Textile Update | October 2018

business • Nov 06, 2018

Another month, another series of milestones

As we move smoothly into the fourth quarter of 2018, the Textile team remains hard at work, focused on product, longer-term vision, and shipping updates. The past month also saw major upgrades in terms of stability and user experience in Textile Photos, as well as some community engagement milestones.

Outreach

As always, the Textile team has been actively engaging with users on social media (some of us are also on Peepeth!) and our blog, releasing two major articles on the tech underlying Textile Photos. These stories were a long time coming, but we’re very happy with the reception they’ve received from the community. If you haven’t already read them, be sure to check them out:

Textile also continues to show up elsewhere online, including regular spots in the IPFS community newsletter, educational materials, and even Protocol Labs’ Lab Day videos (here’s Andrew’s talk specifically) — which were actually recorded in the summer but released this past month:

Technology

On the Textile Photos front, we’ve seen a big month of updates and upgrades. On the front-end, we’ve upgraded to the latest and greatest react native framework. This brings with it lots of little improvements (e.g., stability and display issues on both iOS and Android), as well as better developer debug information, and — crucial for our team — better TypeScript types. In addition to the upgrade, we’ve been slowly moving towards a fully-typed app codebase. This is something we’ve been wanting to do for a while now, and it should significantly improve our ability to ship new releases with confidence, faster.

On the back-end, textile-go has also been upgraded to the latest go-ipfs release (at the time), which provides useful performance and stability improvements. We’re also gearing up for the another IPFS upgrade, which will have far-reaching implications for a lot of pieces in our back-end, including some major performance and memory improvements (which are critical in mobile environments), so big thanks to the IPFS devs for these efforts! In terms of our own code, our front- and back-end libs have now collectively surpassed 190 ⭐️s on GitHub, which is no small feat (we’re even starting to see some forks crop up!).

For those less interested in what’s going on behind the scenes, you’ll also likely notice some pretty major UI/UX improvements in Textile Photos if you’ve updated to a recent release. These improvements should reduce friction when adding and sharing photos to Threads, improve display and interactions on both iOS and Android, and also make for a significantly ‘snappier’ overall user experience. In fact, Android users should notice major improvements to UI smoothness now that all interactions with the underlying textile-go framework happen in a separate worker thread.

What’s next?

So what will Q4 bring for the Textile team? You can expect lots of new Textile Photos releases, some exciting announcements regarding backup and recovery, a push towards more tools and libraries for #DWeb developers, and even some new and exciting ways to interact with Textile Photos outside the mobile app. So stay tuned to our blog and GitHub repos for the latest and greatest updates and new features as they come. Plus, stay tuned for a few more tutorial posts this month to get people excited about IPFS development progress…

And now you’re up to date. 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 partnerships! In the mean time, sign up for our waitlist to get earlier access to Textile Photos, or our mailing list to get updates about new features and progress.