical: "Interoperable HTTP Signalling with Matrix" (slides). The talk included a "dangerous demo" where we made a WebRTC call from our Matrix iOS App to our webclient for the first time - thanks to the OpenWebRTC team for helping us make the demo!

What's great about these kind of events is the feedback and discussion following talks; lots of people have relevant experiences and opinions that they are happy to share, and of course questions on how exactly different features actually work.

It's always great to meet new people and have lots of various discussions. Hopefully we have got a few more people interested in Matrix - we have already seen some new joiners in the #matrix:matrix.org room!

Next up is Fluent in San Francisco next week, where I will be speaking.

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.

This weekend was spent at IDEA-London where the TADHack-mini London hackathon was going on. In total, there were around 18 different projects being hacked on all day Saturday and Sunday morning, before a 5-minute presentation on Sunday afternoon.

Four different projects used Matrix in one way or another: Matrixbot - a robot controlled through standard messages in a Matrix room - done by Scott Barstow and Anders Brownworth (project code and presentation video and picture). Neil Stratford's hack included lighting up his roll of LEDs whenever a push-notification hit his Matrix webclient (picture from the presentation).

The Co-Browsify hack by Žilvinas Račyla and Augustinas Bacvinka allows two people to browse the same webpage, with scrolling events being collected and duplicated to the other browser via Matrix (picture from the presentation). Finally, Matt Williams of Metaswitch created a Project Clearwater/Matrix Gateway which enables Project Clearwater/IMS to set up WebRTC calls with any matrix user (project code and pictures from the presentation) - this is the first time we have had a SIP-to-Matrix call (let alone IMS-to-Matrix) set up!

As TADHack sponsors, Matrix had two Parrot Drones to hand out as prizes, and the winners for best Matrix-related hacks are Matt Williams for the Clearwater/Matrix Gateway - and Scott Barstow and Anders Brownworth for Matrixbot! We are also happy that the other two Matrix-related projects were rewarded with prizes from the other sponsors (full list of winners).

All in all it was a very productive weekend, both in terms of tech and also meeting people. Thanks to everyone who participated and especially those who worked on Matrix-related hacks!

Next up is the WebRTC conference and its related Kranky Geek event - which will be happen tomorrow and the day after. See you there!

As of 9am tomorrow, somewhere in the depths of East London (and remotely from around the world), a diaspora of elite VoIP/WebRTC/Telco developers will compete to build the most innovative and impressive communications demos at Tadhack Mini London! Dave, Oddvar and myself are going to be there from the core Matrix.org team, both on-site and online (at #matrix:matrix.org, of course) to provide support - especially to everyone who's using Matrix APIs in their solution. And as we mentioned before, we'll even be giving away two Parrot Bebop Drones to the best hacks built using Matrix!

It's not too late to get involved - the more the merrier. We reckon it's going to be a really fun weekend, so look forward to chatting to some of you soon!

Earlier this year we went to FOSDEM - as reported in an earlier blog post.

Both the recording equipment and the video team volunteers were new this year, so some problems were encountered, which means that our lightning talk video unfortunately was lost. However, our talk in the IoT-devroom is now available:

(Click here to download the video)

The slides are also available. You can check out the slides from the lightning talk as well.

As always, questions and comments are very welcome in the #matrix:matrix.org room!

Heads up that we released Synapse 0.8.1 a little while back, but we've all been too busy writing software to announce it... you know how it goes. Anyway, here are the changes:

• Disable registration by default. New users can be added using the included register_new_matrix_user script or by enabling registration in the config.
• Add metrics to synapse. To enable metrics use config options enable_metrics and metrics_port.
• Fix bug where banning only kicked the user.

Note that first one in particular: if you set up a new install, you won't be able to register new users using the API by default. This means random people on the Internet can't create accounts on your Home Server unless you actually choose to let them. Also, if you were trying to ban users and noticed that didn't work... yeah, we fixed that.

Okay, back to writing software again!

It's competition time! Matrix is sponsoring TADHack-mini London, which is a two-day hackathon with focus on WebRTC technology, happening on April 11 and 12 at IDEA London. We will award a Parrot Bebop Drone (which itself can be hacked via the ARDroneSDK3) to the two best hacks using Matrix, and we can't wait to see what kind of ideas people will come up with! We strongly encourage anyone to get involved - have a look at our Development Resources (scroll down a bit) and have a think of what you can create within the 16-hour timeframe. The reference Matrix web client already supports WebRTC - you can play with this by registering a user via the matrix.org web client (or you can check out the reference web client and run it on your own box), inviting a user to a 1-1 chat (click on their avatar and "start chat") and then clicking the microphone or video camera icon in the top right to start a voice/video call.

We brainstormed some ideas for further WebRTC/Matrix work in our GSoC (Google Summer of Code) project proposals, for example "Implementing WebRTC support in Mobile apps" and "Multi-way voice and video conferencing". These are very probably too extensive for the 16-hour hackathon, but might provide some ideas for smaller hacks.

We will be at the event to offer mentoring and help, but you can already start thinking about potential hacks - come talk to us in the #matrix:matrix.org room!

Quick heads up that Matrix.org is going to be at Enterprise Connect next week in Orlando. If you're attending and interested in open federation between WebRTC solutions, Enterprise UC, messaging/voip apps, the PSTN etc - then needless to say we'd love to talk to you! Please come seek us out, or drop us an email (firstname at matrix.org) or find us on #matrix:matrix.org to schedule a chat in person.

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.

Hi folks,

We released a new version (0.2.3) of the Android Matrix Console application today - this is a decent upgrade over 0.2.2. Changelog below.

If you're an Android user, please install the app from the Play Store and give it a go and give us some feedback on #android:matrix.org or Google Play.

thanks!

Changes in Matrix Android SDK in 0.2.3 (2015-03-10) ===================================================

---

🔗SDK

---

🔗Matrix Console

Improvements:

• Avoid refreshing the home page when it is not displayed.
• Display a piechart while uploading a media.
• Refresh the display when some messages are automatically resent (after retrieving a data network connection for example).
• Update the user rename message to be compliant with the web client.
• Use the local media files instead of downloading them when they are acknowledged (messages sending).
• Create a medias management class.
• Display the offline status in the members list.
• Avoid creating new homeActivity instance when joining a room from member details sheet.
• The public rooms list are now saved in the bundle state : it should avoid having a spinner when rotated the device.
• The animated GIFs are now supported.

Features:

• Add the rate limits error management. The server could request to delay the messages sending because they were too many messages sent in a short time (to avoid spam).
• Can take a photo to send it.
• A chat room page is automatically paginated to fill. It used to get only the ten latest messages : it displayed half filled page on tablet.
• Add the sending failure reason in the message details (long tap on a message, “Message details”).
• The user is not anymore notified it the push rules are not fulfilled.
• Add some room settings (Display all events, hide unsupported events, sort members by last seen time, display left members, display public rooms in the home page).
• Add various accessibility tweaks.

Bug fixes:

• The media downloads/uploads were sometimes stuck.
• The private room creation was broken.
• SYAND-33 : number of unread messages disappears when entering another room.
• The RoomActivity creation used to crash when it was cancelled because the Room id param was not provided.
• The client used to crash when the home server was invalid but started with http.
• The account creation used to fail if the home server had a trailing slash.
• SYAND-44 In progress text entry could be saved across crashes.
• SYAND-38 Inline image viewer in Android app.