First of all: Hello everyone.
Second: I am the type of person who is interested in multiple topics and is up to date with the different Hive communities, that despite the fact that I am not an ordinary and faithful user of publications. But, I generally open each community website and review trends, consumer to medium sips of content. However, I have noticed that sometimes find it somewhat uncomfortable to be browsing each browser tab (I cannot imagine how users who use alts accounts for different communities will do). Based on that case, started with a little personal problem to get the feed of the different communities and see the value of the content with its respective token.
Then asked myself:
Would anyone else be interested in a similar interface? Would they use the interface to see their posts in the different communities?
I decided to reach out to different Hive users by asking them the same questions and they all thought it was a great idea. Also, from a personal point of view, I think that Hive needs more developers and more interfaces where you can see healthy competition between each one.
Looking for Ideas:
The first step for the development of the new UI was how to propose a new design to access multiple communities without the user feeling disoriented. Researching on UX and design patterns I found several options, and for this case it is not necessary to reinvent the wheel. The design that best suits the new UI is the following:
What I thought best was that the style would be similar to the Discord app. <<< All or the vast majority who make life in Hive, use Discord >>>
This similarity will allow the user experience to improve in a great sense, because it is an application that is easy to use and at the same time complete.
Comparison of UI with Discord
Starting from the main idea that the design will be like that of Discord, we have a vertical panel on the left where the icons of each community will be displayed.
Followed by another panel where the different labels can be selected
In the center the content (Post List, Post)
Finally, a panel where the information can be toggled: showing additional information of the token or of a user.
Problems encountered (Possible solutions)
The first problem I got in development was the impossibility of getting good documentation for the Hive-Engine api, many of the things are not well defined. So I required a list of the current communities on Hive-Engine with their tokens, but I didn't find a specific filter that could be used. For now there is a static list with the information of each tribe.
Order of the communities. This problem arose right after getting the list of communities, and I was wondering in what order the communities should be displayed: By capitalization, post ..? The future solution will be that each user can order the communities to their preference.
How to show the content in html. Undoubtedly, this is one of the problems that so far has been a bit complex for me to solve, because both the comments and the publications are made under markwdown formats. But, finally getting a couple of libraries from twitter and checking out how the Hive condenser does it, I was able to get some useful methods to convert markdown to html.
Voting Power, this is a point in which I am currently working and so far I have not found much information.
Main issues to be resolved:
- Publications
- Comments
- Wallet
At the moment you cannot perform many actions within the UI, but I am satisfied with what I have achieved so far, since I have little time with development. I also take the opportunity to congratulate @leprechaun with his work on the new POB interface based on the Ecency code. However, sometimes I think that it is more difficult to modify an existing code than to make one from scratch.