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  • cwtch-alpha-0.1.5 eca82ae45d

    Cwtch Alpha Release 0.1.5 Pre-Release

    dan released this 2019-07-26 20:52:11 +00:00 | 382 commits to master since this release

    We've been mostly heads down on two large projects: 'make cwtch work on android' and 'tapir: a new implementation of the ricochet protocol'.

    This release contains a lot of the work towards 'make cwtch work on android' except that part where it does (More time with a debugger needed). To that end, since the last release (0.1.4), this release contains a very refactored cwtch library/app/engine. In order to put all the connection, networking, and file storage parts of cwtch into an Android service we had to take all those parts, make them much less coupled with the other parts of Cwtch, and then add in new ways to instantiate Cwtch apps in two parts (client and service) and create an IPC system for them to use to communicate. All that work is in this release available for testing and we want to get it into peoples hands to do just that.

    Running the app on desktop by default will run in the traditional way as a single app (while still using our refactored code, just in a unified app), however, if you want to test the new client/service setup for any reason (for me, it was faster than loading it onto a phone each time) you can run two cwtch processes from the command like as follows

    $ cwtch --service

$ cwtch --clientui

    And they should work together, and you can even kill the client and restart it and it should be fine.

    So that is the biggest and largest set of changes in this new release, but over the course of work on this a lot of small improvements crept in as well including:

    • A progress spinner in the UI for groups indicating when they are connected but syncing with the server
    • Chat text bar is locked until you can actually send (so a peer to peer connection is established, or a group is synced)
    • Minor updates to the UI and what is clickable
    • Minor improvements in "performance" in that we removed a few threads that poll for events and replaced them with events and event handlers
    • Possibly minor improvements to status display

    So while there aren't a lot of new user improvements, a lot of code has changed or been moved around and we definitely wanted to get it out and into people's hands for testing.

    Thanks!

    THIS IS AN ALPHA RELEASE - EXPECT BUGS.

    We are providing these binaries in order to show off what Cwtch is capable of so far, but please expect bugs and note that we HAVE NOT subjected this code to a security audit or usability testing yet.

    It is also not remotely feature complete. Some features are supported by the underlying Cwtch library (check out https://git.openprivacy.ca/cwtch.im/cwtch) but not yet by the UI, and some are still having their research/design finalized by the Open Privacy team before being implemented. We have lots of cool features in the works and we hope you'll check back later to try them out!

    ANDROID: We are not putting Cwtch up on the Play Store yet. If your phone has developer mode enabled, you can sideload the APK below. If you don't already know how to do this, please wait until we put it on the Store at a future date.

    Please note that the Cwtch server feature can be very bandwidth-intensive right now, so please DO NOT CONNECT TO CWTCH SERVERS OVER CELLULAR DATA PLANS or an internet plan with a low data cap. The direct messaging feature, however, uses negligible bandwidth (unless you decide to send gigabytes of text with it). It also has difficulty maintaining its Tor onion service right now, so you may need to kill and restart the app if you find it unable to receive new incoming connections (outgoing connections should work fine).

    Credits: Profile and Server Icons in this alpha were designed by freepik from Flaticon

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