New? It's the same old Steemit we've all learned to love, appreciate, and supplement with a bunch of additional sites, such as Steem Now, Steemd, Steem Followers, etc. What's new is the extension (for chrome AND firefox) by @armandocat that makes many of these tools obsolete, or rather it incorporates them into the Steemit site itself. In fact, under the newly added menu item links you get a list of these sites you can visit with a simple click. But let's take a look at these improvements one by one.
Vote Power, Percentage, and Actual Payout
I'm sure we've all been there: Posted a lovely article, and votes are piling up, but the reward remains meager. Then suddenly, maybe over night, the payout jumps to nice fat amount. Who's done it? Who can I go thank for? (Or who can I go stalking for more of those votes? Not that I would bother my kind upvoter like that, but my curiosity calls for satisfaction.) Looking at the names on the list of votes so far barely used to give me any info. With some of the additional tools I could get an idea who has what capability, and thus make my estimation, but keeping in consideration their VP, the strength of vote they currently have, and the percentage they voted with, I can ultimately just guess the actual amount their vote was worth.
With this new extension the guessing is over. It tells me right on the list at the bottom of the article who voted, with what percentage, and in how much of a reward this vote resulted in. Not only that, your own voting capacity is also displayed on your profile, as it is on every other profile. It's never been this easy to see who can do what. But wait, there is more: in the separate menu item votes you can even see all the votes a user made in the past: which post or comment they voted for, how strongly, and how much the payout was. And this goes not only for the outgoing votes, but for the incoming ones as well. Finally, to leave no doubt behind, the number of votes a user has made that day is also displayed on their profile.
A related feature is that on the slider for voting strength it also tells you the exact amount your vote is worth, not just your percentage. This goes not only for upvotes, by the way, but also if you have to flag someone you can see the amount that will be deducted from the post's reward.
More Info on Followers and Followees
At one point when my feed was so full of stuff I couldn't care less about, I conducted a massive cleaning among the people I was following. I visited the profile of each one, reconsidered whether I was really that interested in following them, and unfollowed a good bunch. Soon afterwards I ended up following some of them again, as I realized that some of these dumped followees had actually interesteding things to read. Of course, all this took quite some time, and I'm sure many good followees ended up by the wayside. But with hundreds of profiles to go through, the inadvertent mistake is programmed in.
With this new extension, the list of followers and followees gives you a lot more info to work with: next to their name you can see their reputation, steem power, and what their vote is worth (at the moment). This is already quite a lot, but combined with everything else, a visit to their profile can tell you so much more about a person. What articles do they like? What are their voting habits? How many times do they tend to vote on a day, and how strong? How many articles do they post / resteem, and how often? And this is just scratching the surface. After installing the extension, I spent hours looking at both followers and followees, until I even felt a bit of shame for suddenly being able to know so much about them...
Looking for an Old Post?
Whether it's a post you read by some other steemian, or one of your own you'd like to look at, now you won't have to scroll through the entire list to find it. First of all, there is a neat histogram right under your profile with bars indicating how many articles you posted (in blue) and how many you resteemed (green). One click on a bar will tell you exactly which posts these were, another click gives you access right there. What I find especially nice is that the actual date is given when a post was published. That means no more fiddling with the calendar, trying to figure out the exact date “23 days ago”.
Another feature that makes it visually more appealing to look at past posts, is the option between the list and the grid layout, found in the top right-hand corner of the page.
Major Improvement on the Markdown Editor
Probably the best feature of this extension is the improved markdown editor. Previously I used to find it extremely frustrating having to scroll down … down … all the way down to see the preview of any changes I made in the editor... then scrolling back up to continue making changes. With this new extension the preview screen is right next to the editor one, and best of all, it scrolls down automatically to the part you are editing at the moment. This could actually make me want to get back to using markdown, instead of just using the editor.
Where Can I Get This Amazing Extension?
For all those who have gotten excited by all these amazing improvements, I recommend to visit the post Steemit More Info 1.2 - Chrome Extension + Firefox Extension by @armandocat There, the creator explains these same features with beautiful screen-shots, asks for comments and recommendations for further improvements, and of course you can give them a well deserved upvote. At the bottom of the article are the links for the extension download for firefox and chrome. I can highly recommend it, as it adds greatly to the already amazing steemit experience.