November

Front-end Overhaul launch + lots of bug fixes and improvements

This month has been very eventful, just as I was hoping for. While Chapters v2 didn't see the light of day, the Front-end Overhaul has been finished and a bunch of small improvements, bug fixes and even features have been added, resulting in quite a big month on releases, if we go just by the changelog!

For the full list of changes, you can always find them in the Changelog ->

📋Changelog

✨ Front-end Overhaul

I am finally finished with one of the biggest code refactors I had to do in years - and I am really glad to have a really strong foundation to build Kenmei for the years to come. This monster saw almost 13k lines of code added and ~18k removed.

I am not going to go over everything this will enable me to do, but I'll quickly go through some of the changes that will affect you. First of all, this should come with a lot of performance improvements:

  • The size of the app will be up to 41% lighter (meaning faster page loads)

  • Initial render would be up to 55% faster (meaning faster page loads once again)

  • View updates when using Kenmei will be up to 133% faster

  • And finally memory usage will be up to 54% less.

Moreover, this allowed me to finish moving across the remaining legacy UI elements. First of all, there are new 'notification' elements, that you see when you update your last read, edit an entry and so on:

Select menus are also all-new (even though the design is very similar), which are a lot more stable now - you can select items using arrow keys, close using Esc and it's fully optimised for screen-readers and more.

The most visually striking one is the tag selector - as it's completely custom, I've adjusted the design to match the rest of the app, as can be seen here:

There are a lot of other improvements, that will become visible over time - new libraries I can use to improve the site, the ability to develop faster locally, easier ways to improve performance and a lot more! I am very glad to have finished it and look forward to the myriad of ways this work will pay dividends over the months to come.

🚀Chapters v2

Of course, the other elephant in the room is the Chapters v2 work. I've been working on it in-between as well, but the work had its ups and downs. The current architecture changes require quite a bit of delicate work, so I couldn't quite move as fast as I wanted. I am making progress though and I am still hoping to get it done by the end of the year.

If you want to find out more as I develop it, like behind-the-scenes screenshots (like the one below) or even a chance to use it before I officially release it, check out Premium, so you get access to the secret Discord channel with all these goodies in it!

🆙Back to Top Button

I got some time to bring in a couple of features suggested by Kenmei members - don't forget you can vote for suggestions or suggest your own over here ->

LogoKenmeiKenmei
Kenmei Suggestions Board

First of all, Back to Top button has been added, to help those of you with large lists, to quickly get back to the top. It works nicely both on mobile and desktop!

Desktop mode

❌Deletion Confirmation

Another simple improvement, that I've been asked for a lot - is the deletion confirmation, to avoid accidental entry deletions. Previously, I would show this when you are tracking across multiple sites, but now you'll see this dialog any time you try to delete an entry.

📈 Progress Overview

This has been a productive month - unfortunately, I couldn't finish the Chapters v2 work, but it's my main focus now. There are still some hurdles to overcome, but I should be able to wrap up that work in December.

I don't want to commit to too much as to what I'll be working on after that, but I really want to invest time into improving the existing tracking functionality (think more reliable updates, better control over the supported sites) as well as the data collected (think authors, artists, alt titles, etc) -> Which I am calling Data Pipeline Improvements.

I got a lot of exciting features I'd like to work on, but I still feel like existing ones need a bunch of love, hence I'll be focusing on that primarily. The one thing I plan to take on - is to finally go back to finishing the official Kenmei extension. If all goes as planned, January could see it released!

Anyhow, I'll have a better idea at the end of December, so hang in till then. It's going to be an exciting month once again!

Current focus:

  1. Chapters v2

  2. Bug hunting and fixing

  3. Data Pipeline Improvements

  4. Kenmei Extension

Till next time 👋

Last updated