Introducing Autosave, Advanced Drafts, Scheduling and New Publishing UI

leofinance (77)in LeoFinance • 4 years ago

Introducing Autosave, Advanced Drafts, Scheduling and New Publishing UI.png

Over the past 2 months, we began deploying a wide range of updates to the LeoFinance.io UI. For the first several iterations, we focused on bug fixes from previous UI versions. If you reported bugs to the Leo Team, then you'll notice that many of them have been resolved.

After collecting bug reports and fixing the major issues over the past few months, we began designing the next major feature update for LeoFinance.

The update was released last week and focuses primarily on the Post Publishing UI.

Two of the most requested features are scheduling and post drafts. We built a scheduling feature in the past but it had several issues including the potential to actually lose a post in transit.

Our latest update solved all of these issues by re-building LeoInfra's handling of post scheduling from the ground up. Between LeoInfra, Lightning and UI improvements, we've now got a publishing UI that we are truly happy with and ready to make more improvements to.

LeoFinance.io is our flagship application and the home of our community. It's vital to our ecosystem and a lack of updates over the past few months has been due to the stretch of new projects. About 2 months ago, we decided to expand the LeoFinance team to handle a wider range of updates on all of our applications with a dedicated developer now handling LeoFinance.io. More info toward the end of this post.

In this post, we'll cover the major new features. We won't run through the smaller fixes, bug patches, etc. but we may save those for one massive post about our past 2 months of updates for LeoFinance.io. For now, we'll focus on the major Publishing UI Update and what's next.

New Features:

Autosave
Advanced Drafts
Publish Post Confirmation Window
Scheduling
Preview and Share Unpublished Posts
UI/UX Improvements

Autosave:

Autosave will now kick in as you're writing your posts. It will create a draft for you and automatically save your writing as you go.

If you leave the publishing UI or your browser crashes, etc. you can visit your "Drafts" page to retrieve the draft you were working on.

This again is a backend-heavy development. Utilizing the LeoInfra database to store and retrieve content.

Advanced Drafts:

We've talked about this idea of advanced drafts in the past. The idea was simply to create a multi-tooled UI to handle various drafting tasks and make your life as a content creator on LeoFinance as easy as possible.

You can find your "Drafts" page from your profile page or from the bottom right "Drafts" button on the Publishing UI. This page will show all of your prior drafts and allow you to edit and publish drafts or delete them if you no longer need the content.

View, Edit & Delete Drafts

Publish Post Confirmation Window:

When you click "Publish", it no longer automatically publishes your post. Instead, you're brought to one last step to confirm before your content goes live on LeoFinance.io and the Hive blockchain:

This confirmation window will show you what your Post Card will look like when it's live on the site. It will also show you some info that you used to see in the "Advanced" tab on the old publishing UI. Allowing you to auto reblog and/or auto post to twitter.

The "Schedule For Later" button will expand the confirmation window and allow you to set a time to publish your content autonomously.

Scheduling (That Works)

Note: in order for post scheduling to work, you need to log in with Hivesigner. We're working on a second iteration to make this auth step easier/not require hivesigner.

By popular demand (@scaredycatguide) we built a scheduling feature several months ago. The scheduling feature we built utilized LeoInfra to create a database for content to be pushed to the Hive blockchain at a later date.

A number of problems arose out of this scheduling feature and it was almost unusable during volatile times (when Hive nodes were less reliable).

In our latest update, we rebuilt the scheduling infrastructure from the ground up. Now our users can schedule content to be posted to the Hive blockchain at a later date without worrying about that content being lost.

The content will live in an archived section of our database so in the worst case scenario of content not being posted to the chain, it will be retrievable from our database. No more posts getting lost.

Additionally, you can now view, edit and delete scheduled posts directly from the UI.

Preview and Share Unpublished Posts:

Sharable previews are probably a feature you never thought much about. With that said, if you've ever co-written a post or collaborated on content in any way, shape or form on the internet, then you've probably used some shared document editor before.

This is likely our first step in that direction. HackMD is a popular shared doc editor (so is Google Docs). In the current production release, you can click the "Preview" button on the bottom right of your post and get a sharable draft preview.

Only the author of the post can edit this draft but the link can be sent to anyone to view the draft before it is published to the blockchain.

In a later iteration, we will likely enable collaborative editing which would look very similar to Google Docs or HackMD.

One of our goals with a feature like this is to further our mission to onboard more Crypto Projects to LeoFinance.io and Hive. We believe this is the perfect community for these projects to share their official updates.

Right now, the majority of them use Medium. This is a mix of usability (LeoFinance is harder to use and understand than Medium) and also audience.

Our goal is to solve both of these problems and onboard a massive number of major crypto projects to LeoFinance.io in the coming months. This publishing UI update (now and the later iteration) is a great step in this direction.

UI/UX Improvements:

We also made a number of UI/UX improvements. Many of these are smaller changes with the aim of simplifying the UI and making the user experience more seamless.

Tags Icon:

To add tags to a post, click on the "Tags" icon in the upper right. Our Smart Tags feature will suggest topics based on your previous 20 posts.

Styling Keyboard Shortcuts:

We had a few issues with our Markdown Editor in the previous version of LeoFinance.io. These issues are now resolved and features like keyboard shortcuts are working again. (i.e. ctrl+b on highlighted text to bolden it).

Post Navigation:

The 3 lines in the upper right pop out a "Navigation" window which create clickable links for you to navigate your post via header titles.

It's especially useful if you write long posts and go back through to edit certain sections.

Hide Preview & View Full Screen:

New Team Member and Feedback Wanted

LeoFinance has been expanding in a massive way throughout 2021. Much of it has been very visible and much of it has been in the background as we prepare ourselves for the coming months and years of major developments.

We've brought on a dedicated team member to develop LeoFinance.io full-time - Shawn. Many of you have seen him hanging around in Discord and taking feedback for improvements as we continue to develop the UI and make progress on our long-term goals for LeoFinance's flagship application.

There's a lot of work to be done both on LeoFinance.io and on the backend for Lightning and LeoInfra, we've already made a great deal of progress just in these past few weeks and we're all excited to see the major iterations roll out alongside the 2021 roadmap for LeoFinance.io.

Feedback Wanted

We're looking for as much community feedback and feature requests as possible. In the near future, we'll launch a post and ask for actual UI/UX designs in detail from the community but for now we are asking for any features / wishes you have for the LeoFinance.io application.

If you've got any ideas for how the app can be improved, bugs you've seen or feature designs that you have in mind - please drop them in the comments below.

As we continue to design and iterate based on the 2021 roadmap, we'll adopt all of the feedback we get and see where we can deliver it in the iterations as we roll them out.

With Shawn working on the developments regularly, we'll look to roll out LeoFinance.io UI Updates on a scheduled basis. Every other Friday, there will be a UI update of some kind - whether that's a group of major features getting added (like this week's Publishing UI Update) or a long list of bug patches and fixes based on feedback.

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