OKRs - 2019 Q1 GUI WG

[olizilla]

What are the apps, interfaces and visualisations we should ship in Q1 2019?

• See It's that time of the Quarter again ✨ - 2019 Q1 Planning 🎉 #792 for the backstory.
• Check the PRs on this repo to see what other teams are planning, and make suggestions!
• Add your ideas for the GUI team as comments on this PR

TODO:

• Self review of how we did in Q4 - add a score to the items on the OKR sheet
• Write up personal retrospectives on what worked well and what didn't over the last 3 months.
• 2019 Q1 OKRs Open Planning (this thread)
• Move 2019 Q1 OKRs to 2019 Q1 OKRs Spreadsheet

[olizilla]

The GUI Roadmap PR is here for review too, and to help us decide what we should focus on in Q1.

@hacdias @fsdiogo @lidel I will take some time this afternoon to draft a first proposal of the GUI team Q1 OKRs. Please help me out by adding your notes on what you feel is super important to focus on next and why to this issue. Please take a moment to review our team roadmap PR as well, for inspiration, or to make suggestions and changes to that too!

[lidel]

My personal vote goes to There is an app for creating, editing, and hosting websites on IPFS
with a gentle hint that we probably want to do it in Web UI's Files screen, batteries-includes style. IT should feel like a natural part of IPFS experience ("of course you can publish a website with one click!").

I feel it is a good priority for Q1 because it relies on more than GUI itself. I suspect we will identify shortcomings in IPNS propagation, missing commands for key import/export and other needs that have bigger chance of being addressed in 2019 if are requested at the beginning of the year.

[lidel]

+ there are some GUI-related ideas moved from Brainstorm section of async hack pad: https://hackmd.io/BnasJrjoTDGEP0LLz-sgug#

• realtime sharing (bi-directional)
• creating and publishing websites (via Web UI Files screen?)
• encrypted sharing (via Web UI and Share Files app)?
• integrate Desktop deeper into the OSes: open with, share with, default protocol handler, etc...
• UI component library
• a site similar to proto.school, that teaches how to build certain features using ipfs

[olizilla]

My feels are

Features

• new publish website feature (as per @lidel's comment) from the files page.
• new peers page, focused on highlighting local peers, and allowing you to manually add peers to connect to. Ideally allowing for labelling and identifying friends on the network. Bonus points for ad-hoc reciprocal co-hosting by following what your friends share. Bonus points for using peer-base.

Education

• Use share.ipfs.io as a case-study in how to configure and host an IPFS app. (boost for Infra + community)
• Publish the reusable UI component library and style guide docs. (DDC and Community team boost)
• Regular pairing with other working groups on new websites / services / apps to share skills, teach how we build web-apps, and get first hand feedback on our components and design systems to help refine it. (DDC and Community team boost)

Our big asks of others

• work with in-web-browsers and ipfs-core to find a satisfactory solution to the "i want remote access to my api" request. (No more CORS configuring. Maybe it's window.ipfs v2 and some tweaks to the core?)
• work with ipfs-core to create apis that will allow us to create detailed visualisations of what is happening while we're waiting for for potentially slow requests. We want visualise work being done by a network of peers on your behalf rather than as spinner and a "waiting for IPFS" label. We want animated network graphs and blocks and woo weee.

[terichadbourne]

I'd love to hear more about this idea from the brainstorming hackpad, if someone remembers being the one to suggest it:

a site similar to proto.school, that teaches how to build certain features using ipfs

What kind of features did you have in mind?

In 2019 Mikeal will be revamping the inner workings of ProtoSchool so it can handle exercises that work with files, and then I'll build an introductory tutorial using the file API instead of the DAG API. ProtoSchool is meant to offer a place for educational material from across all of our projects, so I hope you'll keep ProtoSchool itself in mind as an option rather than necessarily recreating something similar. I'm happy to bat around any ideas.

Once we have the official public launch of ProtoSchool in mid-January, I want to start looking at good spots for cross-linking, such as linking from that new files tutorial to share.ipfs.io or from any of your docs to ProtoSchool where something looks relevant.

On a separate note, I second the support for creating an easy way to host websites using IPFS. My impression is that thanks to Beaker, it's much easier to do that with Dat at the moment, so if it's equally viable with IPFS that would be great to surface as a way to interest traditional web developers.

The new "The Protocol" publication (likely on Medium) will launch in Q1, and I'd be happy to have someone share the work that's been done on the share app, treating it as an example of how people can use IPFS to build their own cool things.

[mikeal]

One thing I'll mention: if the purpose of a new site is to address a particular audience, we should try and fit it into a site that already addresses that audience whenever possible.

We have far too many micro-sites right now. Many of them address the same audience but with different types of content, but because the content is split over multiple silo's they are more difficult to discover and don't end up building an audience they can easily share.

If the purpose of a website is just to show a case study on how to build that exact site, that's obviously fine to do as its own site, but if we're just writing articles or creating educational materials we should try and leverage the audiences we're building in a few central locations across multiple projects and types of content.

[olizilla]

Team GUI has no plans to create any other schools. We're all on board the proto.school train 🚅 🚋 🚋 We'd like to help you build it, and we'll create some lessons for it too. Do you have any feels about anything in this list: #808 (comment) ?

The Protocol sounds very rad.

[hacdias]

I personally interested in integrating Desktop deeper into the OSes and the There is an app for creating, editing, and hosting websites on IPFS. For some reason this reminded me of neocities!

[fsdiogo]

I'd love to hear more about this idea from the brainstorming hackpad, if someone remembers being the one to suggest it:

a site similar to proto.school, that teaches how to build certain features using ipfs

Hey @terichadbourne! I was the one who suggested it, sorry if it has brought confusion as I wrote that as more of a note to myself without much explanation.

As I've been talking with @olizilla for some time now, we think it would be very useful to have a place where one can find information of how to build certain features using IPFS, so a developer can have a solid and tested foundation for the apps' features he wants to build. proto.school has a set of interactive lessons right now, but I think it could have some kind of almanac of features too, if you're willing to work with us!

I agree 💯 with @mikeal, we should aim to aggregate these type of tutorials in the same site, being proto.school the perfect candidate for that.

--

I'd really love to see an IPFS UI Component library shipped in the next quarter. This has been delayed, but I think it's time to focus on this. Apart from GUI, other working groups that are building apps would benefit from that and it would make us work closely with other WGs too, which is a good think.

IPFS has a lot of use cases and many of them can pass unnoticed, even for us working on it. I would really love to have many example apps that just do one thing, but do it well. This collides complements the first part of this post, building a foundation for apps/features.

There is an app for creating, editing, and hosting websites on IPFS gets me excited!

[olizilla]

Draft OKRs for Q1, paging @lidel @fsdiogo @hacdias

Core IPFS features are intuitive and accessible to all

• On board a full time UI designer
• Desktop is released with signed binaries and opt-in analytics with 500 unique installs
• Desktop enables mounting IPFS in the OS file browser, "add to IPFS" context menus, and ipfs:// scheme handlers
• Companion released with an redesigned, outh-like permissions flow for DApps to access IPFS api.
• Release an app for co-hosting and updating websites on IPFS
• Publish a case-study on share.ipfs.io for infrastructure requirements to host your own.
• Web UI File browser can render a view over a dir listing with 1 million 100,000 entries
• Web UI gets an unobtrusive help system to onboard new users, introduce concepts, and link to docs and proto.school
• Web UI allows you to connect to peers and highlights peers on you network
• Web UI works with IPFS cluster and show cluster specific information

Developers are empowered to make great new IPFS user interfaces

• Release v1 of our Interplanetary Design System - A reusable UI component library for React and HTML
• There are 2 pair-progamming sessions per week between GUI and members of other teams.
• Web UI has a mechanism for opt-in, anonymous analytics gathering.

The GUIs push forward understanding and adoption of IPFS

• Publish a proposal for authenticated API access
• Publish a proposal for a request progress reporting api that we can build UI visualisations on

[terichadbourne]

As I've been talking with @olizilla for some time now, we think it would be very useful to have a place where one can find information of how to build certain features using IPFS, so a developer can have a solid and tested foundation for the apps' features he wants to build. proto.school has a set of interactive lessons right now, but I think it could have some kind of almanac of features too, if you're willing to work with us!

I agree 💯 with @mikeal, we should aim to aggregate these type of tutorials in the same site, being proto.school the perfect candidate for that.

@fsdiogo I'd definitely be happy to chat more about the content you have in mind. I'll be working on a ProtoSchoool roadmap in Q1, so let's check in after the holidays and do some brainstorming.

[olizilla]

From a long conversation with @lidel about CORS and letting apps access a local IPFS api, we'd like to add...

Companion released with an redesigned, outh-like permissions flow for DApps to access IPFS api.

As a step towards a v1 http api that supports auth and per app access control directly. The work done on the UI to inform the user about the capabilities an app is requesting would aim to be re-usable for a v1 http api too. More notes here: https://hackmd.io/aiLq_TE5Tu6OvyhARb61Eg#

Also, timebudget wise, at least 1 large piece of work has to go. I know the "host and edit websites from IPFS" is popular, but we don't have time to do it well this quarter. Ideally, that kind of app would come from the community, while we focus on the plumbing and tools to make such a use case a joy to build. Doing a better job of "how can dapps access a local IPFS node" should boost the app builders.

[olizilla]

I've added

Desktop is released with signed binaries and opt-in analytics with 500 unique installs

to capture the fact that there is a chunk of work still to do to get signed releases, and we need grab metrics... we can self host an analytics service to collect the figures

[daviddias]

Hellloooo helloo GUI WG!

I'll be your concierge for finalizing your OKRs for Q1 2019! Please read the fantastic tutorial that @momack2 prepared on how you can do a simple Roadmap timeline exercise with your team to identify and reach consensus in which are the most important priorities, you can find the instructions at ipfs/roadmap#17

I'm available to answer all your questions, take part on the timeline exercise and review your iterations.

[momack2]

Hi GUI WG! Your OKRs in the sheet are looking really good! Can you add owners and merge this PR so we can freeze our goals for this quarter?