The Dreaded Triple Bar – or when design is outside your control
Status.im is one of the earliest projects on the space and the first to focus on a mobile browser. It starts with a–brilliantly correct–assumption that browsers in mobile are not about being smaller versions of their desktop companions but should be all about messaging. As a messaging app is also far ahead of the competition, being a rare example of an open-source, end to end encrypted, fully anonymous message app. I would say it’s one of the best-designed Ethereum focused wallets out there right now. Still, here’s how a typical Dapp looks in Status:
Ok, this is an exaggeration, a composite of many nasty popups, tabs, and other anti-patterns I found while navigating. Here are two real-world examples, the apps Zapper.fi and Zerion. I want to highlight not the apps’ content, mostly, but the many bars on top and the bottom of the screen. Notice how on the left side, the top bar for Zerion has two similar “x” in a similar place, followed by a hamburger menu. …
UniLogin is out of gas.
Not necessarily out of money, but the current Ethereum gas market, the rise of DeFi, and new browser standards have changed the game significantly enough that we don’t see a way forward with the project.
UniLogin started two years ago with a vision for a Universal Login standard for Ethereum, a way to onboard new users to Ethereum directly from the browser, using smart accounts and abstracting away all the gas. …
And in general more about how I approach the UX work
While I’ve been an ethereum evangelist for the past 6 years (it feels so weird to type this!) I have never tried selling people on the idea of buying any coin., because while I am a believer (and hodler) of many assets, and an avid user of DEFI in general, I’ve been always more excited about other non-financial promises of blockchain general computing. Among them, blockchain games, to the extent I said this back when “games” in ethereum were either casinos or cryptokitties:
A new game I’ve been testing out (a bit excessively) last week, Dark Forest, hits almost all of these except for a few points that they could very well explore better when it’s moved from a testnet into a layer 2 like xdai (owning NFTs, universe persistency, bots). And it has the very interesting twist that uses ZK-Snarks for creating a hidden information game. …
a UX audit about rethinking metamask menus
Making software—especially on the blockchain—that is both powerful and usable is very hard, I know. And sometimes we plan a lot of our UI but new features get added, some changes are done in the implementation and while we have ideas on how to improve that, they get pushed to our long backlog. So this isn’t intended as anything but praise at what the great work the team at MetaMask has been doing. I hope this analysis could be useful and due to the great utility MetaMask has on my life at the moment, I’d like to share it. …
Using UniLogin and Gnosis Safe to control a multisig from another multisig.
Despite challenging times, our team is doing our best not to slow down. After tackling the nuances of remote work, we have been focusing on stability and polishing UniLogin.
Meanwhile we are happy to see that some integrations we’ve being working on are going live, namely Kickback and Gnosis Safe Multisig.
But wait, didn’t we already announce we were using Gnosis Safe? To explain, let’s clarify some terms.
Besides their prediction markets and exchanges, the Ethereum development company Gnosis has also built two widely used multisig contract wallets: the original Gnosis multisig and the newer Gnosis Safe, which supports etherless transactions. …
But there’s more! Stick around for some cool stories and unicorn drawings.
Here’s the short version: we’re rebranding ourselves from the long “Universal Login” name, to the shorter, fancier UniLogin brand, with some extra unicorn sparkle. But wait, don’t go yet! There’s a bit more, and you might learn what we’ve learned in the process.
Changes on Ethereum Foundation and ecosystem from an insider’s perspective
Ethereum is changing, and the Ethereum Foundation is rightly changing with it.
While the high centralization of the early years of the foundation might have been crucial for Ethereum to develop and ship, it was also a great source of criticism as it was antithetical of decentralization.
At Devcon4, Aya Miyaguchi, the new Executive Director of the foundation, gave a beautiful talk clearly influenced by Zen Buddhism on her management style.
What’s ahead for our team
Personally it feels like yesterday, but I’ve been working on Mist for over four years. While I’m proud of all the accomplishments we achieved in this time advancing the usability of Ethereum and sharing a vision for web3, we feel Mist, the browser has outlived it’s usefulness: the ecosystem has matured so much that now the user has tons of great options of wallets and browsers on both mobile and desktop. …
Short update on what we’ve been up to
We’ve been busy spreading the gospel of better onboarding through meta-transactions all around the world. More specifically, we have been pushing the development while at the same time participating in ETHGlobal hackatons in many countries and we’d like to share a bit about that.
Updates on development
On the development side, here are the latest updates:
- We are working strongly to have a semi-prioduction ready SDK in the next couple of months
- We have better more complete documentation website
- As mentioned, new boilerplate for hackers, perfect for quick hackatons. …
You can now test out universal logins right from your browser!
After some well deserved cooldown post Devcon4, the Universal Login team is back to work and we have new updates. First, let’s talk about devcon itself: during the whole “blcockhain week” in Prague, we presented Universal Login in 4 different venues: at Web3 Summit, Status Hackaton, DeFi Summit, Devcon and finally at the ECF Allumni meeting. The video of the Devcon talk is available on youtube:
Devcon4 was also a great place for Meta Transactions: besides the talk above we also had many others covering the topic, an onboarding breakout room, a standardization breakout room, and multiple off-schedule meetings, including a fantastic dinner organized by Pet3rpan. …
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