Zippie Product Update — June 2018
If you’ve been following the progress of our project, you’ll know there are many parallel tracks ongoing in Zippie. We’re currently working hard to get the Alpha 2 release completed and this means we have a lot of product related news, more than we can comfortably fit into our monthly update post. Therefore, we’ve decided to start writing monthly product updates, giving you a detailed look at what’s happening from a tech perspective. So, let’s get to it.
Wallet functionality and other improvements
The most revolutionary change in the next version will be how you can actually send ZIPT to other people. In the new version, you’ll be able to simply share a payment link and anyone can claim it. One big enabler for this is the Pay My Gas (PMG) server, which we’ve already used for paying the first transaction fees. PMG allows a user to transact with tokens without having any Ether, which is normally required for Ethereum transactions.
We’re also working to get rid of iframe in the current implementation. It prevents Zippie PWA (progressive web app) from working properly and blocks payment link functionality. It’s the final missing piece before we can start testing functionality and see if all the pieces in our puzzle work together.
Improving Zippie card software
Happily, Zippie card software is done. However, we’ve noticed that NFC reading reliability might vary on different devices. We now believe we can improve the card software and, once that’s done, the card software will be updatable using a utility app we’ll provide for Android users. What’s more, we’ve placed the first Zippie card order to the manufacturer and have an estimated delivery date to the Zippie warehouse for the second half of July.
Refining the UI experience
Creating a great UX is never easy. There are plenty of posts regarding the challenges of UX and blockchain. Nonetheless, we’re doing our best to provide a world-class experience for our users. We’ve already now managed to reduce onboarding to just 20 seconds, but we’re aiming to make it even faster. Currently, there’s no need to input any credentials, just few clicks and that’s it. Our aim is to make the whole experience seamless so users have no need to even think when they use Zippie. This is why we handle GAS fees for them.
However, user experience is not just an end-user experience. It also includes developer experience. So, we’ve started to document UI design in the GitHub wiki, which will be opened at some point soon. It’s good to have design close to the implementation and therefore GitHub feels like the right place to keep it. In the future, GitHub will also have a documentation for getting started with Zippie development.
Needles to say, design is never completely ready. So, there will also be a lot of UI related changes. For a start, we have the new design for the Passport, Wallet and Settings, and implementation will be updated accordingly. Be prepared to see some changes in the future, too. We’ve also got an ongoing brand redesign, which will affect the Zippie look and feel.
Security audit
In order to entrust our own ‘money’ and users’ money to Zippie, we want to make sure we build our software correctly. We have already started security audit with our partner which takes up to 7 weeks. After that, we can move the product from testnet to the Ethereum mainnet.
Release cycles
Once we’ve done the Alpha 2 release, we’re moving to 3-week release cycles. It means that we’ll try to keep delivering on a regular basis by implementing for two weeks and then testing for one week. Let’s see how things start rolling when we’ve got the next release out of our hands.
That’s all for now. But, remember if you’ve got any questions be sure to ask on our Telegram channel. You can also follow our progress and join our community on Twitter, Reddit and YouTube.
Thanks for reading!
