Speed, Speed, Speed 🏎️
For this release, a big focus was on speed – and I don't mean the breakneck speed of our release cycle this month, but the speed of the web app itself.
When opening Gramps Web in your browser, until now you would see a progress bar for a second or even longer. Release 3.12 of Gramps Web API, Gramps Web's backend, already improved the situation a lot by making the initial metadata fetch much faster. With this release, the app now opens almost instantly and continues loading data in parallel.
We also added caching to the language strings, which used to be fetched on every reload, even though they rarely changed.
Finally, some redundant API calls have been eleminated that unnecessarily slowed down initial page load performance.
Enjoy the fastest Gramps Web ever!
New Features
But we didn't stop at performance but also added several new features, big and small:
- In the fan chart, a tooltip has been added to show the names of people on hover, even for slices that are too small to display the name! By @efi in #1071
- The user list in the user management section of the admin settings can now be sorted and filtered. Ready for managing a large user base! By@DavidMStraub in #1066
- So far, there was no visual feedback that Gramps Web was in the process of saving data. A new saving progress spinner has been added to the app bar. Moreover, the loading bar beneath the app bar (showing that data is being read) wasn't working reliably and consistenly. Both indicators are now tied to a state machine, so you can rely on them to show what Gramps Web is actually doing! By @DavidMStraub in #1080
Component Modernization: List Views
The modernization of web components is progressing fast. This time, a large number of components have been ported form table-like display to the familiar list views with circular icons or thumbnails. The most noticable ones are probably the list of children in the family and person views.
Other components that now display as a list:
- Place hierarchy: enclosing and enclosed places
- Alternative place names
- References
- Event participants
- Sources in the repository view
- Repository references in the source view
Overall, this visual refreshment makes the app feel much more consistent.
Apart from the list view, two more style improvements have been implemented:
- The gallery component now uses the same square thumbnail style as the new media view (and it also loads much faster now)
- Notes are no longer enclosed by a box but have a more subtle design
Fixes
- The OpenHistoricalMap layer wasn't filtering by date on initial load (only after changing the filter). Fixed by @DavidMStraub in #1065
- Fix bug that causes citation list to fail updating by @DavidMStraub in #1083
- Improved handling of note type defaults by @DavidMStraub in #1076
New Contributors
Full Changelog: v26.4.1...v26.4.2