ARK Desktop Wallet Update: v2.3 Released

This newest ARK Desktop Wallet update v2.3 brings new features, enchantments
and bug fixes. A lot has also been done on the back-end to improve performance
and loading times.

It has been a bit over a month since our last Desktop Wallet update and we have
a lot of great progress to report! The ARK Team, along with our ever dedicated
community developers, have done an amazing job squashing bugs, patching holes,
and implementing new features. We are really excited to share a wide range of
improvements to the wallet in v2.3.

The new wallet is available for download at:

https://github.com/ArkEcosystem/desktop-wallet/releases

This is going to be the last major update before a big turning point in the ARK
Desktop Wallet v2 lifecycle (minor updates may accompany this release eg:
version 2.3.x). The next bigger iteration (v2.4) will bring plugin support.

We feel this is going to be something unique and will open many new use cases
for developers, delegates, Bridgechains and others who would like to develop
custom solutions without the need to modify the core files of the wallet.

We are going to be developing some initial plugins to showcase the power of the
new system and give developers a starting point on how to implement their
plugins.

The initial release containing the debut of the plugin system is currently
anticipated to be done in the first half of the May.

Hashes for 2.3.0 of Desktop Wallets (SHA256)

• Linux (ark-desktop-wallet-linux-x64–2.3.0.tar.gz)
  128b771842fef98dbecbb56cd9e2c756287b1cfa9b417e6d5766dd61c5320b0d
• MacOS (ark-desktop-wallet-mac-2.3.0.dmg)
  37f88055fc428e7c3adc98b4e66b9fe08fdab068b82fd4f13bf9e161dd7883d0
• Ubuntu (ark-desktop-wallet-linux-amd64–2.3.0.deb)
  b7a0d3e1d0b7b479f392e354325ee888a61271aa74afef3e6aeb7f2c4556a079
• Windows X86 (ark-desktop-wallet-win-x86–2.3.0.exe)
  b47215e357b825e82912d9a61cbb70fc20cb3c3ceefc796140f86d97706cb907
• Windows X64 (ark-desktop-wallet-win-x64–2.3.0.exe)
  9493cb7321f46123f176ddfb57139600d4c4080afcc219659cb791fdf5c26585
• Linux-AppImage (ark-desktop-wallet-linux-x86_64–2.3.0.AppImage)
  ebde7b7916f1ef2f3bc161cd6aa590514ec99b5af4e7a8fa6cc0aec077916700

Changes In Numbers

Since the previous release:

• **9 different developers **contributing to the ARK Desktop Wallet.
• 93 new commits to the ARK Desktop Wallet.
• 266 files changed in the ARK Desktop Wallet.
• 13,337 lines of code added to the ARK Desktop Wallet.
• 3,597 lines of code deleted from the ARK Desktop Wallet.

Now lets go over the changes in current newest release.

What’s New?

• **Make voting easier with redesigned voting process **— numerous changes on user
  experience when voting for a delegate, you can now input a delegate you wish to
  vote for or search for them in the lower bar. It also shows when processing
  transactions at the end for better experience.
  

• **Include a menu to filter and sort the wallets of the sidebar **— we have added
  a filter menu in the sidebar so you can now sort wallets by name, balance and
  also have an option to hide empty wallets. Addition of search functionality
  makes it easy to find wallet with ease.
  

• Load “x” Ledger wallets —this feature allows Ledger users to load X amount
  of Ledger wallets. The reason for this is, for example, some people may want to
  see a larger or smaller amount of addresses/wallets depending on how many
  addresses/wallets have been created. The other reason is to give users on
  Bridgechains additional options to access tokens where they have some tokens on
  their 1st Ledger address and some on the 5th for instance (eg. airdrop), and as
  Ledger stops loading at the +1 address of the last that had any transactions you
  wouldn’t be able to access them otherwise. This also improves the loading of
  ledger wallets and has the ability to stop any currently ongoing process. Do
  note that the bigger the number of Ledger wallets/addresses you want to load,
  the bigger the load times as it needs to parse data for all of them.
  

• **Show voted delegates in list view **— when you click on wallets page and
  switch to list view you can now easily see who you are voting for with each
  separate wallet, thus reducing the need to click on each separate wallet (if you
  have many) to see who you vote for.

• **Improved view of ‘My wallets’ page *— we have improved user experience when
  viewing ‘My wallets’ *page, design has been changed to be more fluid, added on
  wallet hover animation, added additional option so you can rename your wallet by
  pressing … icon.

• Addition of input language component and language flags to profile —
  includes a new language component to over time make ARK Desktop Wallet
  multilingual with your help, improves and fixes several things of dropdowns,
  includes the component in the profile creation, modifies the profile edition to
  display flags on the language dropdown, includes the attribution to the creators
  of the flag icons (on the about section).

• **Allow navigating to delegate addresses on the vote delegate popup modal —
  **when you click on delegates tab and on a specific delegate you can now click
  on their name in vote modal that will take you to their address.

• Remind user to ignore or save changes in edit profile page when leaving
  page—desktop wallet users, when leaving the profile edit page, without
  clicking save button are now asked if they want to save changes or ignore them.
  It also fixes the order on the profiles page if altered after updating a
  profile.

• Implement remote sorting to delegate table — sorting in the delegates tab is
  now done via API and on the whole dataset instead of 51 delegates. You can now
  click Rank, Username, Productivity or Voting % to sort by all registered
  delegates.

• **Add the time format setting to the profile creation — **you can now select
  data format (12h/24h) when creating new profile.

• Verify when sending transactions that the 2nd passphrase is correct — when
  inputting 2nd passphrase it now shows if its valid or not valid so user gets
  input on the go.

• **Display the ticker price on the dashboard, even when the chart is disabled **—
  since some users may disable the chart for performance reasons, showing the
  price might be helpful for them. The price is requested periodically unless you
  disable it in network configurations, so displaying the price won’t involve
  additional requests.

• **Improved UI/UX for QR scanner **— new, enhanced overall look and feel of the
  QR code scanner.

• Copy button in wallet table, redirect & success message — redirect to
  contacts overview instead of wallet after creating a contact. Also:
  — copy
  address button in action column,
  — displays a success message once a
  contact has been created successfully,
  — adds tooltips to the buttons.

• Added “Chart on dashboard” setting to profile creation and edit page — you
  can now set chart to be displayed or hidden on the profile creation page or
  disable it in the profile page.

• Add avatar and change style on confirmation of new wallet page — display the
  identicon and improve style in the confirmation step when creating a new wallet.

• **Replaced lots of action dispatching to load the session with a single mutation
  **— this change reduces the time to load initially. Load sessions and switching
  profiles are reduced about 1 second on average depending on the system.
• Overall latest transactions per profile — in previous version the latest
  transactions display the ten latest transaction of each wallet. This had several
  problems and downsides, for instance:
  — with a high number of wallets, this
  list grows very large,
  — this didn’t actually reflect the latest
  transactions of your profile
  New behavior now displays the 50 latest
  transactions of all wallets combined on the dashboard.
• Implement database migration system — allows executing migrations when the
  version of the app changes.
• Made contacts page scrollable — contacts page is now scrollable if you have
  a larger number of contacts.
• **Infer the market ticker of custom networks by checking CryptoCompare — users
  may not realize that they need to manually set the ticker of the network to
  enable the prices in other currencies and the chart. We can try the token from
  the network automatically and, in the case that it exists, use it directly. We
  moved the market ticker to the “Basic” tab.
• Revamp how transactions are loaded on the dashboard —we revamped the entire
  application to allow caching transactions, improving its performance and
  enhancing the code. Some of the initial changes are:
  — Allow trigger
  actions of the synchronizer directly.
  —Changed the dashboard to not sync
  the contacts, now that they are not displayed.
  — The dashboard doesn’t
  fetch transactions now. This made the initial load of transactions slower
  because the synchronizer fetches the wallet first, so there was a small delay
  which was also fixed.
• **Request wallets data and transactions in parallel during synchronization **—
  In this case, requesting the wallet data and transactions in parallel should
  save those 1 or 2 seconds, at minimum, of getting first the wallet data.
• **Request multiple wallets or transactions at once when the API allows it **—
  Using the new endpoints that allow searching multiple wallets or transactions at
  the same time wasn’t correctly triggered on the first load and when changing
  peers. Apart from that, we’ve refactored the client service to make it easier
  using the new features that are being added to the API, and also slightly
  refactored the tests to make them more readable.
• Highlight the wallet sidebar filters button when they are active — this
  measure helps avoid users from forgeting that they have activated some filters
  and start wondering where their wallets went.
• Improved address list style when creating a new wallet — improved the design
  when hovering the new address, changed checkmark flag, update refresh address
  button.
• **Sync dynamic fees only when InputFee is active **— these changes avoid
  making requests at the beginning to fetch the fee statistics of every network,
  and then, periodically to have them updated. Now, only the current network is
  checked, but just in the case that InputFee component is active, because they
  are only used there. This also improves the Synchronizer service, so, from now
  on, we could disable completely some actions until needed.
• Delayed and changed the interval of synchronization — delays some
  synchronizer actions to not process all of the requested data at the same time
  and changes the intervals to reduce the frequency of requests.
• **Keep the expand button at the top **— keeping the button to expand/collapse at
  the top would allow seeing (expanding) the balance of the last wallets without
  having to go to the top to expand the sidebar.

Other Bugs and Minor Fixes

• Do not treat addresses that are possibly NEO addresses as invalid.
• Change to new voting instructions URL.
• Correctly sort wallets and contacts in overview and sidebar.
• Dashboard transaction loading and wallet sidebar placeholder.
• Add subject to clipboard button upon resetting tooltip.
• Upgrade to node 11 and fix all failing unit tests.
• Add COSS exchange to known wallets.
• Compile portal-vue to not display developer note in production.
• Use the cursor pointer on the pagination rows per page.
• Stage linted files before commit.
• Use the configured time format on the market chart.
• Fix how cryptocurrencies are formatted when localized and displaying with
  symbols.
• Ignore case of filter queries.
• Several BIP 38 issues and refactor the implementation.

New Translations

• Italian language.

Special thanks to all community developers who have contributed to this Wallet

release (Github users: dated, vulet, kalgoop, danielstc).

I found a bug / an issue what do I do?

Please open an issue with all of the details at:
https://github.com/ArkEcosystem/desktop-wallet/issues

I want to help with development what do I do?

Please open pull request
and don’t forget we are also running Github development
bounty so you can earn some extra ARK.

I want to translate Desktop Wallet into my own language how can I help?

Please read instructions at this link (click on the arrow to open full guide):
https://github.com/ArkEcosystem/desktop-wallet/tree/master#translations

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