Hey everyone,

First off, a Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates, happy holidays to everyone, and happy almost-new-year!

Tim and I are very happy with the year devRant has had, and thinking back, there are a lot of 2017 highlights to recap. Here are just a few of the ones that come to mind (this list is not exhaustive and I'm definitley forgetting stuff!):

- We introduced the devRant supporter program (devRant++)! (https://devrant.com/rants/638594/...). Thank you so much to everyone who has embraced devRant++! This program has helped us significantly and it's made it possible for us to mantain our current infrustructure and not have to cut down on servers/sacrifice app performance and stability.
- We added avatar pets (https://devrant.com/rants/455860/...)
- We finally got the domain devrant.com thanks to @wiardvanrij (https://devrant.com/rants/938509/...)
- The first international devRant meetup (Dutch) with organized by @linuxxx and was a huge success (https://devrant.com/rants/937319/... + https://devrant.com/rants/935713/...)
- We reached 50,000 downloads on Android (https://devrant.com/rants/728421/...)
- We introduced notif tabs (https://devrant.com/rants/1037456/...), which make it easy to filter your in-app notifications by type
- @AlexDeLarge became the first devRant user to hit 50,000++ (https://devrant.com/rants/885432/...), and @linuxxx became the first to hit 75,000++
- We made an April Fools joke that got a lot of people mad at us and hopefully got some laughs too (https://devrant.com/rants/506740/...)
- We launched devDucks!! (https://devducks.com)
- We got rid of the drawer menu in our mobile apps and switched to a tab layout
- We added the ability to subscribe to any user's rants (https://devrant.com/rants/538170/...)
- Introduced the post type selector (https://devrant.com/rants/850978/...) (which will be used for filtering - more details below)
- Started a bug/feature tracker GitHub repo (https://github.com/devRant/devRant)
- We did our first ever live stream (https://youtube.com/watch/...)
- Added an awesome all-black theme (devRant++) (https://devrant.com/rants/850978/...)
- We created an "active discussions" screen within the app so you can easily find rants with booming discussions!
- Thanks to the suggestion of many community members, we added "scroll to bottom" functionality to rants with long comment threads to make those rants more usable
- We improved our app stability and set our personal record for uptime, and we also cut request times in half with some database cluster upgrades
- Awesome new community projects: https://devrant.com/projects (more will be added to the list soon, sorry for the delay!)
- A new landing page for web (https://devrant.com), that was the first phase of our web overhaul coming soon (see below)

Even after all of this stuff, Tim and I both know there is a ton of work to do going forward and we want to continue to make devRant as good as it can be. We rely on your feedback to make that happen and we encourage everyone to keep submitting and discussing ideas in the bug/feature tracker (https://github.com/devRant/devRant).

We only have a little bit of the roadmap right now, but here's some things 2018 will bring:

- A brand new devRant web app: we've heard the feedback loud and clear. This is our top priority right now, and we're happy to say the completely redesigned/overhauled devRant web experience is almost done and will be released in early 2018. We think everyone will really like it.

- Functionality to filter rants by type: this feature was always planned since we introduced notif types, and it will soon be implemented. The notif type filter will allow you to select the types of rants you want to see for any of the sorting methods.

- App stability and usability: we want to dedicate a little time to making sure we don't forget to fix some long-standing bugs with our iOS/Android apps. This includes UI issues, push notification problems on Android, any many other small but annoying problems. We know the stability and usability of devRant is very important to the community, so it's important for us to give it the attention it deserves.

- Improved profiles/avatars: we can't reveal a ton here yet, but we've got some pretty cool ideas that we think everyone will enjoy.

- Private messaging: we think a PM system can add a lot to the app and make it much more intuitive to reach out to people privately. However, Tim and I believe in only launching carefully developed features, so rest assured that a lot of thought will be going into the system to maximize privacy, provide settings that make it easy to turn off, and provide security features that make it very difficult for abuse to take place. We're also open to any ideas here, so just let us know what you might be thinking.

There will be many more additions, but those are just a few we have in mind right now.

We've had a great year, and we really can't thank every member of the devRant community enough. We've always gotten amazingly positive feedback from the community, and we really do appreciate it. One of the most awesome things is when some compliments the kindness of the devRant community itself, which we hear a lot. It really is such a welcoming community and we love seeing devs of all kind and geographic locations welcomed with open arms.

2018 will be an important year for devRant as we continue to grow and we will need to continue the momentum. We think the ideas we have right now and the ones that will come from community feedback going forward will allow us to make this a big year and continue to improve the devRant community.

Thanks everyone, and thanks for your amazing contributions to the devRant community!

Looking forward to 2018,
- David and Tim

Hey everyone,

Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates, happy holidays to everyone, and happy almost-new-year!

Tim and I wanted to reflect on the year devRant has had, and looking back, there are a lot of awesome things that happened in 2018 that we are very thankful for. Here are just a few of the ones that we thought of (this list is not exhaustive and I'm definitley forgetting stuff, so please comment about those!):

- After nearly a year in the making, the completely overhauled devRant web version was launched (https://devrant.com/rants/1255714/...)

- @linuxxx became the first devRant user to hit 100,000++! (https://devrant.com/rants/1157415/...)

- We once again pulled off the greatest April fools joke everrrr (https://devrant.com/rants/1311206/...)

- @trogus started making awesome devComics and http://devcomics.com was launched

- We added a feature to allow rant filtering by post type (https://devrant.com/rants/1354275/...)

- We made it so avatars could have expressions! (https://devrant.com/rants/1563683/...)

- We had a booth at TechDay New York and got to meet some devRant users! (https://devrant.com/rants/1394067/...)

- We made major backend architectural improvements - including spinning up a special high-powered-CPU web server to handle avatar creation and make the creation process much faster (https://devrant.com/rants/1370938/...)

- App stability: mainly Android - we fixed crashes, did a push-notif overhaul, and tried to continue making the apps better and more stable

- A record amount of devRant meetups were held, and we couldn't be more proud about that, and we thank every person who organized one! (just a few: https://devrant.com/rants/1588218/... https://devrant.com/rants/1884724/... https://devrant.com/rants/1683365/... https://devrant.com/rants/1922950/...)

We had a busy year, and despite some things going on for us personally and some setbacks around those, we think this was a very productve year for devRant and that we are going in the right direction. We're continuing to constantly evaluate feedback from members of the community to decide where to take the app next. We're fully committed to improving the devRant community in 2019 and we have a lot of ideas about how we can do that. We're working on some things, but we're not really announcing them yet, so please sit tight for those :) In the meantime, feel free to let us know what you'd like to see improved/added the most as we always like to get updated feedback from the community.

As always, thank you everyone, and thanks for your amazing contributions to the devRant community!

Looking forward to 2019,
- David and Tim

Hey everyone,

Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates, happy holidays to everyone, and happy almost-new-year!

We had a bit of a slow year in terms of devRant updates, but we gained some momentum towards the end of the year and we're looking forward to carrying it into 2020. Recently, we launched what I think are our coolest new avatar items yet (https://devrant.com/rants/2322869/...) and behind the scenes we got our iOS/Android apps on the latest version of the frameworks we use, which will help us continue to improve stability. Still, we definitely would have liked to do more, but we're optimistic the coming year will bring great things for devRant.

One thing we are very proud of is this year we had our best year ever in terms of platform stability and uptime. Despite the platform growing and our userbase growing, we had almost no complete app downtime even though our infrastructure is minimal. A large part of this is thanks to devRant++ supporters, who allow us to maintain a small but effective tier of infrastructure and redundancy.

In the coming year, we're going to launch one of our most ambitious initiatives yet, and we're also going to continue to improve the devRant experience itself. We want to try to gather more user feedback, so we'll be working on a way to do that too. Stay tuned, more on this stuff coming soon.

As always, thank you everyone, and thanks for your amazing contributions to the devRant community! And thank you to our awesome devRant++ supporters for continuing to be the main drivers to keeping devRant up and running.

Looking forward to 2020,
- David and Tim

Hey everyone,

We have a few pieces of news we're very excited to share with everyone today. Apologies for the long post, but there's a lot to cover!

First, as some of you might have already seen, we just launched the "subscribed" tab in the devRant app on iOS and Android. This feature shows you a feed of the most recent rant posts, likes, and comments from all of the people you subscribe to. This activity feed is updated in real-time (although you have to manually refresh it right now), so you can quickly see the latest activity. Additionally, the feed also shows recommended users (based on your tastes) that you might want to subscribe to. We think both of these aspects of the feed will greatly improve the devRant content discovery experience.

This new feature leads directly into this next announcement. Tim (@trogus) and I just launched a public SaaS API service that powers the features above (and can power many more use-cases across recommendations and activity feeds, with more to come). The service is called Pipeless (https://pipeless.io) and it is currently live (beta), and we encourage everyone to check it out. All feedback is greatly appreciated. It is called Pipeless because it removes the need to create complicated pipelines to power features/algorithms, by instead utilizing the flexibility of graph databases.

Pipeless was born out of the years of experience Tim and I have had working on devRant and from the desire we've seen from the community to have more insight into our technology. One of my favorite (and earliest) devRant memories is from around when we launched, and we instantly had many questions from the community about what tech stack we were using. That interest is what encouraged us to create the "about" page in the app that gives an overview of what technologies we use for devRant.

Since launch, the biggest technology powering devRant has always been our graph database. It's been fun discussing that technology with many of you. Now, we're excited to bring this technology to everyone in the form of a very simple REST API that you can use to quickly build projects that include real-time recommendations and activity feeds. Tim and I are really looking forward to hopefully seeing members of the community make really cool and unique things with the API.

Pipeless has a free plan where you get 75,000 API calls/month and 75,000 items stored. We think this is a solid amount of calls/storage to test out and even build cool projects/features with the API. Additionally, as a thanks for continued support, for devRant++ subscribers who were subscribed before this announcement was posted, we will give some bonus calls/data storage. If you'd like that special bonus, you can just let me know in the comments (as long as your devRant email is the same as Pipeless account email) or feel free to email me (david@hexicallabs.com).

Lastly, and also related, we think Pipeless is going to help us fulfill one of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard from the community. Now, it is going to be our goal to open source the various components of devRant. Although there’s been a few reasons stated in the past for why we haven’t done that, one of the biggest reasons was always the highly proprietary and complicated nature of our backend storage systems. But now, with Pipeless, it will allow us to start moving data there, and then everyone has access to the same system/technology that is powering the devRant backend. The first step for this transition was building the new “subscribed” feed completely on top of Pipeless. We will be following up with more details about this open sourcing effort soon, and we’re very excited for it and we think the community will be too.

Anyway, thank you for reading this and we are really looking forward to everyone’s feedback and seeing what members of the community create with the service. If you’re looking for a very simple way to get started, we have a full sample dataset (1 click to import!) with a tutorial that Tim put together (https://docs.pipeless.io/docs/...) and a full dev portal/documentation (https://docs.pipeless.io).

Let us know if you have any questions and thanks everyone!
- David & Tim (@dfox & @trogus)

This is not a rant, but I just wanted to share some good news! My brother and I have launched an app called Programmer’s Music. It contains our favourite music tracks and tracks suggested by some of our developer/creative colleagues. It’s for listening to music while coding. We have also integrated Pomodoro time management method in it. It’s ad-free and FREE. :) Please check out the app at https://promusic.tech/2mJrw8A. Feel free to leave an honest feedback. 

Please feel free to leave us a message with your favourite tracks and we will add them. Please share it, follow on Twitter and/or like our Facebook page. Thank you so much!

Thank you, everyone.

PS.- Atom editor fans would ❤ it.

Hey everyone,

@trogus and I have been working on some cool devRant features that we're going to be launching very soon. In addition, as some might remember from a recent discussion, we're trying to bring in some more revenue (so we can at least break even) to avoid having to think about advertisements in the app. To do that, we're brainstorming possible useful add-on features maybe that we can offer to devRant++ members, or possibly offer for a different plan or as a complimentary product (under the devRant umbrella, but separate in terms of where it's accessed.)

If you have a few minutes, we'd appreciate some feedback by taking this survey @trogus put together: https://surveymonkey.com/r/DT9MKVN/

Also feel free to discuss here too if you want, and thanks everyone!

You know what they say...
When life gives you APIs, make clients.

So I found this API that powers the Twitch overlay extension for the Overwatch League and thought it'd cool to see a mobile version of it.

Done in Flutter: OWL Live Stats (https://drive.google.com/open/...)

Give it a try if you want. Right now it's pointing to a dummy API I created based on the one I found because there are no matches at the moment.
The goal was to get it done before playoffs start (July 11) so hopefully I'll get some feedback from you in case I want to publish the thing.

Appreciate your time :)

Disclaimer: I didn't bother investigating how legal and/or useful making/publishing this app is.

Hey Guys,

I just started work on a new (personal) project for my portfolio and I don't know too much about design, so I'm hoping you guys can give me some feedback.

The project is going to be an app that the user can use to create a Poule (basically something like this but smaller: https://poules.com/us).

Any feedback is greatly appreciated!
Also tell me if you'd want to use this type of app with your friends!

Pull-to-refresh in mobile web browsers is useless and annoying.

In mid-2019, the #disable-pull-to-refresh-effect option was removed from chrome://flags on Chrome for Android (version 76) for no apparent reason. The top answer in the Google product forum was to beg for this option to be reinstated through the browser's feedback form ( http://web.archive.org/web/... ). Needless to say, that has been futile.

Why is that a problem? The pull-to-refresh gesture not only is unnecessary due to the quickly accessible refresh button in the menu right next to the URL bar, but also causes unsolicited refreshes when quickly scrolling to the top of the page. This drains both the battery and the mobile data plan, in addition to adding an annoying delay.

I would like to use my web browser like a web browser, not a social media app. Besides, the Twitter web app has its own pull-to-refresh implementation in the notification feed.

Without pull-to-refresh, the user has the freedom to scroll up quickly without risking inadvertently reloading the page. If media was playing while an unwanted pull-to-refresh occurs, the user needs to seek for the last playing position, which could take upwards of a minute if the last position is unknown.

Imagine a desktop/laptop web browser reloading because you scroll against the top. Imagine you reach the top of the page but you have not stopped turning the scroll wheel yet, and then a white circle with a blue spinning refresh icon appears at the center top of the window and the page, and then you have to wait for the page to finish loading, and you also need to seek the last playing position of a video or audio track. Wouldn't that be ridiculous?

Any web browser vendor that enforces pull-to-refresh on its users basically begs users to seek an alternative.

Has been a long time since I'm appreciating working with GRPC.

Amazingly fast and full-featured protocol! No complaints at all.

Although I felt something was missing...
​

Back in the days of HTTP, we were all given very simple tools for making requests to verify behaviours and data of any of our HTTP endpoints, tools like curl, postman, wget and so on...

This toolset gives us definitely a nice and quick way to explore our HTTP services, debug them when necessary and be efficient.
​

This is probably what I miss the most from HTTP.
​

When you want to debug a remote endpoint with GRPC, you need to actually write a client by hand (in any of the supported language) then run it.
​

There are alternatives in the open source world, but those wants you to either configure the server to support Reflection or add a proxy in front of your services to be able to query them in a simpler way.
​

This is not how things work in 2018 almost 2019.
​

We want simple, quick and efficient tools that make our life easier and having problems more under control.
​

I'm a developer my self and I feel this on my skin every day. I don't want to change my server or add an infrastructure component for the simple reason of being able to query it in a simpler way!

However, This exact problem has been solved many times from HTTP or other protocols, so we should do something about our beloved GRPC.
​

Fine! I've told to my self. Let's fix this.
​

A few weeks later...

I'm glad to announce the first Release of BloomRPC - The first GRPC Client GUI that is nice and simple,

It allows to query and explore your GRPC services with just a couple of clicks without any additional modification to what you have running right now! Just install the client and start making requests.
​

It has been built with the Electron technology so its a desktop app and it supports the 3 major platforms, Mac, Linux, Windows.
​

Check out the repository on GitHub: https://github.com/uw-labs/bloomrpc

This is the first step towards the goal of having a simple and efficient way of querying GRPC services!
​

Keep in mind that It is in its first release, so improvements will follow along with future releases.

Your feedback and contributions are very welcome.

If you have the same frustration with GRPC I hope BloomRPC will make you a bit happier!

In june 2018 I am going to get my software developer diploma! I am very excited about it. But for now the workload is just getting higher and higher.

Therefore I think I am going to be less active on here for a while.

But before that I would like to introduce you to a new app two colleagues and I wrote to help students in similar situations.

https://beta.outcobra.school

It is a Website that allows you to manage all your study / school related stuff in one place.

It would be great if some of you guys would give it a try.
We appreciate all your feedback!
But it's a side project and still in beta... so please do not expect it to be perfect (yet, we are trying to get there...)

PS It's completely open source just search for outcobra on github. Feel free to open up as many issues as you like

Hey guys,

some fellow contributors and I have been working on an update to my second app.

I wanted to ask if you have any suggestions or any feedback on the UI/UX, app or code.

This is the TestFlight invite: https://testflight.apple.com/join/...

This is the repo link: https://github.com/bcye/...

As of my previous posts, I wanted to share with you my latest app.

It allows to read feeds from wordpress websites without having to deal with banners, ads, weird fonts and so on.

It's ugly as fuck as it still uses the standard ionic/angular style, but it works, and that's what matters.

Of course it's just for Android, as I really don't want to pay for an app store developer account.

Here the link:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/...

Any suggestion or comment is really appreciated and I thank you in advance for any download, rating, usage or whatever feedback.
Thank you very much.

Another video calling app??!

www.theTalk.at

Oh yus.. Why not!
There's no login, works on mobile browser and its dead simple!

Check it out and pliz give feedback!
And it's very beta!

Also, anyone have any gyaan about growth hacking for something like this?

!rant

Hey guys i relased a new app called: SaleMonkey. Im currently working on the next update an would like to get some serious feedback from people who look at the app with a developer mindset to spot some Problems.
I hope its not Bad if i poste a linkt to my app. You can get it here:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/...

Currently only on Android. Ios Version is planed for next year.

Thanks

AltRant.

Naturally.

Footnote: I am really thankful for the positive reception of my project from the community. I thought I was all alone on this and that it was the only one in on this project, but everyone who installed their app was quite actively trying to help me and give me the feedback I was in desperate need for. I want to thank everyone.

Special thanks to @Lensflare for contributing on the SwiftRant library repo (https://github.com/OmerFlame/...)

(More QoL and bugfixes are coming soon!!)

UNOFFICIAL DEVRANT CLONE JAM - VOTING WITH CRICKETS - DAY 2

I see that nobody is leaving any comments on hackathon entries. It is troubling, because there is no telling if you approve the app behind the post or not - even if I were to collect all upvotes through myself.

Please give the feedback to our contestants in their respective rants! What it takes to make a "devRant clone" or there should be something else entirely? How do these clones look to you, which gets the most points?

Yesterday, @ostream has left the competition by removing account from devRant, but, hopefully, we'll see him again on the next hackathon. Now, it's only @retoor and @SidTheITGuy. They will clash for the right to get a cool animation of their devRant self. You vote can affect this.

Finnegan (by @retoor): https://devrant.com/rants/9946268
ragedev (by @SidTheITGuy): https://devrant.com/rants/9946238

Leave your comments in respective rants. Read the rules and vote for as many as you like!

UNOFFICIAL DEVRANT CLONE JAM - VOTING START - DAY 1

3 entries were submitted, and we're ready for your feedback! It is exciting to know what your votes say about the work needed to supplant devRant. However, considering the sudden announcement of hackathon some 10 days ago and very short sprints, we get what we get.

2nd place nominee gets their devRant self in all vector beauty. Of course, it's not the exact style, but it's something resembling and with objects separable from each other! The winner gets an animated version.

You are welcome to familiarize with all devRant clones that our participants have made!

Finnegan (by @retoor): https://devrant.com/rants/9946268
Ostream App (by @ostream): https://devrant.com/rants/9946296
ragedev (by @SidTheITGuy): https://devrant.com/rants/9946238

Leave your comments in respective rants. Read the rules and vote for as many as you like!

Yay! We completed this project in 8 weeks.

Collaborate with unlimited users to share your ideas and take your teamwork to the Next Level. Work together anywhere, anytime!

Check out the demo here: https://youtu.be/1lMAnxmsgKw

Check out the web app here: https://doodlelive.herokuapp.com

Please don't ignore it, let me know your feedbacks either good or bad and I would surely work to improve on it.

Thanks a lot in advance!

Hello everyone!

Since this is such a cool community with so many app devs, I though it would be cool to share with you all a project the company I work with its currently developing.

The name is appcoins, and it's a blockchain project that aims to solve 3 big problems that devs, users, Appstores and oems face everyday in the current apps ecosystem:
- the advertising: create a trustworthy advertise system for your apps, where you can actually invest money that will be spent on users that will use your apps; currently is a system where everyone is trying to fool everyone.
- Malware and Adware detection: create a system powered by the community to rank dev's apps, using a reputation system, and dispute by bidding. currently it's an unscalable system, with many detection flaws.
- In app billing (aka IAB): offer a new and easy way for users to buy cool things in your app, even if they don't have access to a credit card or other payment methods. Users will be rewarded by trying out your cool apps. Also opens the door for payments with crypto currencies in AppStores.

This is just a quick overall idea of the all project. If you're interested, checkout the website https://appcoins.io/

If you've any question or suggestion, let me know and I'll try to answer as best as I can, or redirect to my devRant coworkers.
Any feedback you may have, feel free to share it! This system is designed for us all devs, so your input is really appreciated.

Thank you all, and sorry for the long post.

Any android devs here? I created a simple interview tech assignment app with 2 screens (item grid and item details) with latest architecture (Compose, Retrofit, Coil, Room). Looking for a review or any kind of feedback/ideas regarding what needs to be fixed/refactored. Repo is here: https://github.com/appdevv/DemoApp
If you want, feel free to pull the repo and just make a pull request with your comments.

Check out my newly developed app!
here the app promotion video:
https://youtube.com/watch/...
and the app playstore link:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/...
your feedback is very important :D! thanks :D