Exactly 2 months after NeoChat 1.0, the NeoChat team is happy to announce a new release of NeoChat. NeoChat is a native client for the decentralized communication network Matrix.
Aside from the many bug fixes, performance improvements, and subtle appearance improvements, NeoChat 1.1 brings many new features that will make your experience with it more convenient.
Thanks to the work of Hannah, Nicolas, and Tobias, this release also brings NeoChat to many more platforms. Nightly builds of NeoChat are now available on Android, Flatpak, AppImage, macOS and Windows. Not all of them are considered production ready, but we hope to improve the support for them in future release.
New features
First launch experience improvements
Probably the highlight of this release is the completely new login page. It detects the server configuration based on your Matrix Id. This allows you to login to servers requiring Single Sign On (SSO) (like the Mozilla or the incoming Fedora Matrix instance).
Servers that require agreeing to the TOS before usage are correctly detected now and redirect to their TOS webpage, allowing the user to agree to them instead of silently failing to load the account.
Stickers
Everyone loves cute stickers, so now NeoChat supports displaying them too. We don’t yet support sending them.
Editing messages
Editing messages is another popular feature of every IM client. NeoChat is now able to show edited messages correctly and also make it possible to edit your messages. The behavior is the same as in Element.
Multimodal mode
It is now possible to open a room into a new window. This allows you to view and interact with multiple rooms at the same time.
Commands
We added a few commands to NeoChat. Previously you could use /me and /rainbow, and we added a few mores: /shrug, /lenny, /rainbowme, /join, /invite, /part, /ignore, /unignore.
Plasma integration
We improved the Plasma integration a bit. Now the number of unread messages is displayed in the Plasma Taskbar. It is using the com.canonical.Unity.LauncherEntry DBus protocol, so that should be reasonably supported across desktops.
Tarballs
Version 1.1.1 of NeoChat is availabe here. The package is signed with my gpg key 14B0ED91B5783415D0AA1E0A06B35D38387B67BE.
For users, a Flathub version will be updated shortly.
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