Textile Update | March 2019

by Carson Farmer

March developer madness… making things easier for devs

Photo by Christian Fregnan / Unsplash

The Textile team was pretty much ‘heads down’ this past month (hence the March update in April), with a major focus on improving the external developer experience. This means a lot of work on stability, library modularization, simplification of developer APIs, and just general house-keeping (moar docs!). This month’s update will be pretty short, but we’ll try to highlight all the bits and pieces that someone looking to build on Textile should know about.

Textile libraries

The biggest news in terms of new Textile developer tooling is our alpha releases of two new mobile platform-specific SDKs. Specifically, the team has been hard at work moving from a singular React Native SDK (which wraps platform-specific frameworks) to standalone Android and iOS SDKs (which the React Native SDK will depend on). Right now, the APIs are under heavy development, but are already ready to test and use if you’re interested in getting your hands dirty. Textile Photos will be the first production app to use these new SDKs, but if you’re at all interested in using these libraries in your own project, get in touch!

We’ve also been hard at work improving the developer experience on desktop, with major improvements to our js-http-client Javascript library. It is now fully implemented in Typescript, and comes with its own types for working with Textile’s REST API. This means you can build on top of Textile’s desktop tray app faster, easier, and with confidence. We’re expecting this to bootstrap new Textile-based apps on desktop, and we’ll be documenting our own efforts in this area with a new blog series.

Libraries

Textile apps

On the user-facing side of things, our focus on back-end and stability has meant that you might not have seen a lot of UI changes in Textile Photos. However, thanks to a flurry of bug fixes, and UI improvements, you may be experiencing more streamlined in-app experience, especially on Android. While we were at it, we did manage to sneak in one much-anticipated new feature... photo zoom! Now, when you tap a photo in Textile Photos, you’ll get a zoom-able, full-screen view of your precious memories.

In other app-based news, Textile released the first version of our Notes app, along with a short post by Andrew on how it was created. Textile Notes is open source, and like all our code, you can find it on GitHub. The new app seems to have struck a cord with users, which is highly motivating. So expect some updates and new features in the near term...

Apps

Textile is hiring

In other news, Textile is still on the prowl for top notch dweb developers. If you’re interested in the future of the web and decentralized mobile systems, get in touch. Seriously, do it, we’d love to hear from you. We’re still scoping out our hiring process, so the full positions have yet to be fully spec’d, but you can bet we’re looking for dweb enthusiasts with experience in the tools and technologies that Textile produces and writes about regularly. Join us on our Slack channel or shoot us an email if you have questions!

Consider yourself updated

If you’re excited about Textile — or just want to learn more about our apps, ideas, and vision for the future — feel free to reach out on Slack, or share your thoughts on Twitter. If you’re a fellow decentralized web developer, let us know what cool distributed web projects you’re working on — we’d love to hear about it, and maybe discuss your employment future! In the mean time, sign up for our wait-list to get earlier access to Textile Photos, or our mailing list to get updates about new features and progress.