A short 6 weeks since Parity 1.0, I'm happy to announce Parity 1.1, codename Alacrity. This is a mid-term release (we're half-way to 1.2 Civility) with mostly "under-the-hood" improvements and optimisations since 1.0.

Our main features for Alacrity are:

• New JSONRPC APIs for tracking, tracing and inspecting all message-calls and balance transfers, including those that happen as "internal transactions";
• a simple web front-end to inspect how far you've synced, what your mining rate is and play around with the JSON RPC (just head over to http://localhost:8080/ once you're running parity -jw);
• for miners, a gas-price based upon the price of Ether, with automatic fetching from the web;
• auto option for --pruning, so after the first sync it'll automatically find the right method.

In addition, under-the-hood improvements include:

• Ubuntu 16.04 support;
• builds for ARM with Ubuntu Snappy packages available through our CI system;
• substantial refactoring and optimisation of the widely-used JSON codec;
• optimised mining code that allows acceptance of old nonces and yet keeps up to date with all incoming transactions.

We're very excited to get this out to you; you can find binaries on the website and GitHub release page. Get support in the Parity Gitter channel.

Civility is now in active development and has features including full IPC compatibility for the wallet/Mist, a "bulletproof" actor/hypervisor architecture and an initial Proof-of-Authority consensus method. Look out for it in 6 weeks' time.

The Parity team.