Textile Update | June 2019

As summer continues to heat up, so too does Textile!

It’s been a lively summer for the Textile team as we continue to ramp up our developer offerings, test and explore new features in Textile Photos, and engage with our growing community of developers and IPFS/Textile enthusiasts. This month, I’ve decided to take a slightly different approach to our community update… by making it a bit shorter, providing less commentary, and including more individual updates. I think it will better showcase all of the amazing things that the Textile team has been up to (it’s a lot of stuff!), while making the whole update a little easier to digest in one go. So sit back, relax, and find our what Textile has been up to this June (and a little bit of May).

Community

June was a huge month for community building, outreach, interactions, and announcements. Here is a listing of some of the bigger things that happened:

• On our blog last month we revealed that we were opening up Textile Cafes to external developers. For those of you unfamiliar with Cafes, you can read up on them here, and for those interested in connecting their own apps or services with Textile’s Cafes, get in touch on our community Slack channel.
• Textile team member Carson featured in IPFS Events blog, and while the actually went out the previous month, it was related to IPFS Camp (see below) so we’re including it here. Here’s the original tweet for those keeping track.
• As always, we’ve continued to update out Blog with new posts, and last month was no exception. We’ve got a new one on offline first chat using Textile, and a few other updates and released that I’ll mention below.
• The team has also been very active giving talks and running workshops focused on introducing folks to Textile, and our general vision for the future of personal data. For example, Andrew gave a talk at Commit Porto (he also tweeted about it), and Sander gave an invited talk to the Ink and Switch community workshop/discussion/speaker series, prompted by an earlier post and discussion on Ink and Switch’s blog article (this tweet is also relevant). We’ve also participated in several IPFS-related Meetups in SF, and Andrew gave a Textile talk at AltConf, plus he was featured on MacVoices after the event… don’t believe us? Here’s the tweet.
• In other news, Textile was invited and attended IPFS camp, which was a ton of fun, and a huge success for the overall IPFS community. Make sure you check out Andrew’s excellent post-camp review post, which was featured in IPFS newsletter (here’s a tweet as well). This whole event was really good community validation for Textile, as we ended up being featured/involved in most, if not all, camp sessions. We loved the poster session in particular, where 7 people figured out how to explain the internals of Textile to the rest of the group… super cool! It was also really good to touch base with developers working on Textile-based products in person, and some highlights included Anytype, Permaweb, Openwork labs, etc. Plus we also touched based with other projects in and around the Textile space, including OpenBazaar (we’ve been fans of their dev team for a while), Worldbrain.io, and Qri.io. Here’s another really good summary of the Camp by David Dias, one of the Protocol Labs organizers. The included video should give folks not in attendance an idea of what exactly, we all got up to while we were there.

Releases

While some of the team was off giving talks, meeting with folks from other teams, and introducing Textile to the masses, the rest of the team was hard at work pushing out new releases, features, and fixes. The biggest updates include:

• We released/announced our brand new iOS SDK (here’s the tweet) at the end of May, followed closely by the release/announcement of our brand new Android SDK (here’s the tweet for that one too). With these two releases, we’re that much closer to a unified API for decentralized mobile apps on all mobile/desktop/server/browser platforms! Next stop? Full native browser support…!
• We also reached a big release milestone for js-http-client (and we tweeted about it), and adoption continues to exceed our expectations. Thanks especially to out community of devs supporting, using, and filing bugs/issues on that project.
• There were also a few big release milestones on go-textile, including the fact that we’re now fully embracing semantic versioning to help match Textile versions with the various Textile clients (command-line, Javascript, iOS, Android, etc.). We also had several major releases to our command-line tools and APIs, which should provide a much more streamlined experience for developers and enthusiasts working through our Tour of Textile, testing out our user-focused APIs, and just generally exploring the Textile ecosystem. We’re also hoping this will provide a useful reference implementation for our other clients and tools.
• Related to this, we’ve started the initial move to a Version 2 of our Threads interface, which has already received better chain traversal behavior, and much more. You can track some of the progress on GitHub, and if you have opinions or ideas you’d like to share, we’ve love to hear them. Feel free to use the above ticket, or share a use-case, feature request, etc on our public Slack channel.
• In other release news, you can check out our IPFS Tag game, which we ‘released’ along with our IPFS Camp workshop materials and more during IPFS Camp last month. Feel free to check that stuff out, build your own game of tag, or play around with our workshop materials. We’ll also be recording a separate version of that workshop and releasing it here on our blog for folks to work through on their own (stayed tuned for that).

And now you’re up to date. If you want to hear more about Textile and what we’re up to, get in touch. Check out our GitHub repos, chat with us on Slack, or fire us a quick email. We’re also going to be at various events in the next few weeks/month, including DWeb Camp, ETH Berlin (Carson will be an IPFS/Textile mentor), and some Meetups.