SteemPoll Update | New Login Flow And Other Changes | About Frequin Time!
So, I released the initial version of SteemPoll back on New Years' Eve and since then I have pretty much become a ghost. I have now deployed the new version of SteemPoll and it can be accessible by heading over to the URL https://www.steempoll.tech.
What caused such a huge delay?
Well, this was not the way that I intended on continuing my work on my tools and DApps. However, several things hindered the smooth release of the subsequent versions of my DApp. As many of you already know, I was hit by Covid for two whole weeks. After recovering, I was swarmed by a ton of work from my office to make up for the time lost when I was on leave. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I announced that I would have the new version up on Feb 6th. Well, I clearly missed that deadline I set for myself. This was because two key colleagues of mine, including my manager, decided to quit in the same week. So, the workload that I already had increased further.
Apart from all these minor roadblocks caused due to real-world things, the framework that I use for building my Apps also decided to add a few problems. Thank you for that Microsoft!😑 So, creating workarounds for all these took additional time. However, this also allowed me to learn more internals about the framework which I feel are going to speed up any future developments that I decide to do.
Now that I spent a big chunk of your time explaining the various causes of the delay, let me go through the numerous changes that I have incorporated into this new release.
The Changes:
New Login button
1-Login : The login was the biggest hindrance in SteemPoll. While I chose Steem Keychain due to the increased security that one would get by using it, it looks like most of you don't use the Keychain extension. I would still recommend you all to do so cause it reduces the risk of ever losing your private keys to hackers. However, I have now also added the facility that allows you to directly log in using your private posting key.
Login Page
Details of the current user. Logout button
The new login button is on the side along with the rest of the navigation menu. Clicking on it would redirect you to a new screen. You can now select if you want to log in using your private keys or by using Steem Keychain. Please note, that that App only accepts your private posting key. If you enter any other key, it will throw an error.
2-Fixed Expiry Selection: When you create a new Poll, the expiry field was very buggy. This was because this was already a custom implementation that I had created. So, it wasn't very well tested. I have since then fixed that in the newer version and you should be able to now select the expiry date without any issues.
Link to the Poll on SteemPoll
3- Link to the Poll: As suggested by @chriddi, SteemPoll now adds a line to the end of your Poll. This is a link that redirects users to SteemPoll if they are viewing the post of Steemit or any other Steem front end.
4- Fixed Non-English Links: The German community had reported a bug where non-English languages caused an issue with Poll creation. That should now be fixed in this new version of SteemPoll.
Upcoming changes:
Well, thanks to @steemchiller's work on SDS, I have now successfully integrated search into SteemPoll. However, it will still remain in testing until the next release.
I am also working on a feature that allows users to vote through the steemit frontend. Ideally, it would have been great to see users use SteemPoll to cast votes. However, if you guys feel safer on Steemit and would like to cast vote from here, I would need to add a little extra load on the Poll creators.
The rest of the features on the roadmap are going to be developed in the upcoming versions of SteemPoll.
Poised to make more changes:
I now have a much better grasp of the workings of the internals of the App. This allows me to make more dynamic changes to the final UI and make it appear better. However, my UX design skills are not up to the mark yet. While I can make things work, I am not that great at making things look good. So, I would really appreciate it if you guys, the community could come up with suggestions and features that you would like to see on SteemPoll.
If you guys are really interested in this App that I am building and would want to make suggestions or report bugs, I would create a discord server just for this purpose. Do let me know what you guys think. Like I said previously, We BUILD during the Bear Market!
CC:
@steemcurator01
@steemitblog
@pennsif
PS: If you guys think that I add value to Steem, please do consider supporting my witness which I also run. If you do want to support my work further(and haven't voted me yet), please do consider voting me as your witness by heading over to https://steemitwallet.com/~witnesses and voting starlord28 as your witness. Currently, I'm ranked 47 on this list.
Nice to read that you are still developing your app. Even if it takes a little more time after work. I can understand that well.
Some suggestions have already been made from our community (by @chriddi), and there is still some work to be done to implement them ;-). I would like to add a small thing: it would be quite helpful for the overview, if in the comment automatically created by the vote under the post is recognizable that this is a vote and not "any" comment. Maybe as a prefix: "voted on SteemPoll: ..."
I also think that functionality should be the main focus first. The appearance can then be changed later, if it should be necessary. Important are the processes in the background, which have to work.
Thanks for your work!
Yup. I am currently working on a way to let users cast votes by simply commenting on the post. However, I should also ensure that this feature is not misused by others. By letting them cast votes through steemit, it would be very easy for them to change their vote at any time. Which I feel defeats the purpose of a Polling application. Let me see, I'm sure that something would come to mind which would allow me to fix this.
The main thing is that you are healthy again and you are doing well. Covid is certainly not funny, but no one really needs Long Covid! All the best!
I hope so much that your remarkable efforts will pay off and that the app will soon attract much more interest than it seems to at the moment. All the best for that too!
Thank you for all your kind words @chridi. I will do my best to bring in features that will draw more users in. I'm also considering moving away from plain old polls to the full-on frontend for Steem.