Regular updates from the trenches of XMPP and Objective-C
While submitting Monal for review, I have discovered that with OMEMO, I can’t distribute Monal in France without government approval there. There is no point in holding up this release for the rest of the world, so I will be removing it from the French store while I file the paperwork for a future release. Something tells me this is probably not the last time this happens.
Chatsecures version of the same issue
I have posted what I hope are the final beta for the next iOS client the Mac one will come soon afterwards. These will be what I plan to ship to the App Store barring any serious bugs. This will be my first production release of OMEMO. I have tried to debug this quite a bit over the past few months. Theres still a lot to do but as usual I would prefer to do more frequent releases rather than large ones. I am sure as more people use these new clients there will be more bugs and I will fix them in weekly releases in Feb.
I am still trying to chase down the bug that shows duplicated contacts for some people. At this point I suspect it is several different bugs that all look the same. I have posted new iOS and Mac betas that attempt to address this. Let me know is the betas solve the problem for your or not.
We are on our 13th beta. It has been a lot of iteration and improvement (thank you for helping test) and we are marching towards a good release. There are a couple of more issues I want to address and then we are going to ship this off to the App Store. I am eager to have a reasonably stable, modern XMPP client with OMEMO available on the Mac. It has been too long.
I am an engineer not an UI/UX designer. I dabble in those things and sometimes have an idea of what is good and bad from past experience but it is certainly not my strength. You can see that in the evolution of Monal over the past decade. We are always presented with a need to balance user friendliness with lots of options. I have rarely seen anything get the balance right. Oddly artwork has always been one of the hardest things to deal with.
Icons are super important. I started off using icons from KDE and later bought Glyphish, which I have been using since iOS 5 or so. I recently discovered Icon Deposit, where a lot of things I would have killed for in the past are available for free with attribution. It is the open source model applied to artwork. This is something I would recommend other developers checkout. Are there other resources like this? I haven’t paid attention to it in ages.
OMEMO key viewer is in. Trust/untrust toggle doesn’t work yet and you can’t view your keys yet. Those are all coming.
A quick glimpse at the key management screens and the new details screen on macOS. These will be in the next beta.
My nightly beta release continues. There are new Mac and iOS betas where I am trying to address issues with OMEMO device synch, duplicate recipients and in iOS I have added the ability to view your own keys (Settings->Accounts->your account->Keys)
A quick fix for decryption issues. If you have used earlier betas, after upgrading, remove your account on every device with monal (iOS and Mac) and re-add it. There was a bug in earlier betas that messed up the signal session and a clean slate should help a lot.
There are new betas for Mac and iOS. This should resolve crashes on the iPad as well as any decryption issues seen on both platforms.