Activity, contacts & icons

As I had hoped, this was a heads-down week to get some work done that requires focus.

The main one was creating the new activity page for the guide. I had a lot of screens in the UI Kit that I could use, but creating a proper page around them did require a lot of detail adjustments.

Mid-week was the 0.1.9 release of the Bitcoin Icons. Only 3 new icons and 2 fixes, but it was a bit more involved because one of the new icons was the Satoshi symbol concept based on the @ sign. I don’t actually think we need a sat symbol, but people requested it, and it’s good to have multiple options in the set other than the kebab one (this needs a better descriptive name). toporas also submitted a concept, so to keep my preference out of it, I asked Twitter which one to use. Fun exercise to do.

I spent the second half of the week on a new Contacts page for the guide. This is surprisingly tricky to design, in parts due to the many payment request formats across bitcoin and Lightning. There’s a PR up with a first draft, which I then tore apart and rethought in a 2-hour live design session, which you can find the recording of embedded below.

Both activity and contacts are concepts that sound very basic for any wallet to support. But I really haven’t seen one that actually implements them well. I hope that by putting good references designs out there, we can help move things forward.

Thanks for all who helped with these efforts above, directly and indirectly, with discussion, feedback, etc. Contacts especially have been a regular discussion point for a long time.

This was also a week where I reduced my involvement in several other projects/calls to a minimum (in order to focus on a few things). Always bugs me bit to have to do this, but there’s only so much time and energy in a day. Next week should be a bit more balanced in this regard.

Other cool things in the community this week:

Have a good weekend.

✌️