Time for another Columns for Steem (what is that?) update!
The most noticeable change is in the design of the posts themselves, the line-height of post titles is now a bit more narrow, the default from Google’s Material Design was way too big, and I added icons for upvotes, comments and the Steem Dollar value of posts to make it look a bit nicer.
One tiny feature I added is that you can now click on profile pictures to open that user in a new column, which can be very handy. In one of the next updates, the user columns will also display a bit of information about the user instead of just their posts. Like their bio, Steem, Steem Dollar & Steem Power holdings and their voting power. Pretty much what my other project Steem Observatory displays at the top. I’ll probably make that information expandable so that you can show/hide it with a button click when you rather want to use the whole vertical space of a column to display posts.
Also, due to the way I try to minimize the bandwidth usage of the app, sometimes posts could show outdated information before this update. This happened in columns sorted by “New”, “Blog” or “Feed”. These columns only check if there are new posts every minute, and if there are none they never get updated, which saves bandwidth, but also means that old posts already displayed in the column would keep showing old votes, comments and SBD values. Now these columns make sure that they are updated at least every five minutes, even without new posts.
The other changes I’ve been working on for the last three days are mostly under the hood, improvements to the source code, including some speed improvements. You might have noticed before that closing columns felt a bit sluggish, it’s instant now.
It’s important to do that once in awhile, a little bit of house cleaning before adding too many new features, or the source code over time turns into a big mess that is hard to debug and add features to.