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!

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)

Announcing a few new devRant Android/iOS features, available immediately in the latest versions of the devRant app which just went live.

1. As pictured, you can now easily scroll to the bottom of any long rant by selecting “scroll to bottom” in the ... menu of any rant with >= 10 comments.

2. At the bottom of any rant that has at least 1 comment, you’ll now see a button that allows you to refresh the rant (and scrolls to the bottom) so you can see new comments if there are any.

3. Any rant can be refreshed by tapping the “Rant” title in the title bar.

How did we come up with these awesome ideas/decide to add these features? For most of them, we didn’t! At least 2 of these were recently requested by devRant users (some requested a bunch of times) and we heard everyone and saw how much these were needed. Remember, you can always suggested features in our GitHub issue tracker: https://github.com/devRant/devRant - we always appreciate feature suggestions and ideas for improvements!

Just to add one note - we still have plans to improve commenting functionality, but we’re hoping for the time being these additions make things a little more intuitive.

Let me know if you have any questions, and thanks everyone!

//
// devRant unofficial UWP update (v2.0.0-beta7)
//

After "Active Discussions" (implemented in v2.0.0-beta5), it was time to implement the last missing app section, "Collabs".
This is the biggest update since the start of the public beta, over 100 changes (new features, improvements, fixes).

Changelog (v2.0.0-beta7):
- Support for Collabs
- Notifs Tabs
- & more... read the entire changelog here: https://jakubsteplowski.com/en/...

Microsoft Store: https://microsoft.com/store/apps/...

I'm really happy to announce that the unofficial UWP client has now 100% of the features available on the official Android and iOS apps (if we don't count Push Notifs 😝 but they will arrive soon too).
It took several months of hard work, but I made it... it's here, it reached the level I wanted to reach since the beginning of this project (May 2016) (if we don't count Push Notifs).

I did it a lot of times, but I think they deserve it everytime, I would like to thank all the people who made this possible, all the active users, who opened issues, suggested features, or just used my app and had fun, posted positives (and negatives, motherfuckers, just kidding, maybe) reviews on Microsoft Store etc.
The entire community who made me want to do this project.
You're amazing guys!

Of course this is not the end of this project, I want to bring the app out of the beta and support it until I will be able to do it, releasing updates almost simultaneously with @dfox and @trogus.

Planned to be done:
- Support for Anniversary Update
- Push Notifs
- Custom Themes
- Close the 15+ issues (features requests, fixes) on the issue tracker on GitHub
- Ranti by @Alice: Your devRant Assistant <- I really hope it will become a thing :)
- Your future suggestions -> post them here: https://github.com/JakubSteplowski/...

Thanks for the attention,
Good ranting!

Finally finished my new app Deep Sleep Fan for iOS. Took 3x as long as I thought it would to develop even though it used a shared code base. Check it out at https://itunes.apple.com/app/...

Now I can go to bed.

Updated the devrant-web block/filter script, it now also filters based on avatar link, to not have random "commented on your rant" leak into your notifications - forgot myself I've had that script, you're of course welcome to block me too, if I annoy you, that'll make both out lives on devrant easier: https://github.com/7twin/...

Best paired with the notification categories too: https://github.com/7twin/... for an overall better experience.

Just make sure to use tampermonkey, as other implementations usually lack half the necessary style injections, selector supports etc.

I might revive my plugin'able cross-platform (desktop, ios, android, web) app too, which would out of the box feature this and many other things.

@dfox @trogus: feature request: in iOS 10.3, a feature was added where you can customize the app icon on the home screen (see http://theverge.com/2017/3/...). Can DevRant have our avatar as our icon?

Just as I had been discussing information security here on devRant, Facebook reminded me of an article I posted a year ago.

http://makeuseof.com/tag/...

Makes me wonder if Facebook's iOS app is keylogging me. Not long ago I was having a conversation at work with a coworker on a topic of a product I know for certain I had never, ever searched for online. Just after we ended the conversation, I launched my Twitter app and, lo and behold, there was an ad for that exact product on my feed.

Hey everyone!
I'm thinking of building an open-source React Native app for DevRant just as a fun project. I came across an unofficial API documentation and also a wrapper.
https://devrant-docs.github.io/
https://github.com/danillouz/...

If anyone has used these, kindly let me know your experience and which one is better.

PS: I have no intention to publish or earn money from this project. Anyone who is interested can jump into the project and help in making it better. If enough people want to use it, I can compile an apk/ipa for people to download later on.