Desktop app
Since our last development update, the app team shipped two named releases: 0.39.0, under codename Joule, and 0.41.0, under codename Kelvin. Both continue to improve user experience through homepage improvements and a new repost feature. Version number 0.40 was skipped due to a bad build, and 0.42.0 finished up the repost work started in Kelvin by allowing them to be created in the directly in the app.
Joule improvements - homepage, invites, and more
Joule brought a huge revamp to the homepage experience by moving away from the default trending + tags view, to a more dynamic and larger tile listing of your preferred content.
We want to make the experience more about the content you’re already interested in, as opposed to trying to force you into trending-first discovery as in previous versions. The other main feature in this release was invites. We re-worked this area allowing users to share special invite URLs featuring their channels instead of a random invite code. Inviting friends and fans of your channel has never been easier!
A bit more on the UI changes: front and center is your Following feed, which includes two rows of the latest content from your subscriptions. Below this you are presented with trending content for some of your tags, then trending across LBRY, and finally content from the @lbry channel to help you stay up to date with the latest news and happens on our platform. Each of these sections can be clicked into via the hyperlink to a more detailed listing. We moved from dropdowns to more user-friendly buttons to sort by top/trending/new. The sidebar is also a bit more dynamic and shows your followed tags or channels, depending on your choice of view.