Hello Steemians,
This is another quick update about from me since last witness update. After SteemFest, I had some time to recover and reflect on projects and put every feedback I got during fest into long-term perspective. As always, let me start by saying Thank you for those who is supporting good-karma witness!
There are few things eSteem will move towards, better and engaging user experience. Desktop version is long overdue and plan to make initial release in coming week so that we can gather some community feedback on that end. I am really looking forward to it, because it will be first stand-alone desktop application (GUI on Windows, Linux, Mac) for the Steem.
eSteem mobile improvements coming with some exciting changes. If you have missed SteemFest presentation and some notes on future of the eSteem mobile, please check this post, where I briefly wrote about v2 of eSteem. v2 is something that will be separated from v1.x because it is totally new source code and will combine all the best experiences we gathered during v1.x development. Note: v1.x will continue get updates. v2 release is in Q1 2017 and it will be production ready app with clear feature line and purpose. If you want to support, sponsor, donate for the project development, please do so by voting witness and @esteemapp account can also be used for donations, it is highly appreciated and valued because as you may know v1.x development relied on post payouts. v2 will have different business model as well. More details on this will be published later on.
Also been thinking about turn-based games on Steem, which I think, would help to increase user retention, bring new developers/users to the platform. Recent post by @jesta about different post types is also something which I think would attract more users from different side of the internet. Badges which was also briefly talked before, would engage users more. I want to try out developing few badges on eSteem mobile, first. Have few ideas how to handle this, will try and report about this later.
Seen various discussions about upcoming HF16 changes and I think, once changes have been tested properly and discussed every change in-depth detail, we can get ready on server side of things. I am yet to test ChainBase version, but so far some witnesses reporting that it is working alright. Next week, will try on backup servers.