I am happy to announce the release of Electrum 1.9.8.
This release includes some features initially planned for version 2.0.

Packages are available on https://electrum.org/download.html (signed by me)
Binaries for windows and mac will be available in the coming days

enjoy

Thomas
-----------------------

RELEASE NOTES

# Release 1.9.8

(This release includes features initially planned for version 2.0)

* Electrum servers were upgraded to version 0.9. The new server stores
   a Patrica tree of all UTXOs, an idea proposed by Alan Reiner in the
   bitcointalk forum. This property allows the client to directly
   request the balance of any address. The new commands are:
      1. getaddressbalance

      2. getaddressunspent

      3. getutxoaddress

* Command-line commands that require a connection to the network spawn
   a daemon, that remains connected and handles subsequent
   commands. The daemon terminates itself if it remains unused for more
   than one minute. The purpose of this is to make scripting more
   efficient. For example, a bash script using many electrum commands
   will open only one connection.

edit: encrypt/decrypt methods were removed due to a bug