Lisk Explorer 1.4.0 — Enhanced UX/UI, Improved Performance, Bug Fixes, and Website Analytics
We’re happy to announce the release of Lisk Explorer 1.4.0 after the recent patches of 1.3.1 and 1.3.2. In the last two patch releases, we’ve introduced multiple enhancements in our client-side AngularJS based application and on our server side Node.js application. With the introduction of 1.4.0, we have made several UX/UI improvements.
UX/UI Enhancements — Peers Statistics, Network Status and Search Box
We appreciate that it wasn’t easy enough to grasp the meaning of the numbers in peers statistics, so we did all we could to remedy this. We tried different designs and eventually came up with a more informative and consistent approach to illustrate the number and percentage of peers running different height on different operating systems and Lisk Core versions.
In addition, we discovered that the network status is a frequently checked element that warranted a dedicated space on the homepage. As a result, we added a section right below the header to make the network status prominent.
The last change that you will notice in this release is the design of the search box. We’ve implemented a more consistent and appealing design to improve your search experience..
Performance Improvements
We enhanced our code quality by removing many unnecessary API calls or iteration over our data lists. With these changes made, we’ve achieved a notable improvement in the load time of our pages and components. We still have a long road to go in this aspect of the Explorer, but the aim is to create the fastest Explorer in the blockchain world, with an unrivalled user experience, and we are rapidly getting there.
Bug Fixes
We updated our code base to ES6 standards and have eliminated many outdated libraries previously used to provide some methods which are presently available in ES6. We performed this migration in order to be able to upgrade to new libraries like React which are currently utilized in Lisk Nano. In these two patch releases we’ve essentially fixed almost all the bugs we spotted or that were reported by our eagle-eyed community.
Introduction of Standards
Alongside the above mentioned changes we’ve made to enhance our code quality, we’ve replaced JSHint with Eslint. Eslint is a modular, vastly developed linting utility for JavaScript, used by almost all of the new libraries and frameworks in the JavaScript world.
Eslint ensures our code is easily read for any developer in our community.
Website Analytics
Last but not least, we’ve introduced a change which may seem to be somewhat minor, but it makes it considerably easier for webmasters to deploy Explorer on their servers, with their custom Analytic service name and client ID to keep track of statistics of their users.
Analytic services like Google Analytics provide facilities for anonymous statistics of their users, such as the number of visits in every page for a random time period.