September 2023 Recap

Rich Burdon -

September was an eventful month. The DXOS team traveled to St. Louis and attended Strange Loop and a Local-first Software Unconference. We also completed some major protocol upgrades and overhauled Composer, massively improving the drag-n-drop behavior, and rolling out new plugins and an improved layout.

Strange Loop

A few team members enjoyed spreading the word about DXOS at the very last Strange Loop Conference on Thursday and Friday, September 21-22. Strange Loop was an excellent time to meet with people from like-minded companies like Ink & Switch, Socket Supply, PartyKit and many others. There were also some relevant talks such as Martin Kleppmann's New algorithms for collaborative text editing and Brooklyn Zalenka's IPVM: Seamless Services for an Open World. Good times!

The best part of Strange Loop was all the folks who ventured out to the Local-First Software Unconference the next day!

September Releases

Our primary focus in September was preparing DXOS for the demos at our events, which meant extending Composer's functionality while stabilizing the platform.

Release 0.2.3

aurora-grid for mosaic layouts
  • Added new components and stories for the aurora-grid package, which is a UI library for creating grid and mosaic layouts.
  • Adding identity and device key and a swarm layout to devtools.

Full release notes on GitHub.

Release 0.2.1

0:00
/0:12

In Release 0.2.1, we improved the appearance and code quality and applied consistent border styling to the Table component.

The key highlights are:

  • new tasks template 
  • configurable batching
  • fixed shell dark mode
  • composer new drag and drop foundation and fixed presence computation
  • neater vault reset page
  • interactive demo on the DXOS website
  • docs about shell and default space

Full release notes on GitHub.

Release 0.2.0

0:00
/1:12

In Release 0.2.0, we introduced several improvements and fixes to DXOS apps and plugins, as well as some devtools and UI components.

We released a breaking change which required you to reset your ECHO database through the upgrade.

Here are the key highlights: 

  • new spaces API and shell API
  • composer quality of life improvements, vim mode and show closed spaces
  • aurora light theme changes
  • tasks app example

Full release notes on GitHub.

ICYMI

Livestream with Chad Fowler of BlueYard Capital 

Last month Jess Martin of DXOS and Chad Fowler of BlueYard Capital connected via livestream to discuss the power of local-first development with DXOS, demoing some simple SDK-based applications and showing off where we're going with an extensible application framework. Curious about why Chad had been looking forward to this livestream for over a year? Check out the full length video here, or watch a cut-down version focused on just a demo of DXOS here (There's even a transcript, for you "prose > video" folks).