Moar Desktop Status Champagne!

Another two weeks have flown by and there has been phenomenal chat and desktop progress with many contributors all across Status leaving Slack behind.

I'm pleased to say that about 20-30 core contributors have started living our principles and drinking our own champagne by deactivating their Slack account and switching to Status full time. Kudos to @oskarth for being the first!  The exodus happened gradually, then suddenly, and now it appears that most core discussions are happening exclusively on Status.  We've even had Michele, a windows user, switch even though we don't have a windows build yet. That is dedication! (you can get a lot done with just a VM)

Saying goodbye to Slack has been easier for some than others. A few stragglers expressed reluctance to switch because it means losing years of conversations and knowledge scattered throughout Slack channels and threads. Well, fear not! Jacob has helped us retain this knowledge and has provided a full export of every Slack public channel going back to early 2016. @exiledsurfer called this The Book of Slack. Since the archive contains all channels and may contain sensitive personal, legal, or security information we thought it best to protect this with an org-level login. Going forward we hope to do better by using Status with conversations are happening in the open with everyone is encouraged to join. We are also creating Status conversation archives, so if you are interested in contributing please join the automation discussion.

Also exciting is that in addition to core contributors we've had an influx of Chinese users and collectively we are sending 1k-2.5k messages a day in our default public channels. More details on analytics.status.im.

Here is a quick look back at some changes since the last update:

• Links are now linking!
• channel names are now quick-links to public channels
• Inline replies for chats
• Scroll view optimizations
• Fixed a dumb but severe bug that caused messages and contacts to not be saved in the database
• Added random names to chat's and profile's for easier identification
• Fixed a bug where certain characters like < and > didn't display properly
• Made changes to allow dev and release versions running at the same time. Now devs can make Status with Status at-the-same-time!
• Updated Qt on build servers which fixed a few glitches
• We now allow new users to backup their seed phrase for later recovery
• Speed boost when switching chats
• Group chats! (for testing, not for solid use)
• Wallet transaction requests from mobile are now shown
• Fixed a bug where certain messages would become pinned to chats
• New chat colours
• Mailserver pagination improvements
• Fixed more typing issues
• Many more fixes

We also have made great strides towards a Window's build. We are doing some magic and building windows on Linux, and it sorta works but has some issues.

Up next we are working on fetching 7 days of history instead of 1, custom URL support so we can deep link to chats and profiles and have universal links work universally, integrating ubuntu-server into the app, fixing memory leaks, adding Mac dock notifications, push notifications, better scrolling, and more fixes. Our goal is to get a release ready after the board has been cleared. Not long now!

At this point Status Chat is solid on both desktop and mobile so I'd encourage everyone to grab a nightly and start chatting.  There are a few quirks but overall I don't miss Slack at all.  Come join us!