Textile Update | August 2018

Bugs, Releases, Invites, and a wrap on Textile Build

While August is a month of vacation for many, we’ve been using the time to get Textile Photos ready for more users. The app is now running live for a bunch of users, empowering end-to-end encrypted photo sharing for them and their friends (or in at least one case, their co-workers). We wanted to give you a quick update of what we’ve changed recently and highlight some of the cool new features we’ve added. For those of you who have already signed up for our wait list, you’ll be very happy to hear that we’ve sent out another big batch of referral codes, so keep an eye out in your inbox for our email update.

In the mean time, here’s a quick GIF to get you excited, and a list of things and features we’ve been working on to get you informed:

App Updates

• We’ve enabled a simple decentralized identity based on a user’s public key and an IPNS profile
• We’ve disabled all the permissions we used to ask for during app ‘onboarding’. But you’ll still probably want to grant permission to your camera roll or camera to add photo to the app 📸!
• We’ve disabled auto-sync of your camera roll to Textile Photos. We’ll add it back as an opt-in feature soon. For now, only photos you select in the app will be added to your Wallet
• Lots of testing and improvements to the way photo sharing works and how large groups of people can all join the same encrypted Textile Thread
• Encrypted, decentralized, out-of-app Textile Thread invites now allow you to invite people to your Textile Threads over text message, Slack, or any other tool you use (this is a really powerful feature, which we’ll write about more soon!)

Tech Updates

• The Textile framework, client and desktop app now have automated releases on the GitHub repo. All of these should be considered early beta and we’re accepting Issues as you find them 😉.

What’s Next?

• Textile Contacts for organizing and finding people you know on the decentralized web
• Photo Reactions to start showcasing how chats, messages, and reactions will be sent over Textile
• Textile Wallet Recovery so that you can recover all the photos, contacts, and Threads you create with Textile Photos through your private mnemonic phrase

Other News

On a completely different note. We’ve also recently wrapped up our first ever Textile Build Developer Training Series. We had 150+ signups for the course, and 100s of interactions and views on the live/recorded sessions. You can check out the whole series on our YouTube channel to check out the course playlist. All the sessions were recorded live, and links to the slides are available in the video info box. We’re releasing all the materials under a creative commons attribution license, so feel free to share and share alike!

Give it a Try!

We’d love it if you want to start playing with the Textile Photo sharing features right away, and we know that a Thread with a single user is a pretty lonely place… So if you’ve already singed up to our wait list, check your email for a referral code for you to share with up to 5 other people (if you didn’t receive a code from us this week, we’re getting to you soon we promise, hang tight!). Have them download Textile Photos from either the Apple or Google app store and create an account today! And if you’re a developer interested in building for the distributed web, we’d also love it if you checked out our Textile Build materials. Let us know what you think, what other topics you’d like to learn more about, or even send us a link to a cool app or project you’re working on!

Thanks! Looking forward to hearing your feedback.