Why is your address so long?
oh, .. btw, .. to impress people around here you need to talk "tech" .. not screenshots .. those might work over at BCT .. but certainly not here :/
Bytecoin is privacy-centric currency so address is a data format of 2 public keys.
Regarding the technical details, I hope this text will cause a greater interest. And I apologize for the delay with the response.
Developing GUI Wallet for BytecoinIn Bytecoin Reference Client release version 1.0.3 we have rolled out Bytecoin high-level API that is capable of providing top-notch tools for GUI developers. This update is a crucial prerequisite for Bytecoin Wallet, as it allows to run a native Bytecoin network inside any application. It acts as a showcase for INode and IWallet interfaces and allows 3rd party developers to focus on making their product without the necessity to understand complex CryptoNote cryptography.
However, this update was not dealing with the core only: we have released a GUI Wallet, which is a big step towards users. Not only does it allow to use Bytecoin with more pleasure, but demonstrates convenience of new API libraries that allow to concentrate on developing applications.
BenchmarkingWe were looking at the best solutions only during wallet development. Our goal was to select the best that was created before us while keeping specific Bytecoin features.
Bitcoin-Qt was selected as a basis, being one of the most popular yet easy-to-use wallets. We did not stop here, though. We liked the NXT Wallet's elegant design, and Hive showed us the way to be user-friendly.
We considered many solutions during development, such as Electrum and Multibit. Despite all their benefits, we chose not to follow their paradigm but to concentrate on making a simple yet elegant wallet that provides general Bytecoin functionality.
UI prototyping and focus groupsAfter laying out the plan, we invited team of UIX professionals. Two 'working-weeks' later we arrived at design concepts of Bytecoin GUI Wallet that satisfied everyone on Bytecoin team.
The next step in Bytecoin Wallet development was UI prototyping. We have narrowed down the list of features we wanted to see in the first Bytecoin Wallet release and sent them to UIX group.
The following week we derived an image of Bytecoin Wallet that would be ideal from our point of view. The time came to check if our image of ideal corresponds with that of users. To do this we gathered two focus-groups representing two target audiences. The first one included people deeply involved in the cryptocurrencies' world. The second one included those who did not have such experience.
The first focus-group provided us with some valuable advice regarding functionality and usability, while the second tipped us off on how to make the wallet more intuitive and user-friendly.
The development!Finally, we have moved to the actual development of Bytecoin's GUI-Wallet. We invited a team of professional UI developers and one third-party tester. Our choice was Scrum development methodology. To ensure that we're on the same page, Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development methodology for managing product development.
We've set our sprint interval to two weeks. At the beginning of each sprint we had a planning game with the UI development team to select the functions to develop this sprint and give estimates. In the end of each iteration UI development team presented demo version of Wallet, which was given to our tester.
The complete development required six iterations, but the prize was awesome. We have polished the code so much in four months that even our lead programmer-perfectionist praised our work. It was the first time in almost three years, when he appreciated our work this way with the first try.
We are going to take a break in developing GUI Wallet after such concerted effort. We have plans for many functions of the wallet, including mobile version of it. Still, despite positive evaluation from both focus-groups, we would like to collect comprehensible feedback before continuing development.
We would appreciate it if you share with us your development experience, comment our development process or give us your opinion on our new GUI Wallet here in the comments or send us email to contact[at]bytecoin.org.
Topic: Bytecoin Wallet (GUI) released (Read 1443 times)
