Riot.im 0.12 is here and by golly it’s a big one! The main headline is that WIDGETS HAVE LANDED!!! — small form web apps you can share with everyone in a room, unlocking a whole new dimension of collaboration within Riot😊. We’ve been working on this for months, and it’s insanely exciting to see us finally able to start decorating our rooms with Hangouts-quality video conferences (from Jitsi), document editors, graphing dashboards, and anything else you can imagine!

We’ve also improved usability introducing (proper) mentions, big changes to the composer including autocomplete, rich text and markdown and a new improved emoji picker 😄😃😀😎. And finally we’ve introduced a first cut of end-to-end encryption key sharing so you can seamlessly continue your encrypted conversations when logging in on a new browser. Phew!💦

Tell me about these widgets!

Widgets are a deceptively simple idea — small-form web applications you can pin into a room, building up a dashboard of functionality that is shared with everybody in that room. They’re intended to be used throughout Matrix, although Riot/Web is the first implementation in the wild. For a technical overview head over to the Introduction to Widgets post at the Matrix Blog.

What are widgets for?

Widgets are a way to add full-blown interactive apps into your Matrix rooms. The experience is a bit like installing an app on your smartphone: you go to an app store; find the app you want; and add it to the room! The difference is that the app is then visible to everyone in the room, so whoever switches to the room can instantly be on the same page — helping them share or collaborate around the same material.

Show me the widgets!!

So the way to get widgets for now is via Modular, the new name for the Riot App Store. Out of the box you get:

More will be coming soon, and via Custom Widgets you can also build your own — see the Matrix blog for more details.

Does that mean we have proper video conferencing at last?!

YES!! Thanks to our friends at Jitsi we now have fullblown video conferencing and screen sharing available in Riot/Web via the Jitsi widget. Native Jitsi support has also landed on Riot/iOS (but hasn’t been released yet) and is coming soon on Riot/Android. There are a few rough edges still (e.g. you drop off the conference if you switch away from the room with the conference, and we need to hook it nicely into the timeline), but it’s a major improvement.