There has been lots of words among users, to simply say out loud, which front end is best for regular use case of Hive Blockchain activities. I have been using both the UI for my regular activities of my account and I have come out with some generic but yet useful differences which could make a user see for them self which suits them better. So here goes my end of scrutiny about both these front ends.
Clearly hive.blog will have much more preference for a user, especially new users. That is because due to the way it is built up. The UI is designed in a very smooth manner (like Steemit.com) which I am probably used to. As that is where I did most of my activities regarding my journey. Needles to say hive.blog is where it all started, so this will always be the base to everything upcoming. And there is always room for improvement for other projects to nurture and improve the UE for us all.
Easy to Perform ActivitiesIf I have to compare HIVE with other social media related platforms, it can be little confusing for new comers. Especially with all the private keys and other related activities along the chain. That makes it ideal to go through hive.blog for user experience and grasp the whole chain activities of content creators for new users. Easy to grasp and get hold of the chain activities. After all, when we on board new users, we do not want to make them much more confused than they already are, don't you think?
Everything that you are searching to make your activity smooth and precise is easily found and utilized in hive.blog. Which gives an extra comfort for a user's activities.
SecurityA little technical stuff. Separating the wallet access, was probably one of the best decision made. As it allows a user to double check about the ongoing activities of the wallet of an account. Even though it is separated do not confuse it with other thoughts. This is for your accounts safety and gives additional perks to your assets. Everything related to finance of your account is held here https://wallet.hive.blog/@username. Your assets , activities related to your HP/HBD can be monitored from here easily. Some of the activities like the internal market of HP & HBD can be found via this place. You may call if the HUB of your account.
So what makes Peakd, so different?If I have to say for myself, I use both the UI and for most of my activities I prefer peakd 80% of the time. To be more precise, Peakd offers far more options for a user to choose from compared to hive.blog. There are too many options to talk about but I have to narrow it as much as possible and point out the ones which I (as a normal user) always look out for.
The EditorCreating a blog post is probably the most used feature of both the UI's. And I have to say peak surpasses hive.blog in several ways. When you are drafting a post, peakd allows you to give some advanced options such as, some much needed markdown guidelines which allows a user to make their post more attractive than of being generic. Not only that, there are some additional options while you are creating a post, which are to be found in the editor of peakd. Saving a post as draft, I have been using this feature for a very long time, even in steempeak as well. For various reasons, we end up making mistakes of not saving a work or create different posts but for some mistakes we might end up loosing them. But this feature allows you save different posts and you may edit them for future purposes when you want them to. Schedule Posting this feature is also a must use feature for many of us. It allows you to post a blog upon giving a time and duration of your choice, even if you are not online. You can select the time and date of your choice and peakd will publish your post from your account as you choose. In addition to that, you can use more tags compared to what you can in hive.blog, it will allow you to cover more users (please do not spam btw). Even after all these a user can choose a thumbnail of their own even if it is not the first image. By defualt in peakd it will show the selected image as thumbnail but in hive.blog the 1st image will show by default as thumbnail image even if the changes are made in peakd.
As a CuratorWhen you are performing your activities as a curator, it is your responsibility to keep in check who you are giving your votes to. And that task becomes a lot easier when you are using peakd. There is a blacklist handled by Hivewatchers, Spaminator & buildawhale, if the user is any of these list, it basically gives an alert to you of about the users activities. There is a sign/badge beside the content creator which gives you a hint about that particular authors content. It does helps a lot. I have been using this feature for some time and it has helped me a lot over the time for handling my curation activities.
Maintain your ActivitiesFor maintaining or tracking your HIVE activities peakd has a feature of that. Which allows to track your activties on HIVE chain just like hiveblocks.com maybe not in detailed form but it helps quite a lot. Another feature which is not really available on hove.blog.
Toolshttps://peakd.com/me/dashboard
This is probably the best feature of peakd. It allows to get an overall idea about your Hive account. Here you can check all teh details related to your account activities in very much details form. Which includes Author rewards , Curation Reward , Account Growth , Votes incoming/outgoing to most users by/to your account and many more. This will definitely give you an idea about the activities of your account and allow you to improve on your activities on those fields.
In addition to these features there are also more additional features which makes peakd get more point in terms of user experience review. And as for users who are starting new or looking for some nice UE, peakd may be one of the best choice. But few issues which really made kind of get off about peakd is about it being CLOSED SOURCE (if I am not wrong). So if you are using peakd I do suggest you to use Hive Keychain/ HiveSigner while you log in to peakd, instead of using peaklock of peakd.
At the end of the blog I must say, it is all about preferences. What makes you feel good, you should use that feature. No force or no guilt of not using this and not that. After all, I would like to enjoy my time in here like every body else. I suppose so do you as well! So lets enjoy and learn from each other and grow together.