Remember Riot messenger? It’s a decentralized, encrypted open source messaging software based on the Matrix protocol.
I wrote a detailed tutorial on using Riot on Linux desktop. The software was in beta back then. The first stable version, Riot 1.0 has been released a few days ago. Wonder what’s new?
New Features in Riot 1.0
Let’s look at some of the changes which were introduced in the move to Riot 1.0.
New Looks and Branding
The first thing that you see is the welcome screen which has a nice background and also a refreshed sky and dark blue logo which is cleaner and clearer than the previous logo.
The welcome screen gives you the option to sign into an existing riot account on either matrix.org or any other
Changing Homeservers and Making your own homeserver
As you can see, here you can change the
You can find an unofficial list of matrix
Internationalization and Languages.
One of the more interesting things are that the UI and everything is now il8n-aware and has been translated to catala, dansk, duetsch, Spanish along with English (US) which is/was the default when I installed. We can hope to see some more improvements in language support going ahead.
Favoriting a channel
One of the things that has changed from last time is how you favorite a channel. Now as you can see, you select the channel, click on the three vertical dots in it and then either favorite or do whatever you want with it.
Making changes to your profile and Settings
Just clicking the drop-down box beside your Avatar you get the settings box. You click on the box and it gives a wide variety of settings you can change.
As you can see there are
Encryption and E2E
One of the big things which riot has been talked about is Encryption and end-to-end encryption. This is still a work in progress.
The new release brings the focus on two enhancements in encryption: key backup and emoji device verification (still in progress).
With Riot 1.0, you can automatically backup your keys on your server. This key itself will be encrypted with a password so that it is stored securely. With this, you’ll never lose your encrypted message because you won’t lose your encryption key.
You will soon be able to verify your device with emoji now which is easier than matching long strings, isn’t it?
In the end
Using Riot requires a bit of patience. Once you get the hang of it, there is nothing like it. This decentralized messaging app becomes an important tool in the arsenal of privacy cautious people.
Riot is an important tool in the continuous effort to keep our data secure and privacy intact. The new major release makes it even more awesome. What do you think?
Finally :D
Periodically testing it as potential replacement for Slack-like services / servers and as aggregator, for example, for XMPP, Slack, Skype: amount of features and some specific options are perfect, but unfortunately (last time tested the product in self-hosted installation about 12 hours ago) – still to raw (unfortunately).
Hope that recently happened migration of KDE community from IRC to Matrix will somehow help Matrix with improvements, cause IRC was not simple to understand for everyone in our time, while Matrix/Riot can be hard to use (interface, bugs, etc.).
Bugs you will encounter in every software, doesn’t matter if it is mature or immature. The idea of free software development is not to remove bugs (although can be a lofty goal) but to improve usability, use-cases, fixing edge-cases etc.
If you look at the amount of work going in and the number of use-case scenarios which were when it was 0.13 and now when it’s 1.0.x it’s poles apart. I do know that there are lots of bugs that need to be fixed and they also need to figure out a way to be able to generate debug logs without giving personal info. For instance, I am following https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/3304, once this gets fixed, I am guessing lot of community will be able to share more of their debug logs and things would move much faster than today.
You contradicted yourself in the 2nd sentence of your response, How is removing bugs from your software not “improving usability”. lmao
it really is a minefield, many bugs could and may be encountered when a certain set of conditions exist. So it ‘may be’ a UI/UX bug but in many scenarios it may not. For instance, when you run an application in a debugging mode or even from a command-line you may encounter issues that you would not know if you just click on an app. In that sense, finding and fixing bugs may not necessarily not improve the usability or UX in the normative sense.
Really did prefer the old website design.