Software Update: Riot Web 1.1

Matrix is an open specification for secure and decentralized communication. To use this network you can download the application Riot Bet. It allows you to chat, exchange files, make audio and video calls, set notifications and bring bots to life to set up integrations with other applications. The developers have released the 1.1 version of Riot Web with the following announcement:

Riot Web 1.1 —UX++

Riot Web 1.1 is here! The Riot Web devs have been hard at their craft, landing functional and aesthetic upgrades to timeline scrolling, registration, room preview, receiving invitations and image upload.

Frustration-free registration
Regular readers of this blog mightn’t have experienced Riot’s registration UX recently, but 1.1 lands a crucial (and long-overdue) enhancement — clear and timely form feedback.

We’ve also tightened up the password rules, encouraging strong password use through the introduction of algorithmic complexity requirements (powered by zxcvbn). This is only on registration for now, but you can expect it to land on Password Reset and User Settings soon.

Join that room
In reworking Room Preview we’ve gotten rid of the Big Ugly Box, leaving much more room for actually previewing the room. Pick a (previewable) room from the Room Directory to give it a whirl.

At the same time we’ve given the invitation UX some attention to make sure it’s abundantly clear who is inviting you where.

Buttery smooth scrolling
Riot 1.1 includes the latest and greatest improvements to timeline scrolling. The timeline is a tricky beast to handle smoothly (it’s forever changing shape as images load or messages decrypt), but we’ve reworked it from the ground up to make scroll jumps very nearly a thing of the past.

It’s a dramatic improvement, but there are still a few crumbs in the butter — if you spot scroll jumps in the wild please do throw us a bug report.

Image upload preview
Image upload now features ‘upload preview’, taking some of the excitement out of pasting the contents of your clipboard into a public room.

And if somebody does upload an image upside-down, thanks to YaoiFangirl420 you can now straighten it out without leaving Riot.

Breadcrumbs — nearly ready for launch
‘Breadcrumbs’ (the trail of recently-visited rooms located above the room list) will very soon graduate as a finished feature (and we’re keen to hear your feedback)

Preview Breadcrumbs now by enabling Show recent room avatars above the room list in Labs (under User Settings)

LOTS OF STABILITY AND PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS
And of course a release wouldn’t be a release if it didn’t include lots-of-stability-and-performance-improvements. Recent work has focused on room upgrades and the gracefully handling the (quite unreasonably) difficult problem of the host machine running out of disk space.

Running out of disk space is still a Bad Thing that’ll make Riot (and your computer generally) have a very bad day, but thanks to recent changes Riot should at least tell you why it’s struggling to behave normally.

What’s next?
Right now we’re hard at work on message editing and reactions —you can see the work in progress as it lands over on https://riot.im/develop

And as always you can check out the full Riot Web, matrix-js-sdk and matrix-react-sdk changelogs for the gory details, and (as always) thank you for all your love and support and keep that feedback coming (#riot :matrix.org/github)!