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?

A note on privacy and tracking software

How many people use Monal? A lot. Thousands and thousands of people all over the world in all sorts of random places (Hello, Antarctica!). However, all I know is what the Apple download/upload  counter shows and what people tell me in emails.  Much the same way I have objections to ads in my software, I do not like the "metrics" software and libraries that are out there. Unlike many other iOS apps, Monal does not contain and will never contain user tracking software. Consider this app your refuge from ads, trackers and middle man servers.

2.0.2 changelog

This is a bug fix update that addresses issues users have raised.  I have tried to have one release roughly every month, there will be no January release.  Unless there is a major issue in this release the next release will be in February.

1. fixed a bug where some people might not show up as online sometimes
2. fixed bug where away was not working
3. added status orbs
4. fixed bug adding accounts
5. several ipad ui improvements
6. SECURITY: fixed possible XSS attack
7. active chats count update properly
8. Misc connectivity bugfixes

Always free, no ads, no creepy servers

A lot of people have told me about being willing to see ads to support development. I actually really dislike ads and all the apps that I have used that had ads were slowed down by them. I also notice that certain other IM clients released versions without ads and then pushed updates with them after the user base grew. I find that to be a rather deceptive bait and switch particularly since I know that the ad services collect and use user data --possibly based on your chats-- to present more ads. It is behavior like this, the 3rd party account sign up nonsense and the lack of direct connections that prompted me to write Monal in the first place.

There will always be a free version of Monal, it will always support direct connections and it won't have ads.

2.0.1 bugfixes

I am pushing out a quick bugfix update to fix some issues people have told me about.


1. removes a lock up when user disconnects while chatting
2. added a progress indicator to show when large chats are loaded
3. fixed a compatibility bug with some ejabberd servers
4. fixed failure to load on some devices
5. added timeouts on connection to better detect errors
6. fixed the issue where sometimes the login window spins forever

Jabberd and Monal 2

I am receiving a few reports of issues connecting to some Jabberd servers. I haven't been able to replicate this on any of my test installs. If anyone has access to a server that is not working with Monal and can give me a test account to work with, email me.