October 2023 Recap

Drag and drop in Composer.

We’ve set up a drag-n-drop paradigm so that:

• components can 'render themselves' in a variety of contexts
• containers can say what 'shape' and 'type' of data they accept
• trivially bind these to the underlying data model

We’ve built a toolbox so you can build your own airtable.

• define new schemas dynamically using a table UI
• present that data using arbitrary views
• view changes reactively update the underlying data

Syncing a brand new device now takes seconds

• we made a lot of performance improvements over the past 6 weeks!
• The invite UX can be used in your own apps - you don't have to build it yourself.

We are lowering the barrier to building an app with plugins:

• offline, real-time sync, multiplayer
• user-owned data store
• effortless interop
• universal drag-n-drop

This little demo plugin is ~200 LOC!

devtools makes debugging DXOS a delight:

We've build a tool to inspect what's wrong, like this live network visualization. The ability to toggle online/offline is great for testing reconnect and offline sync situations.

Knowledge Sharing

London Local-first Software Meetup

What does the ecosystem look like if we can align the interests of the developers and the end users? -Rich Burdon

During London's Local-first Software Meetup on October 18, Rich Burdon highlighted the significance of decentralization for principled reasons like data sovereignty and privacy, as well as functional benefits including lower latency and offline capabilities. Rich showcased DXOS through a live demo, featuring our open source plug-in model and a chess game integration, underscoring our commitment to enabling independent software developers to create scalable, privacy preserving applications.

Office Hours

Starting in October, Jess and Zhenya from DXOS started hosting weekly Office Hours. Office Hours are held on Thursdays from 11-12 PT via an event in the #general voice channel of our DXOS Discord server. Stop by and ask questions or get a demo of some super-beta stuff (LLM integration, universal drag-n-drop, etc).

Lofi/9 Meetup

At the Local-First Web Development Meetup #9 on October 31, Jess Martin spoke on the future shape of software.

At DXOS, we're thinking beyond apps by building local-first, multiplayer, interoperable architecture where users own their data. Using CRDTs for synchronization, the local-first focus of DXOS ensures data is always stored on users' devices. Jess showed off Composer, a developer-first knowledge management app that allows developers to remix apps inside a single environment with customizable surfaces, universal drag-and-drop, and maximal extensibility. Jess showcased its versatility and potential for building interactive and collaborative applications.

October Releases

 Release 0.3.4

Key highlights for this release:

• new debug plugin in Composer
• new presenter (slide shows) plugin in Composer
• new typed operator filters in ECHO queries
• experiments with schema lenses

Full release notes on GitHub.

 Release 0.3.3 

Key highlights for this release:

• new API to read the owning space from an object
• new labs experiments: draggable grid view, graph data visualizer, search demo.
• new drag-n-drop system in composer (same features, less bugs)
• we are preparing to land a new query DSL to allow the results of a complex filtering expression to be observed efficiently
• bugs and networking stability improvements

Full release notes on GitHub.

 Release 0.3.2

Key highlights for this release:

• cross-space queries
• cross-space references
• we are preparing to roll out our new universal drag and drop layer (mosaic) in composer
• presenter plugin in labs (your stacks are now viewable as presentations)
• CLI and project template fixes
• agents are becoming more stable, we are preparing to turn on automatic epochs in agents
• Diagram: the whole team is now running personal "big peer" agents and they are all swarming together as visualized by the DXOS devtool 

Full release notes on GitHub.

Release 0.3.1 

Key highlights for this release:

• promoted sketch functionality from labs to composer
• new ability to see deleted objects in devtools
• composer actions now support keyboard bindings
• new welcome readme in composer
• Object.keys(yourEchoExpandoObject) now works as expected
• removed errors fetching from localhost on client startup
• networking connectivity and stability improvements

Note on the minor version change and recent hotfix: We had to move to 0.3.x because we discovered some previously published versions of some of the DXOS packages up on NPM in the 0.2.x range which caused some of the "only in production" failures we saw late last week. The move to 0.3.x ensures we avoid this situation again, and does not imply any breaking protocol changes this time. We will also continue to harden our CI process to help avoid this situation again. Many thanks for your patience!

Full release notes on GitHub.

ICYMI

DXOS sponsored September’s Local-First Software Unconference. Participants were encouraged to upload their notes, so feel free to explore more about the sessions and the mini attendee profiles in this GitHub repo.