Arronax Refresh

Cryptonomic takes a measured approach to its Arronax roadmap and releases. It’s been some time since there was a major Arronax update. This is for several reasons. One, since Arronax is metadata-driven, new data exposed by the Conseil indexer automatically becomes available in the UI. This requires little to no change in the front-end code. Two, Arronax is a generalized data exploration tool that expects the users to interpret the information they are seeing. We also have an opinionated and Tezos-centric block explorer — Mininax that is more responsive to how the chain evolves. This update augments Arronax on two fronts: data and UI/UX.

Let’s talk about all the new stuff that was just released in Arronax. There are lots of immediately-visible data changes:

• New Governance report
• Operation failure details
• Block modal now displays included operations.
• Links within all modals can be clicked to show the related entity.
• Dynamic default queries.
• Simpler URL structure.
• Richer data on contract invocations.

We’ve also updated to source code for better architecture and clarity. We reduced external dependencies and updated the ones we continue to rely on. That includes the update to the latest version of ConseilJS, now at 0.4.1–more details on that release are also published. Coupled with these features in Arronax, we updated the metadata served by Conseil to better link the chain entities together and format them more consistently for display.

Cryptonomic recently added a new staff designer so many UI/UX changes across the entire product range are coming and this Arronax update is the first taste. Here’s a partial list of changes:

• Sticky table header.
• Natural language report titles.
• Shorter default tab view that expands if needed.
• More consistent UI icons.
• Top-level sharing actions.
• Improved error reporting to the user.
• Updated colors to information clarity.

There were certainly some bug fixes as well, including the following:

• Copy button on the modal now works.
• Switching networks causes a metadata refresh.
• Filters that don’t have an impact on the result set are hidden.
• Warning when leaving or refreshing Arronax.

As always, Arronax is an open-source project and you can follow our development on GitHub. We’ve started on the next release already which will refine the functionality above and provide more flexibility for detailed entity display. For a complete list of changes see the pull request that merged this into master.

P. S. Mininax Update

Arronax’ younger, more opinionated sibling, mininax.io has also received an update. There is a handy link to call the Tezos Notifier Bot on Telegram. There is now block-level based navigation. For example, here’s block 12. In addition to that there were some small UX updates.