About the STEMsocial app development: May-June report

in HiveDevs4 years ago

It is a long time I didn’t take the time to write any update about the development of the STEMsocial app. Four weeks to be precise, since this post in which I clarified various items embedded in our funding proposal (#91).

Even if we are still far from being funded, I believe it is important to communicate about what has been done and I will do my best with this item in the next few weeks. The current period is bad as I actively participate to the activities of an important hiring committee, which eats 150% of my time. I will be free again from July 3rd.

In this post, I briefly detail what has been done with the last 13 commits, the modifications to the code being traceable from the GitHub folder. The deployed version of the app can be as usual accessed from https://stem.openhive.network.


A new editor and a better MarkDown/HTML converter


Our new post editor has been finalised, and is used for more than 3 weeks by several STEMsocial members. This helped a lot in the debugging, and we improved our MarkDown/HTML internal converter at the same time (one bug always leads to another bug). In particular, video embedding is working way better than before, code areas and quoted text are correctly displayed and text alignment too.

Therefore, I benefit from this post to personally thank the 8 STEMsocial members who helped me here with their tests and bug reports: @carlos84, @acont, @cyprianj, @dexterdev, @emperorhassy, @gentleshaid, @medro-martin, @sciencevienna and those I sadly forgot (my brain is over busy those days; feel free to manifest yourself in the comment section of this post, I will apologise 100 times and add our name to the list).

As a summary of what has been done, the code is now free from the older packages that were initially used for post editing, and a few options have been added in the process: users can easily add beneficiaries, choose the payout distribution method and get some MarkDown (or HTML) template for improved text format through a home-made toolbar. At the same time, the way codes and quotes are displayed has been rewritten. This was a long-term suggestion that I addressed in the process.

I hope posts now look nicer for the eyes and post editing is smoother! :)


Communication with Hivesigner / Hive Keychain


In addition, it was quite unexpected, but I had to rewrite entirely how the app communicates with Hive. This took some time. Even much more time than planned.

Two options are still allowed to login and broadcast transactions: Hive Keychain and Hivesigner. I have improved the design of the modals associated with those login options and centralised all the communication tools in a single file.

In particular, extra checks on the viability of the Hivesigner token are made, redirections after token renewal are now fixed from various bugs. This even leads to fix some issues at the Hivesigner level together with @good-karma (thanks for your time). Finally, the app now reports in a more detailed way any broadcast error.

All of this was achieved again with the help of various patient beta testers: @agmoore, @cyprianj, @felixrodriguez, @nattybongo, @robotics101 and @steepup. Thanks to all of you! I hope no one has been forgotten :D


About close-future development plans


In the next few weeks (after my committee meeting, I plan to work on various aspects:

  • fixing some issues with the followers/following feature of the app (that is actually broken);
  • improving the loading time as the app is asking too much to the chain (which makes it unnecessarily heavy at the client level);
  • finalising the wallet transfer functions;
  • improving the display of the user personal blog profile (@dexterdev, pelase be happy);
  • getting some statistics about the app usage.
    From there, I will move on with the major tasks planned for the summer: improving routing and SEO

That’s all for today!


The famous last words


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It's hard these days to find true instances of community, where determination, hard work, skill and cooperation come together to create something of lasting value. Leadership, and teamwork. Congratulations @lemouth, and all those incredibly smart people who are moving STEMsocial into the future.

Many thanks for the nice words. Yes, I am sometimes (actually often) feeling overwhelmed with this task, and I don't have enough time to do everything I want to do... But little by little, we will get there! I am still feeling highly motivated ^^

I'm happy the way you always respond swiftly to some of the reports... It is really impressive and commendable.
Stemsocial to the Moon

That's the least I can do. I need testers to test all implemented functionalities. Of course, I test things here. But the way I do it introduce by definition a bias!

Thanks again for your help! It is appreciated!

Great work, is the code open sourced?

Yes it is. Our project has always been open source, from the very first days. The current branch (corresponding to the deployed version) is available from this GitHub link.

Great! It's a hard work to do by one coder, so congrats! We could make a similar post on the STEMSocial Discord Bot. I'm still waiting for you to update its repository with the new changes you've made for 9 month 😄

Yes, I know...

The problem is that there are parts of the code that need to be cleaned and I will push the code only when this will be done (i.e. related to keys so that yes, it has to be cleaned). However.... time is not extensible... It is on the list. Just come back to me by mid July if not done by then :)

I will! :D

This is really a great work, I will definitely give the app a try. Thanks for sharing this blog in the Hive community.

Your post has been curated with @gitplait community account because this is the kind of publications we like to see in our community.

Join our Community on Hive and Chat with us on Discord.

[Gitplait-Team]

Thanks a lot for your support! Feel free to send us your feedback to the app (any constructive comment is appreciated and will be addressed),

Screenshot_20200620094126.png

When I checked out the site, I quite love the setup. Only just that I can't access a simplified view on my phone, just showing in desktop view which I don't prefer.

Is there anything I can do to make it look more simplified.

The site is highly mobile unfriendly, and this is by far something that lies quite high on my to-do list.

I usually try to address this issue page by page, when I re-code things to a large extent. For instance, the page related to post creation is mobile friendly.

For the rest, I am afraid that patience is the key (unfortunately, there are only 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week). This is why we actually put out our proposal #91, so that we could have some handles to increase the pace. But we are too far from being funded at the present time.

In any case, thanks a lot for the feedback. I will answer this comment when the changes will have been implemented (at least for the profile page you quoted as redesigning it from scratch is in order anyways).

Okay thanks for the reply 👍

You are welcome! I always reply!

Everything is falling into place... *mwhahahaha... I mean... yay!

Please don't give too much information about our Machiavellian plan to rule the world ;)

Estupendo lo que esplayaste en esta publicacion, lo pondre en practica y gracias por compartir, saludos.

Thanks for the nice words. Feel free to try it out and provide me a feedback (google translate helped me for translating from Spanish to English ;) ).

BUENOS DIAS A MI TAMBIEN, LO USO CONSTANTEMENTE, PERO DE TODAS MANERAS Y SIEMORE LO HAGO LAS COSAS BUENAS HAY QUE SABER APRECIAR, GRACIAS.

You are welcome!

Keep up the good work. I am sure that one day, could be far or near, all these efforts will yield the much needed results.

I will, don't worry! Soon or later we will get there! I do my best to be as fast as I can but there are so many things to deal with...

this is a good news!!!

I think so too, but I am not objective... :D

Keep up the good work friend.
Stemsocial is a wonderful community

I will, I will! Don't worry. I will do my best with the time I have (which is not as much time as I would like to have ; )).

Thanks for the nice words!

excelente trabajo, sigan adelante en su esfuerzo por las mejoras de la plataforma

Thank you (google translate helped me to understand your comment ;) )!

thanks for the support

thanks for the support

We appreciate your efforts and the efforts of all those that assisted (the patient beta testers) in improving the STEMsocial app.
Nice work sir

Thanks for your nice words. Having a few beta testers (in other words, existing users) is also very motivating for a developer ;)

Great news... Thanks

You are welcome!