New Release Version Available - v19.1

With another release now available, we're excited to give you an update on what's changed with the latest release version, v19.1.

 Below is an overview of the features added with release version 19.1 - For a full overview of the changes introduced with v19.1 please view the v19.1 Release Notes.

General

Remembering open private conversations across sessions: A user’s last active conversation in their previous session, and any conversations in which a user has sent or received messages are now remembered across sessions. This is done seamlessly by the server.

Queuing message-sending when disconnected on MindLink Anywhere and MindLink Mobile: Previously users had to wait for reconnection to occur before composing messages. Currently messages can be composed when disconnected. MindLink Anywhere will now queue and send messages in the background as soon as the connection recovers. This improves the usability of MindLink Anywhere in low-bandwidth scenarios.

MindLink Anywhere (Web)

Rebrand from MindLink Desktop to MindLink Anywhere: The web application, formerly known as MindLink Desktop, has been rebranded to MindLink Anywhere. This was to clarify our "work-anywhere" message, and better reflects the technology involved.

Voice improvements in MLA: Additional improvements to the UX and client handling have been introduced. Calling buttons have been added to the conversation header in private conversations. The status bar now displays more clearly when calling. The client now detects if the browser cannot do audio, and report this correctly to Skype for Business. Finally, the client now detects whether the user has a microphone installed and a warning is shown if the microphone isn’t installed.

Multiparty Voice in MindLink Anywhere: MindLink Anywhere now supports voice calling for Multiparty conversations. This includes starting and being invited to multiparty voice calls, and management of the individual modalities available in each conversation.

Folders in MindLink Anywhere: Support for folders has been introduced into MindLink Anywhere. Folders are fully configurable from the client, including dragging-and-dropping to reconfigure them.

Playing a sound when a message is sent in MLA: The web client now plays a sound when messages are sent. This is a configurable option in the global settings.

Performance improvements in MLA: Users on older Firefox versions noted that the UX became sluggish after a period of use. After investigation, browser bottlenecks had been identified with how the user interface is laid out by the browser. Using more recent browser technology these bottlenecks have been fixed.

For the latest MindLink Anywhere server installers and technical overview please visit the MindLink Anywhere downloads page.

MindLink Mobile

User colours in MLM: MindLink Mobile now shows user display names in different colours, based on the user. This mirrors a feature from other common mobile messaging applications. The colour of the user display name is generated from the user's name.

For the latest MindLink Mobile server installers and technical overview please visit the MindLink Mobile downloads page.

MindLink API

Issue "user is typing" notifications from API bots: When a chat bot is simulating a conversational interaction, it is convenient to show "thinking" time by issuing typing notifications to the human user. This gives feedback that the bot has received the previous message and is about to reply. This functionality has been introduced to the API so that a bot can trigger its own typing notification in a 1-2-1 chat.

Reset API event stream across server restarts

For a bot to receive notifications of events happening on the chat system e.g. new messages being received, it uses an "event polling" mechanism, driven by an event cache on the API server.

When listening for new events across a server restart, the bot was not informed of the restart, but the event cache was reset.

To address this a new mechanism has been added to coordinate polling for events across server restarts, so the API server event cache understands that the server has been restarted since the last poll.

This change is backwards compatible with existing bots.

For the latest MindLink API server installers and technical overview please visit the MindLink API downloads page.