Condenser (Steemit.com) GitHub Development Report - 2017-07-22
It has been a long time since I've done a report on the activity in GitHub. I wanted to bring everyone up to speed with the various changes that I see being worked on!
For those of you who are not familiar with the "GitHub Report" - this is not an 'official' report. This is a summary of changes that the dev team is publicly working on or discussing in GitHub. It is intended to give everyone a picture of what they are working on. There is no guarantee that any/all of these will be implemented and put up on to the site, but it does give you a good idea of what they are up to, and what to expect :)
Steemit Communities
This seems to be one of the dev team's biggest focuses right now. There is a detailed specification proposal on the GitHub wiki with information on how communities are intended to work. For the technical people who are interested in viewing the actual code changes, Steemit has a public repository hivemind with their latest checked in changes.
Mobile App
"Developing iOS and Android native mobile applications" is one of the big items listed in the 2017 roadmap. I don't have any new details to report, but it seems like this is one of the main items for the year.
Whitepaper Updates
There is now a repository in GitHub for the whitepaper and the team has been checking in changes. I don't know what the plan is or what to expect, but it is nice to see progress being made on this. It would be really awesome if there was an updated whitepaper released sometime soon!
Achievements and User Insignia (Badges)
This was another item listed in the roadmap. Steemit has posted a draft for tracking achievements and displaying various milestones as badges. The details can be found in the Achievements-Insignia Draft wiki.
Slider to Adjust Power Down Percent
Currently users only have the option to power down 100% of their SP via the Steemit.com wallet. GitHub Issue 766 adds a slider, so users can control the amount that they want to power down. A pull request has already been submitted, so it is likely this feature will be added relatively soon.
Draft Management System
In GitHub Issue 147, a comment was made from the dev team indicating that a feature to save drafts may be added. There is no timeline or checked in work done yet, but it seems like it is on the radar.
Ability to use scroll wheel to adjust vote slider
There are talks on adding the ability to adjust the vote slider using the mouse wheel. If it turns out to be a quick/easy change, it looks like the dev team will be adding it in GitHub Issue 169.
Internationalization
A lot of work has been being done behind the scenes to make the condenser code handle translations more effectively. I don't know what the timeline is for this, but it looks like it is being tracked in GitHub Issue 233 and GitHub Issue 300.
Upload and hosting of avatar images in settings page
There is no activity yet, but it is on the radar. GitHub Issue 1303.
Posts not editable after seven days
There is no activity yet, but it is on the radar. GitHub Issue 1373.
General Keyboard Navigation Improvements
This is probably only of interest to a small subset of users, but there are a lot of actions that users can only do with mouse clicks. Adding hotkeys for the common actions will be a big improvement for "power users" who like to use hotkeys. This is being tracked in GitHub Issue 1506.
Post Scheduler (Longer Term)
In GitHub issue 147, the dev team indicated that the ability to schedule a post based on a saved draft is on the radar.
Sort follower/following in chronological order (Longer Term)
In GitHub issue 554, the dev team indicated "When we switch to hive APIs this will be fixed."
Notifications Overhaul (Longer Term)
The current notification system is not the greatest. It frequently goes down, and it doesn't include various things that users would like to get notified for. In GitHub issue 853, the dev team indicated "notifications service will undergo major overhaul". GitHub issue 72 seems to be where this is being tracked.
Mentions Tab (Longer Term)
In GitHub issue 1027, there was a request to add a "mentions" tab. The response from the dev team was "We'll implement this once we get the middleware running."
New Posting Editor (Longer Term)
In GitHub issue 1440, there was a request to add an Emoji button to the editor. One of the Steemit devs commented "With a better editor this would be trivial. Let's revisit then." While there is no timeline on this, it is an indication that this is on the radar.
Those are the interesting items I found to report. If you are interested, you can view all of the open issues here: https://github.com/steemit/condenser/issues. A reminder, nothing in this post is 'official' and all of the items that are being worked on are subject to change.
If you are on GitHub, please remember to read the guidelines for contributing before opening issues.
It saves the dev team time if they do not have to review and close out issues that are not supposed to be there, which helps them deliver more of our highly anticipated features faster =)
Reminder to vote for witnesses!
The Steem witnesses are the elected leaders of the community that power the blockchain. Everybody should learn about the Steem witnesses and vote on who they think is best. If you don't know much about witnesses or aren't sure who to vote for, you can check out this Witness Voting Guide. If you think @timcliff is doing a great job, please consider voting for him as witness! You can vote for witnesses here: https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Great recap, how often do you do these? I will follow in hopes of seeing more.
I am traveling atm but will bookmark, i hope to go down some of the rabbit holes you have linked
To some extent it is as needed. I was doing them once a month for a while, but the activities in GitHub slowed down a bit, so I started doing them less. (With the developers working on communities and mobile, there haven't been as many other changes.) I think it has probably been about 6 months since the last one I did. I do still post quite a bit of other Steemit dev' related stuff though, so if you like this type of thing you probably won't be disappointed from following me :)
I'm so grateful for this. it can be confusing here, sometimes, and it's nice to know what's in the works!
Unless I'm not understanding github, it seems like development is almost stopped to a crawl.
https://github.com/steemit/hivemind
If that's their main focus why was almost nothing posted in the month apart from a minor update 8 days ago ?
You can see the progress here. Only one person committing very often per week, but not actually stopped.
I haven't really dug into the code there, so maybe it doesn't have much. Sorry if it isn't really useful. The wiki page is probably a better resource.
The GitHub work is not really a great indicator of everything they are doing, or how busy they are. Most of the dev work is done 'behind the scenes'. A lot of the progress is not really visible until it gets close to done or is ready to check in.
This github seems a little technical stuff and need more evaluation and time to get into our heads. Hopefully seems beneficiary in the near future. Thnx for sharing such stuff.
That is something I am wondering about in general .. I would expect a little bit more activity for a company sitting on millions of dollars ☝ But maybe tim is right and a lot of stuff is happening in the background..
@timcliff - I am excited to hear about all the new developments underway/under discussion for improvements in Steemit. I thank you and the developers for all the hardwork. The ones most important for me personally are - ability to schedule posts, official IOS app, scroll wheel adjusted vote slider and user insignias. Thank you for this comprehensive update of the github activity.
Will vote for you as witness(Update - voted today for you as witness). ThanksAt my end, I have continued my efforts to learn new skills for a quality blog and added a GIF blog with an exciting 'Bathing beauties-Elephant herd tracking and dust bath story'. I request you to take a look when you have time and provide your comments. It will be an honor for me. Thanks
Cool. As a general rule, I don't respond to users plugging unrelated content, but I have a soft spot for "nature" related things, so your blog is down my ally :) I followed you. Thanks for the thoughtful comment.
Thank you so much. Sorry I bothered you by 'pluggin in' unrelated content in my enthusiasm to spread my wildlife/nature messages. I am honored to see a great Steemian taking the trouble to follow my blogs. Thank you once again.
Thanks for the summary. I was wondering what they were working on...
This is much easier to get the information this way.
Thanks again.
I recently made some heavy changes to my witness voting. Barry recommended you so I just went ahead at the time, but I can see why he recommended you now that I had time to look! Keep up the vision! I hope we get some more strong witness candidates too.
Cool, thank you! :)
While all of these changes are interesting and needed in some way, I specially like the following items on the list.
It's nice to know that so much work is going on we'll see some of the issues get resolved. The platform is in good hands and will evolve beautifully under the able leadership of witnesses and dev team.
Witness Vote: - I have already voted @timcliff for witness!
I know dragosroua was really pushing for that power down slider, and I really like the emoji support too. Mobile App would be one of the best things since sliced bread. Glad to see you are probing GitHub again, since you are the OG GitHub shark
Hey Tim, these are great changes that I'm looking forward to! Scheduling posts is something I've always wanted to do and would make it so much better if it could be integrated with steemit, as well as many of the other implementations. Thanks for sharing, and I hope to see some of these changes soon!
Excellent work my man!
Thanks @klye!
Thanks for this report, and thanks for all you and the devs do for steemit!
And glad I could be of help on the parenthesis in filename causing first photo to not show as a thumbnail in feeds issue:
https://github.com/steemit/condenser/issues/1499
Yes, thanks for that :)