Skyspine Development Blog

Skyspine 5.0!

It’s live with a new look and a totally recoded interface. Skyspine 5.0 features a number of great performance tweaks such as on-demand content loading, auto-save, and a refreshed communication structure. The same great back-end powers everything, but it’s also been optimized in many ways to make Skyspine snappier. The blog, for simplicity, has been moved to a tumblr account (here).

The new interface features both a light minimalist theme and the darker classic theme. The theme selection can be changed from the settings menu in Skyspine.

For the press release regarding these upgrades, please see here.

Optimizations underway

Skyspine’s growth has resulted in some shakey performance lately, namely slow initial load times. A number of optimizations and features are currently in development and will be out fairly soon. These include:

- On-demand content

Initial load times will be decreased by only downloading visible tabs and panels. Collapsed panels will be populated when they are expanded, and tabs will be populated when they are clicked.

- JSON structure

The return object structure will be simplified a bit to make javascript parsing much faster. Similarly, the handler functions will be faster due to some fat trimming.

- Panel modules

A small library of widget-like modules will be available to load into panels. Launch modules will include weather forecasts, Twitter, Flickr, subvariance, and more.

- Updated styles

With Firefox 3, some CSS standardization caused some elements to shift around a bit. These will be addressed with the next upgrade as well.

- Updated blog

For simplicity, the Skyspine blog has been moved to Tumblr for now.