We announced the Cwtch Alpha 2 weeks ago. Since then we’ve seen many people trying Cwtch out in different ways, from building it themselves to running the supplied binaries. From this we’ve received lots of feedback in our issue tracking system. We also started using Cwtch (dog fooding) ourselves for some dev team communication.

Today we are releasing a new Cwtch alpha update, 0.1.2 that contains the following work and more:

• Many Tor related fixes so that it more easily is autorun by Cwtch out of the box on Linux
• Inclusion of Tor in Windows builds
• Visual feedback on sending messages to groups
• Many small visual clean ups
• Fixing the edit boxes on Android and Windows to receive group invites
• Big stability fixes for how we run and use Tor (stop using NEWNYM to trouble shoot old 0.3.4.x connections)
• Better saving and handling of group/peer names and displaying of them

We still have a long way to go but this is an exciting usability update and should make things a lot smoother for early adoption users to play and test out with. To that end, if anyone is interested, we now have a “Cwtch Alpha” group everyone is welcome to join to test out with and chat in, just paste the following invite:

torv3frgCHN7wBNpDdOVvSixgbsIwIjYKD/kl768gRG4hiaQ=EsABCiA2NmI0NmM4OGMxNDc1ZGUxODE5YWYyYTk1ZDM5NTQ4ZBIgDSFY2mxYJiSJs0b442hFChzaHB5B8EERcFqLAkpb5kAaODJjM2ttb29ibnlnaGoyenc2cHd2N2Q1N3l6bGQ3NTNhdW8zdWdhdWV6enB2ZmFrM2FoYzRiZHlkIkBgg+E0T4YKtxnw57sHQbuG3C6myjU2aS496O4n3jpzQu8iT25NReJnuwqv9ER93wE1N9g1f7WY8JCtx0bnvyQK

We have also been working on our build infrastructure to generate new compile binaries for Windows, Android and Linux every time there a new pull request is approved. The builds can be seen at build.openprivacy.ca/files/. This will make shipping new releases easier, and provides testers with a way of trying out new builds before an official alpha release. We want to get into the habit of releasing updates more frequently as we continue our work.

We have lots of plans and some good feedback from the comunity to drive us on for the next while. Please give Cwtch a try and join the conversation:

• Cwtch alpha 0.1.2

The Open Privacy Staff