Development Update (big changes coming!) (Patreon)

Hey everyone! Just wanted to give a status update. If you celebrated Thanksgiving last week, hope you had a safe and pleasant one. My quarantine pod and I enjoyed a nice in-home Korean BBQ setup; it was fun.

I’ve been sick the past week, and that’s slowed me down (I tested negative for COVID). I’m still chugging along, working towards that big 0.9 Community update.

TL; DR: A new data layer is coming to make the Community update easier to build. As a bonus, it comes with offline support and no more loading spinners.

Upon evaluating everything Justin and I want to do with Community, I hit something of a technical wall with the way LK represents and stores projects. It’s traditional and rigid, and for Community I need more flexibility. I want to be able to use an entire Project as a template, or copy an editable module into a project with one click. I’ve been looking into alternative solutions, and I believe I’ve found one. I’ve migrated about 60% of LK’s dev build to this new “data layer”, and it’s been quite successful so far.

The new data layer is what’s called “local-first”, meaning your client manipulates your work locally, and then gracefully synchronizes it with the server and other clients. The central LK server remains the authority on project membership, image uploads, content sharing, and backing up your data, but the clients take over content creation, editing, and export. This means no loading spinners or delays, far fewer ways of losing data, easier copying (important for Community), easier feature development for me, and true offline support. (Image and map uploads, of course, don’t work offline, but I’ll conjure up solutions for that)

I know we talked about offline support coming after the next major features, but building Community on top of LK’s current data layer would pour concrete over it, so to speak, and this change is more effective the earlier it’s made. I’m excited about this development because it means better performance, more capital-F Freedom for you and your work, and an overall better experience. It means Community can do bigger and bolder things.

I knew this change was coming eventually, so I made it easy to swap out the data layer, but it’s still a pretty big change. I’ll be recruiting interested folks to test it on my development server. More details to come.

Thanks again for your continued support. You don’t have to do anything different in anticipation of these changes; just keep doing your thing :) Let me know if you have any questions.

Regards,

Braden