Plug 0.5.1 — More ICNS Features, 5x Faster Plug Calls 💨 & a New NFT Tab ✨
Visual changes inbound! Plug is getting a few UI bumps including a new NFT tab and a bulk of ICNS features. For dApp experiences, Plug is also getting a whole lot faster with this update.
A new juicy Plug release? Coming right up! Plug 0.5.1 focuses on two of the most important aspects of Plug — UI / UX and speed.
For this new version of Plug, we’ve gone even deeper down the ICNS rabbit hole, replacing all identifiers with ICNS names when possible, and giving the ability to set an ICNS .icp name as your wallet’s main ID.
But that’s not all! We’ve also reworked Plug’s backend to add a whopping 5x improvement in the speed of update calls made to canisters through Plug! Your favorite Internet Computer dApps just got a whole lot faster 🚀
As always, you can download Plug v0.5.1 from the Chrome Web Store, & Firefox Add-on Store, or get it from GitHub!
Special thanks to the Plug community member Rem.codes for their help with this update’s in-page provider speed improvements! 🥳
Got an idea to improve Plug? Plug is open source, anyone is welcome to open new PRs / Issues.
Plug Gets a Full ICNS Makeover 👨🎨
The first thing you’ll notice about Plug 0.5.1 is that anywhere there used to be a Principal ID, we’ve replaced it with its human-readable ICNS counterpart if possible.
If you see a principal ID that should be resolving to an ICNS name, make sure the owner of the principal ID goes to ICNS and updates their reverse registrar setting to specify the ICNS name they’d like to display.
We’ve also added ICNS names as NFTs. Transferring will be turned off for the time being, but expect an update soon.
Last and certainly not least, you can now link one of your ICNS names to your wallet.
If ‘michael.icp’ is set to your wallet, other users would be able to transfer tokens and NFTs to your wallet by sending them to ‘michael.icp’. Plug will set the reverse record and Principal ID record on ICNS to your Principal ID in Plug!
Additionally, all activity in other users' wallets is automatically translated to activity from `michael.icp` instead of your 53 characters principal ID.
A lot cleaner, right! 🔥
5x Faster Calls Through Plug 📞
Plug’s UI / UX is already pretty snappy and responsive, the speed improvements in this update are behind the scenes🕵️♂️ but make a big difference for the dApp ecosystem that integrates Plug.
In a nutshell, we’ve refactored a few parts of Plug’s backend code to streamline the speed of update calls that dApps make through Plug. This means quicker applications and fewer wait times when frontend dApps make calls to canisters to perform actions (like wrapping your ICP or making a swap with Sonic).
The best part? dApps don’t have to do anything to gain this speed increase, just keep on using Plug 💪
New NFT Tab! ✨
Did you catch the sneak peek in the ICNS names as NFTs image? If not, we’ll just come right out and say it… Plug has a new NFT section 🥳
Why the changes? We’re pretty confident that NFTs won’t only be JPEG art forever and are acting accordingly.
The new NFT section is better designed to not only work with regular JPEG NFT collections but also for collections where you might be holding a large number of assets — aka we’re prepping for GameFi on the IC!
Squashing Activity Section Bugs 🐞
We’ve been doing some significant bug hunting for this update, mainly with regards to Plug’s activity tab (Check out the full list on Github!).
