Grandmothers set the standard
Many initiatives in the cryptocurrency world are strongly focused on the latest and greatest features, and making sure to be ahead of other projects in leaps and bounds. This leaves out a huge amount of potential users who are very interested, but do not know how to use cryptocurrency, or even exactly what it is, and thus need a set of tools that give them a simple and comprehensive experience.
That is why our first focus is making sure our wallet is built to accomodate those who have less tech experience. Basic functionality has priority, in order to leave no one behind. This starts with careful design of how to log in, seeing an overview of and access to funds. Following that is simplifying the sending and receiving of transactions. We will be testing how people respond to the user experience of the wallet, and how we can make it easier to use.
Choosing our libraries
In the field of developments, we worked last week on formalising the different libraries that will form the underpinning for the Internet of Coins network infrastructure. Not a simple task, since there are many different factors to take into account, such as security, quality and readability of the code, whether it is being actively maintained or abandoned, as well as the licenses under which it is available. Much code relies on extensive third party frameworks or libraries that are subject to change and can be difficult to maintain or simply too large and bulky for a lightweight approach. We try to keep technical dependencies as small as possible.
Human readable hashstrings
One of the things we integrated this week are functions to convert hexadecimal strings (12a0d99ff) to a more friendly form. We chose for the RFC4648 standard, to convert hexadecimal strings to Base32 notation in a bit-safe manner (so that no bits are shifted to a different position). Since we could not find a library without extensive dependencies or that could convert with the simple and direct approach required for our project, we implemented these functions ourselves. In Base32 notation, the numbers 0, 1, 8 and 9, that can be confused with letters like O, I, B and P, are left out. Keep in mind that many people do not primarily use the latin alphabet. The shorter strings, like PBD 7XW ZF2 are easier to communicate, remember and write down, so that non-technical people can also use IoC technology without hurdles.