The SAFE Network July Round Up
July — it’s been one hell of a month. With new releases and tasks getting the big green tick on the project plan, our team have been working and delivering non-stop. And there is no sign of us slowing down anytime soon. This month, we’ve taken the opportunity to restructure this monthly summary to better reflect the weekly updates, as well as grouping together projects that are either in-flight, or completed. As ever, we’d love to know what you think! This is, of course, only an overview of all the work in July, check out the weekly dev updates on our forum for the full picture.
Releases
The big news this month was the release of the first SAFE Mobile Browser! A superhuman effort by the developers in Chennai, and of course all the effort by the team supporting the testing, bug fixing and QA. The only way to see how good this is is to download it yourself, whether you are an Android or iOS user, and why not have a wee read about the future plans for the browser here.
We also released another version of the Desktop Browser, which took care of a few pesky bugs. You can download the latest release, v0.14.1, from here.
Completed
The Reliable Message Delivery project is now complete! The only outstanding issue has been moved to Secure Message Delivery project as it concerned signature gathering so made more sense sitting within that scope. This is important as this is the method for relaying messages in the network. Read more here.
The milestone for having files containers supported by the CLI has now been fully implemented. This means you now can now create (published) FilesContainers by uploading files and entire folders with the safe files put command. You can also retrieve and render the content of FilesContainers and files (published ImmutableData) using XOR-URLs with the safe CAT command. And, you can update an already created FilesContainer by sync-ing it up with local changes made to files and folders with the safe files sync command. Go and see how easy it’ll be to upload data on the Network from the command line by trying it out yourself! Details on GitHub.
In progress
Vaults are well underway, with many of the major facets of the initial implementation completed or close to completion. There are a few outstanding small tasks which, although small, will help lay the ground for upcoming phases. The next step is to see the results of running the SAFE Client Libs test suite against a new Vault. We’re expecting to see a few failures here, but these will enable our dev team to understand where the issues are before putting fixes in place.
The implementation of the new data types in SAFE Client Libs is getting closer to completion. Work this month has focussed on replacing the internals of SAFE Authenticator to use only the new data types (including the new login packet type and changed account flow).
A new project was set up in team SAFE CLI, as they work on implementing a Name Resolution System (NRS), which is the system that enables human-friendly URLs. Just like URLs on the Clearnet today, they are (normally) clear and easy to understand, and importantly remember, and we want to make sure that this is the same on the SAFE Network.
This month we took the time to elaborate on the Front End themes in more detail. Each milestone; Perpetual Web, Take Control of Your Data, Private Communications and the New Digital Economy has its own standalone Medium post where we explore why each of these four things is so important, and why we’re incorporating them into the SAFE Network. In parallel, work has been progressing at pace with the design of the Perpetual Web. You can catch a sneak peek here.
Events
We had a meet up this month in Glasgow, which included a presentation by MaidSafe Engineer Jean, that led to some really interesting discussions about Vaults and how SAFE will shift our relationship with data. We’re working on the date for the next one so keep your eyes peeled!
Next month already looks busy with the team at the Turing Festival, Edinburgh, Web3 in Berlin and a meet up in Brighton. The information for all these events is over on our events page so go and check out what’s happening near you.
That’s a wrap for this month, but make sure you keep up to date weekly via the SAFE Network forum.
