In this week's development recap, Colin Cantrell discusses the progress made on the mobile wallet. Several beta versions have been released, and the team has been fixing multiple issues along the way. The past week's focus was on unreliability testing, specifically fixing a bug that caused new accounts not to be broadcast to other nodes when created offline, leading to lost transactions. The team has fixed this issue, and the wallet now ensures that users are up to date with other nodes when refreshing their transaction history or coming out of background mode.
The mobile wallet is almost ready for release, with only a few outstanding bugs, such as issues with very large Sigchains and crashes when the wallet comes out of background mode. The team plans to release a new public beta soon after concluding internal testing. The mobile wallet will also have a new syncing screen to indicate when the Sigchain is still synchronizing.
Colin also talked about the Constant Time Database, which is a feature that saves battery life and speeds up synchronization in the mobile wallet. The more disk seeks required, the more operations are needed, and the more electricity is consumed. This is why the Constant Time Database is useful. This feature will be included in the upcoming Tritium++ upgrade 6.0 and will be tested in the mobile wallet before being released in the desktop wallet. Additionally, this feature will cut block size in half, reducing the chain size by a factor of two and double the sync time.
The team is working on the client mode for the desktop wallet, which will allow users to save space if they are not staking. The final client mode revisions are expected to reduce the required disk space from 1 GB to 500-600 MB, doubling the sync speed. Although compression algorithms have not been very effective on blockchain data, Colin is investigating different algorithms to explore their ability to compress data and thus increase synchronization speed even further. The team is going through a few more beta cycles for the desktop wallet, after which they will release the new binaries. Colin says that they are getting close to setting a release date for the desktop wallet.
Colin suggests that the ideal time to release the mobile wallet is after the activation of the hard fork because there are going to be some new consensus rules that could be modified. He explains that the client mode verifies all of the smart contracts and manages all of the state in a way that it's actually a node. When there's a major network upgrade on Nexus that changes specific rules that the client itself is verifying, users will have to upgrade their mobile wallet.
Lastly, Colin reported that regression tests and unit tests have been carried out to fix the unit test framework that has not been migrated to the new API semantics, documentation, and error codes. Next up, he will be focusing on the new feature build out, specifically getting the remote login and new API set up. Once the desktop beta is released, the team will announce the release date for the first phase of the Tritium++ rollout. Basically, there are three phases to the plan. The first phase is already complete, and the second phase is the desktop wallet hard fork, which includes a bunch of new features. The third phase is the mobile wallet.
For more information on Nexus, visit: https://www.nexus.io
