FrontierNav Weekly: 9th March 2020
Changes
- Image uploads are no longer stored locally, they're uploaded immediately.
- When adding a game to your library that hasn't been released yet, your play state defaults to "Plan to Play" rather than "Playing".
- Replaced slider widget in some form controls with native
<input type="range" />. - Fixed a bug in Data Tables that prevents using the tab scroll buttons via touch interfaces.
- Reduced database sizes by stripping empty data.
- Reduced number of network requests when loading images.
Reducing Local Storage Usage
I've mentioned this a few times in past updates, but to give some context: FrontierNav uses the web browser's local storage features to store data before a Merge Request is made. Every change, including image uploads, are stored locally and then uploaded when a Merge Request is made.
However, there are problems with this approach as web browsers aren't able to guarantee persistance. All of your changes can be lost through multiple ways at the browser's whim and FrontierNav will never know. To add to this, local storage has limits that can vary from megabytes to gigabytes depending on the browser and device.
So local storage isn't reliable and I've decided to slowly move away from it.
Disgaea 5
I've been playing Disgaea 5 for the past few weeks. It's a data-heavy game and its interfaces to go through that data and understand it isn't great. The Wikis for it aren't very good and the guides aren't easy to navigate. The most thorough guides are in Japanese so I have to translate it to English and then to Disgaea's localised English every time I want to look something up. It's not great.
So I decided to improve the situation by adding the data to FrontierNav and making it easier to navigate. After all, that's why I made FrontierNav in the first place!
The downside? I'm only one person. I'd still like to finish up Xenoblade 2, but finishing Disgaea 5 would be more beneficial to me since I'm currently playing it.
Either way, I'm getting a good amount of feedback just by using FrontierNav and taking note of various points of friction. I guess that's one of the benefits of being part of your own target audience.
Next Up
Carry on I guess. More data entry and streamlining. Oh, and keep an eye on that Coronavirus.
Thanks for reading.