Weekly Report: 22nd July 2019

Desktop UIs

This week I've been doing a lot of UI experiments. A lot of it was fueled by yet another poor desktop experience being introduced by a major web company. This time it was Twitter. Luckily they have Tweetdeck which provides a much better desktop interface anyway.

FrontierNav

• Added change tracking
• Added support for exporting changes
• Added support for importing changes
• Tables now support keyboard navigation.
• Made sidebar universal.
  • Everything is now consistently on the left. No more navigation on the top, user login on the right, page navigation on the left, sidebar on the left, etc.
  • This is a step towards a frame-based UI to support multiple pages and visualisations on a single screen using frames. Kind of like windows but more intelligent so that FrontierNav can make better use of space on larger screens to reduce clicking around.
  • It feels like I'm rebuilding an operating system GUI...
• Experimented with smaller font sizes and padding to see how a space-optimised FrontierNav might look and behave. This will become more important when a frame-based UI is available and screen space becomes more valuable.

FrontierNav Editor Initial Release

The FrontierNav editor is pretty much complete. Of course, there's a lot of features and improvements I'll be adding a long the way as with any product. But in terms of data-entry, the foundations have all been laid.

The biggest issue now I guess is figuring out the best ways for users to apply their changes. FrontierNav isn't active enough to allow any public change to get applied without moderation. So chances are, I'll go for a request-based approach. Users can make changes and send them over for approval when they're done using the import/export feature.

As a first step, I'll be using the editor to fill in the missing data for Xenoblade 2 and X. Adding functionality to the editor as I need it for others to use in the future. That's a much better approach than hacking scripts together and throwing them away.

Automated Change Submissions

I'll probably remove the need to import/export changes in the near future. If changes are stored on Firebase, there's no need for it outside of offline usage. However there's a risk of flooding the database so it'll need to be restricted to trusted "Editors" or rate-limited.

Video Games

I finished "Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze" on the Switch finally. It's a good game. Astounding music and level design. Some flaws. Very different from Mario's more nimble and acrobatic platforming. Donkey Kong's a lot more weighted and slow; as you'd expect from a gorilla.

I'll probably pick up "Starlink: Battle for Atlas" from my backlog next. Not expecting much from it.

Thanks for reading