Moved

Monal is a free chat program for iPhone and iPad. The official site has moved to Monal.im

Monal 2.0.3 Submitted

Monal 2.0.3 has been submitted to the app store.  Below is the slightly changed final change log.   Along with 2.0.3 I am launching the new Monal site  found at Monal.im .  The new site is designed to be more descriptive for new users, allow for better social media integration and bug tracking. In addition I have started to build a detailed and illustrated  help section. The first post explains  how to use group chat

Followers of this development blog should go to the new one

Monal 2.0.3 changelog:


1. Proper multi tasking. It will run in the background
until you logout or close the app. No more 10 minute limit.
2. Manually set XMPP priority
3. Shows offline contacts
4. Added gtalk extensions for google apps
5. fixed an issue with Digest-Md5 servers and connectivity
6. Fixed a bug with some non english messages not arriving
7. improved auto recovery in the event of a network error
8. when swiping to close an active chat it says "close" instead of delete. When clearing a chat log it says "clear" and not delete
9. improved UI for adding new contact
10. shows a badge with a count of messages received on app icon
11. status is not overwritten when setting away
12. fixed misc crashing bugs with the UI
13. new buddy details screen
14  optimized and switched from GCC to LLVM+Clang compiler
15. Added Multi user chat (MUC) menus.
16. Removed browser tab from iPad UI

This blog is closing

This blog is closing. I have decided to upgrade to a proper site to better meet the needs of the massive global user base that Monal has garnered. Certain things such as help pages and bug tracking systems have become necessary. The new site is a massive improvement and will launch with the release of Monal 2.0.3. I will make one more post here later this week with a link to the new site.

Oh one more thing, you can now actively join as many groups as you like on any server that supports it (Monal will discover the service)

2.0.3 Final Change Log

2.0.3 is a major update that improves the application significantly. It is now feature complete and is being beta tested. This is the final change log. It's scheduled to be released early March.

1. Proper multi tasking. It will run in the background

forever until you logout or close the app. No more 10 minute limit.

2. Manually set XMPP priority

3. Shows offline contacts

4. Added gtalk extensions for google apps

5. fixed an issue with Digest-Md5 servers and connectivity

6. Fixed a bug with some non english messages not arriving

7. improved auto recovery in the event of a network error

8. when swiping to close an active chat it says "close" instead of delete. When clearing a chat log it says "clear" and not delete

9. improved UI for adding new contact

10. shows a badge with a count of messages received

11. status is not overwritten when setting away

2.0.3 changelog

Winter break is over and I am updating Monal again. The next release will be a pretty big update. I am sure many people will appreciate #1 on this list. Obviously, this is only for iOS4 users on 3GS and above.

1. Proper multi tasking. It will run in the background forever until you logout or close the app. No more 10 minute limit.

2. fixed an issue with Digest-Md5 servers and connectivity

3. improved auto recovery in the event of a network error

4. when swiping to close a chat it says "close" instead of delete. when clearing a chat log it says "clear" and not delete

A shameless plug

I recently released my second iPhone/iPad app. It has absolutely nothing in common with Monal.  The program is called MyNepali and uses sounds and images to teach  young children some basic animal names in the Nepali language.  It is 99 cents. If you are interested, you can find MyNepali here
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mynepali/id406911355?mt=8

And we're back

I have no idea what happened.  The email account that was used to create this blog was listed among the 1.3 million accounts taken from Gawker hack on Sunday.  While my account password was not there, I did get  locked out of Gmail because of suspicious activity, likely thousands of failed login attempts from all over the world.  I assume this blog was taken down for the same reason. This  was annoying but could have been much worse, I could have been stupid and used the same password for my Gawker account and my email account.

The Gawker hack is one more reminder of  why trusting some third party with your Gmail, Facebook  or corporate login is a bad idea. While push messages are really nice, are you sure that the database that has your username and password is secure?  Do you trust the company making your IM client with all of that info?