I came across a post in which I was introduced to STEEMPEAK, which is a user interface for socially interacting through the blockchain in the manner of steemit.com or busy.org. This is only the second alternative front-end website I have looked at. Busy.org was the first and I logged in and tried it out for a few days. However, it didn't really fit me in spite of having some cool new features. I preferred to continue using Steemit with its familiar simplicity and perhaps sentimental value :D.

The post I came across by @cryptoctopus entitled "SteemPeak.com - The Best Steem Front-End?", spoke very highly of it as you may gather from the title. There were a number of interesting features mentioned in his post and CO was unambiguous in his statement about STEEM front-end interfaces: "I've tried many and I must say that now I'm 100% switching to STEEMPEAK". I decided to check it out for myself, logged in and am using it to author this very post! I've not read any other reviews or discussions yet, am not affiliated with SP blah blah. This is just some bargeshit coz I like it and a few of Cryptooctopus' borrowed words (and some copied tags) 😌.

Miscellaneous Features & Observations:

• Voting slider, you can set it to vote at any percentage you wish, regarless of Steem Power
  

• Dashboard for analytics view where you can see graphic displays of your rewards, votes, posts and comments, as well as an indication of 'account growth' (ie amount of SP). You can play around with different views.
  
  
  
  

• The 4-5 min D-tube video I watched ran through smoothly, @meno's message certainly worth hearing! D-tube videos can be played in the Feed itself btw!
  
  
  

• Blogposts, Drafts, Templates etc can be viewed as a grid. Thumbnail images are displayed without cropping. Looks great to my eyes!
  
  
  

• You can choose to exclude resteems from the blog view should you not wish to be exposed to what people you follow consider worthy of a RS :)
  
  
  

Creating Posts:

• There is a preview of the post on the right of the screen, saving the Steemit bother of scrolling up and down constantly to fix typos and adjust layout etc yet not being able to preview the changes simultaneously. However, in SteemPeak the buttons to load images are located at the top of the editing box and do not float, which means that I need to make sure the cursor is in the right place before engaging with the upload image dialogue, as I cannot see it. A certain amount of scrolling back and forth is therefore still required. A repeated observation on this post is that images took a few seconds longer to upload than on Steemit.
  
  
  
• You can choose when to publish. I'm going to schedule this post for 11.11 am on 28 July. Once scheduled, it is locked for editing. Choosing to re-edit (as I'm doing now :) cancels the schedule until you're done and you can reset the clock. Nice and simple.
  
  
  
• Drafts and templates can be created. Any post can be saved as a template. Multiple drafts and templates can be saved
  
  
  

Wallet:

• Shows current value of STEEM and SBD. You can filter the view so that you see only in or out transactions, and you can exclude the .001 SBD spammers :D
  
  
  

Unexplored (by me) Features

This is a direct quote from SteemPeak.com - The Best Steem Front-End? by @cryptoctopus

"Saved Users + Saved Topics + Bookmarks: Want to create your own curated feed experience? Save your favorite topics and users for quick access through the "Saved Topic" and "Saved Users". Add the possibility to bookmark directly from the feed and you've got something much more enjoyable to browse."

SteemPeak has a number of features that I have had to use other non-steemit.com websites for, and these are features that I would like steemit.com to have had. Some of these - such as allowing multiple drafts and templates to be saved and the 'self-curation' possibilities, sound like they would make organising posts a lot more fun, accessible and efficient.

I have only just started using SteemPeak and this is my first post using its interface. I will need to use it for a while before I settle in of course and find my flow, but first impressions are excellent indeed. Thank You Developers 🔆

So there you have it, a glimpse of something new and exciting (I think so anyway). It's good-looking - sure-footed, elegantly turned out and funkily featurefull. I like it very much and, if the day-to-day user experience turns out to aligned with my first impressions, I can see myself making the switch from ol' steemit.com.

I invite you to check it out for yourself.

Thanks for reading
🚣