Wallet 0.7.5 (Beta 19)

Faster sync, stability improvements, more robust node

This update has been a long time coming. A lot of things happened in the last weeks that created this delay: geth had not only one, but two vulnerabilities found at the same time that it released with a lot of internal changes to the way the wallet synced and connected to the IPC. We were starting a new team (welcome @hiddentao, @evertonfraga and @luclu) and I was pushing for weekly releases, without proper testing. Meanwhile the DAO happened, and we wanted to make a release that had support for events subscription without realizing the performance impact it would have. All that converged into having a couple of crappy releases where many users were having to downgrade to 0.6.2 just to be able to do small and simple tasks. As a result, we decided to hold off on any new releases until we were sure we could have the stable and usable Wallet we believe the community deserves.

But finally, we feel that this version arrived. Ram has worked hard on refactoring the logic behind the node connection to make it more resilient and stable. Bas has worked a lot with to adopt the changes to the Geth IPC connection, which should allow other nodes to be more easily integrated in the future. Fabian refactored the whole event subscription so that you only Luca and Ev have worked in a ton of smaller issues that combined were creating an overall bad experience. I've refactored a lot of the splash screen and onboarding logic. All this, together with a brand new sync by the geth team and specially the fast sync by @karalabe result in a much more stable and fast wallet. Even if you have already downloaded the blockchain before, I suggest you try downloading it from scratch again as an experience: Peter reported being able to sync from scratch in less than 30 minutes using a SSD, while my experience, from a not so great connection in south america, was a full sync in about 1 hour and 30 minutes.

If you had downloaded the wallet in any point in the past and had issues syncing, sending transactions or a constant wrong password message, I highly recommend you give the wallet a second try. Even if it's not perfect I'm sure it's a lot better.

We are also working to streamline and optimize our release process, including some automated UI testing for electron, and at the same time all of those improvements were some great stride forwards on the Mist Browser itself, which we hope to be able to release a preview soon (no dates promised though).

Checksums

shasum Ethereum-Wallet-win32-0-7-5.zip: e6b07b174aeb777f2aeec44378e270025904489d
shasum Ethereum-Wallet-linux64-0-7-5.zip: 5ce69e3fe9b8d04fbb47bcba7c7fce8729484fb6
shasum Ethereum-Wallet-linux32-0-7-5.zip: 7a07b9dc737fa8c0abc57aca82e1eff8774673f3
shasum Ethereum-Wallet-macosx-0-7-5.zip: 244162798a176ff576d56ddd23d577efd1d88f12
shasum Ethereum-Wallet-win64-0-7-5.zip: 5e241adf4d6362a946f92f3666e0d6aeb16bc9c8

Known issues

• The latest version has issues connecting to the latest Eth nodes
• While running the wallet in Mist mode on the command line, you'll see some icons and images missing
• If you close the window during sync, the app will stay running in the background and won't quit. Close the app using the keyboard shortcuts

Full Changelog

• Changes the way event subscriptions occur, now only downloading events and logs when requested, per watched contract. This was severely impacting the wallet - especially with very active contracts like The DAO
• Added unlock and send (#700) aka "two second unlock vulnerability"
• Fixed incorrect total token balance (ethereum/meteor-dapp-wallet#206 and #608 )
• Fixed broken clipboard-functionality on the main-net (ethereum/meteor-dapp-wallet#192)
• Check for update at startup and inform the user if a new version is available (#707)
• Pass custom CLI options to the Ethereum node (#689)
• Updated nodes to latest version of geth (1.4.7) and eth (1.2.9)
• Upgrade code to latest version of Electron (#811)
• Korean Translation (#645)
• Norwegian Bokmål translation (#705)
• Italian translation (#768)
• Improvements to the French translation
• Node startup and synchronization improvements (#559)
• Sync is much more resilient now and auto-restarts if node changes
• Fix how we detect whether eth has started up, remove nodeConnector
• Ensure can switch network type while syncing
• Improved how we determine splash screen status messages. Now much more responsive to underlying connection process.
• Adds default wallet hosted by github for Mist Browser (#767)
• Build windows management architecture, to avoid 'window already destroyed' errors
• Fix problem with geth node being detached (#789)
• Removed peer search timeout functionality and simplified splash screen logic
• Check for node startup error (#673)
• UI Changes to network indicator (#675)
• Make the wallet span the whole width of the app (ethereum/meteor-dapp-wallet#212)
• New art for Mist Browser (#696)
• Remove dependency on node log output for detecting startup success (#706)
• Refactoring Dapp IPC connection (#724) this will prevent multiple 'wrong password' and unresponsive nodes
• Refactor splash screen (#772): center the checking network message, show Start App button sooner
• Changes to onboarding screen (#786): Fix bug that was preventing onboarding to start, allows account creation to be skipped and checks passwords, Added number animation to block numbers
• Added a drag region to the mist sidebar (#820)
• Fixed header jump on transparent bar (Mist Browser only)
• When sending from multisig, makes sure you own the "from" account (ethereum/meteor-dapp-wallet#210). This makes sure not only that you have that account, but it picks the highest balance you have
• Fixed an issue where the multisig wallet would not show the correct owners after they were changed