What is this? An update? Shut up and take my votes! (Hey, a guy can dream!)

If you’ve never heard of Columns for Steem, it’s a multi-column client for Steem I’m developing right now that lets you display hashtags and users in columns, like Tweetdeck, Mastodon or Tweetbot do it for example. You can check it out here, no need to login to use the app.

What’s new?

User info in columns

User columns (opened by either adding a new column with a username like @crypticwyrm, or by clicking on a user’s profile image to open that user in a new column) now show information about the user at the top (refreshed every 5 minutes).

It currently shows the bio, Steem & Steem Dollar balance, follower & following count and the post count. I’ll add Steem Power and Voting Power in the next update since that is a bit more involved.

Since this user info area takes up a bit of the vertical space in columns and you might be on a smaller screen like a laptop, smartphone or tablet, you can click on the small handle below this information to hide it.

Here’s how it looks with the dark theme:

And here’s the light theme version:

The design for this isn’t final yet, I might add some icons or do something different entirely, we’ll see!

There is a new setting (open the drawer by clicking the icon in the top left corner of the site to see all settings) that lets you configure if it’s hidden or shown by default when columns are displayed, so you can use different settings for different devices for example.

If at any point you don’t understand what a setting in the app does, just hover your mouse cursor over it since there is probably a tooltip explaining it in more detail.

Favicon

I hadn’t designed an icon for the app yet, but since I noticed it works remarkable well even on smartphones and tablets (I’m going to improve it even further in future updates), I made one for this update. I’m not a graphics artist so don’t expect too much but it’s at least very distinctive, that’s for sure! Here’s how it looks:

And on my Android phone using the “Add to home screen” feature of the web browser, Chrome in this case:

It’s supposed to be a miniature representation of how the app itself looks, I drew it in 16x16 pixels resolution so it looks good in all sizes, even as the tiny icon in browser tabs. You can see the columns, scrollbars and pictures of Steem posts in there represented as different color rectangles.

Yet more image parsing improvements

Parsing images from Steem posts is quite a task, I’ve further improved it in the app to also display images hosted on IPFS, so now you can see images from DTube posts for example. At this point it should work for 99.99% of images, I haven’t seen any broken images the last few days while using the app (aside from those cases where the picture is even broken on Steemit.com because the user posted the wrong link).

Tiny design improvements

I changed the padding around columns a bit. You probably won’t notice anything since it’s a tiny change, but now the padding between the columns is the same as outside and when columns scroll horizontally because too many are open to fit on the screen, the right padding was missing, it’s there now.

What’s coming next?

There will be one smaller features update in a few days just like this one and after that I’ll probably make an update that will just improve the speed of the app. It’s already super fast most of the time, but whenever new posts get displayed the whole app freezes for a moment to render them which is annoying when you’re scrolling while that happens. There is a lot that I can do to make the rendering of posts faster, so after that update the app should feel blazingly fast at all times.

After that I plan to add some features where you have to login with your Steem account, like voting on posts. I don’t want people having to enter their Steem key or password, so I signed up for SteemConnect v2 a few days ago, which is what Busy uses (since they developed it together with Steemit). It lets you sign in to a Steem site like Busy or Columns For Steem without having to actually give away your Steem private keys or password to do that. Just like you can sign in with your Twitter, Facebook or Google account on some websites. Makes it a lot more secure for you and there is less trust involved.

I haven’t heard back from SteemConnect yet though, their website says they give you access to their service after signing up but I haven’t received anything aside from an email verification link I had to click, so no idea how long it will take to get access. I'm not even sure if I need "access" since I already found all the links and info I need to get it working I believe, so maybe I'll just try it out ;)