Jankteki 0.6 released: User Notes

A couple of weeks back, I subtly released Jankteki 0.6, which brought with it a refactor, lots of instability, and a feature that I’m hoping will be useful to people that aren’t me: The ability to add user notes against a user on jinteki.net.

Have you ever added a friend on Jinteki and forgot why they’re there? Me too – now I don’t need to, I can add user notes. Here’s a demo of it in action:

As I said, it has brought with it a bit of instability, and it is still in its early days in terms of quality / interaction / etc. But I need to tell people about it, in case they think the software got buggier for no reason whatsoever. I also think it’s a nice basis to build further features upon, and want to get input on it as early as possible.

One of the silver linings of the breakages is that it has led to me tightening things up in the code base.

Scarily enough, there are now just shy of 1500 users of this extension now, and when it breaks, it seems to annoy people. Going below 5 stars in the chrome extension store gave me some real impetus to try to stop that all happening again.

There are now some tests, and build scripts, and stuff that makes it look like I have any idea what I’m doing, to aid with keeping things stable in the future.

If however, something does get through these very porous nets – head on over to http://github.com/simons/jankteki to raise a bug. There’s a proper readme over there now too, so that should give you all of the information needed to get problems sorted in good time.

And if you have no idea what I am talking about, but do know what Android: Netrunner and jinteki.net are, download the Jankteki extension from the Chrome webstore. It’s pretty useful.

Jankteki v0.4.0 released: fixes panel

The more eager eyed Jankteki users may have noticed the latest release. It consists of a small in-game ‘fixes’ panel where you can manually manipulate the game state without having to look up relatively arcane chat commands.

Here’s a video of this feature in action:

It’s the first interaction I’ve done with the game directly and was made pretty simple through Clojurescript / Om’s use of websockets. It was my first experience inspecting websocket frames through the Chrome Dev tools, and it must be said – I found it to be an utter joy. Hopefully this leaves room for other enhancements down the way.

In the meantime, the next slate of work is going to be around creating a fuller user-model – adding notes, annotations, that sort of thing. Maybe even the dreaded “shitlist” feature. More information on all of this / priorities etc can be found on my Trello roadmap

To keep up with this stuff, you might follow me on twitter (but this comes with its own price), you could subscribe to the YouTube, or you could just watch this space.

Again, if you haven’t yet, and this might be useful to you – download it from the Chrome Webstore and raise problems / missing features / pull requests on the Jankteki GitHub page.