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Enhanced Darkcoin Wallet UI

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Since we're going with #3 and 4, the only thing I'd suggest is keeping the color scheme for the balance section the same for both of them. I don't really see a reason to display the balance in green on the white version, but not on the blue. Plus the green just seems unnecessary unless contextually it's contrasted with red (as in a negative balance, if that's even possible).
vtK3b32.jpg

The Arrows on PAYMENTS tab and the arrows for SEND and REC'V need to be flipped vertically.

REC'v should be an arrow to the left and pointing down
SEND should be an arrow to the right and pointing up

A REC'v is a download
A SEND is an upload.

It will be a minor change but in the end it just looks better

Besides the DRK symbol "D" has the REC'v symbol in it.

I'm looking at consistency.


EDIT: I made an edit : http://imgur.com/C4YRcXp
EDIT the edit: Missed the SEND BUTTON in the middle: http://imgur.com/1Tmrujk
 
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This just came to me...lol
Rather simple I thought......but
If there's is every going to be a DENOMINATE button..... it should look something like this: http://imgur.com/fxFDCPm
Then the whole Darkcoin Masternode something like this: http://imgur.com/yGcrsNn

These are concept designs and not the finished product(s)
I figured raze could clean them up and make them look pretty :)
 
@ Mangled Blue
I agree with your suggestion on re-orienting the incoming/outgoing transaction arrow icons. Makes sense. I will fix it as you suggested. Thanks for pointing that out and making a small improvement to Darkcoin! :)

And perhaps you can pm me and explain more about this "DENOMINATE" button/feature? I'm not sure I quite understand your meaning...

-- The DRK Lord --
 
Regarding wallet GUI improvement:

The standard proposed by Minotaur is truely a great improvement from a visual perspective. I'm so happy to finally see this being taken care of. I'm very pleased to see DRKLord and the community using these recently designed mainstream graphics which were discussed earlier here at darkcointalk.org (coming from Minotaur's designers). Good choice, even though some people opposed this mainstream look in this earlier discussion, it's exactly what Darkcoin needs!

Congratulations and many thanks to initiate parallel development. Taking care of the non-technical elements is just as important for various reasons. The wallet needed attention desperately so it could be in tune with the beauty of the underlying core client. People who don't bother to read up on Darkcoin will be more easily convinced when they see that wallet design. Some people look at different things to recognize value. This might do more to raise the price than core improvement, no matter how strange that sounds to some hardcore ICT engineers.

May I however propose two "nice to have" ideas to take it further. This could perhaps even help to initiate some viral marketing, word-of-mouth advertising, some *hype*:

1/- Could you investigate what is required to make the wallet GUI themeable as also proposed by some others, i.e. with an external config file allowing customization of (icon) images, fonts and colors. Obviously the wallet would still come with the standard mainstream theme for the end user, possibly allowing them to choose another alternative standard theme included in the official software package. A set of rules for the external information would need to be followed of course, but I can imagine a whole array of fanboy/girl themes being made for the Darkcoin wallet. There's many artists out there that would have fun making a Darkcoin wallet theme, provided the functionality is there to easily add a new theme. This would also please the people who truely oppose mainstream graphics.

2/- There's this one specific thing however which I'd really like to see happening (over time) with the Darkcoin wallet GUI (perhaps for a second revision); DRKLord and other developers, please investigate the feasibility of integrating a feature allowing to set a 'walletpaper' to the Darkcoin wallet. What I mean by this is to allow the end user to set 'any' image as the background of the wallet. This would probably need to have some configurable transparency settings and 'best fit' type of settings. I can imagine people sharing or boasting about their pimped/customized wallet with for example their favorite hot girl sitting behind their stack of darkcoins. I can imagine many people posting their nicest customized (sexiest) Darkcoin wallets... *could help a bit to make Darkcoin go viral?*

Darkcoin is very technical for average people, they know it's valuable to have privacy improvements. Great innovation is being implemented in the core protocol, but some people, including myself, would also like to see more "fun stuff" while we're waiting for a robust anonimity implementation. I'd love to play with my wallet trying to find the best setup which identifies me as the person that I am. Sure there will be plenty people who have no imagination and will gladly accept the slick mainstream standard or revert to the non-enhanced GUI, but there will be many people who prefer to be unique and will get creative. A themeable interface with custom walletpaper would allow you to do that. Take your wallet for example, isn't there something to it that makes it really yours? Something you changed or added? Maybe some people just want to use a family picture as their walletpaper, et cetera. Would be really nice. At least I think so.

Only a suggestion for the Darkcoin wallet roadmap...

I've had this idea before (as many people probably have), but I have actually recently discovered a cryptocurrency who is working on this feature:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=685968.0 (this is not an advertisement, simply proof that it can be done, hope you don't mind)
 
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Regarding wallet functionality improvement:

1/- It would be great if the more advanced user would be allowed to set a custom directory for the Darkcoin wallet directory. This is one of the features which I find terribly annoying. For Windows users, it's perhaps a prerequisite to have this in the AppData Roaming folder, so I'm not 100% sure if it can be done without creating issues. I would definately like to keep my wallet outside the standard location. If somebody were to get into my machine hosting my client, he would not be able to access my wallet, as that would be stored on (for example) a Truecrypt encrypted USB stick. I suspect this could be a significant improvement security-wise. The client would "simply" need to read the defined wallet from its defined location.

2/- It would also be a significant improvement imho, if the end-user could have multiple Darkcoin wallets/addresses per client. One private and one which is used publically for donations for example. As far as I know, I would need to set up different virtual machines to achieve this goal, which is not resource or user friendly. This might be a difficult one, but I hope some day it will be feasible to use multiple Darkcoin addresses with ONE client on ONE machine (with wallets on cold storage). (see MultiBit)

Edit: 1/ is indeed feasible by setting the '-datadir=' (Windows) or '--datadir=' (Linux) parameter when starting up the Darkcoin client in the command shell (was already part of the Bitcoin client). I presume however that not many standard users are aware of this parameter, as this is not well documented or made clear to end users. Not sure also if the Windows installer for Darkcoin now covers this one way or the other or if it's even part of the Darkcoin documentation (if any).


Edit: 2/ Multiple addresses per wallet/client was already feasible, not sure how I missed that. My bad.
 
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I'm well aware that you guys now need to focus on the primary goal, which is simply implementing the chosen/best GUI look as the standard for the Darkcoin wallet. I'm not asking to take on more than you can handle at this point and I would certainly like to see the new wallet design released already for 'RC4'.

Good luck and best regards.
 
@ Mangled Blue
I agree with your suggestion on re-orienting the incoming/outgoing transaction arrow icons. Makes sense. I will fix it as you suggested. Thanks for pointing that out and making a small improvement to Darkcoin! :)

And perhaps you can pm me and explain more about this "DENOMINATE" button/feature? I'm not sure I quite understand your meaning...

-- The DRK Lord --


My reply is actually over on BTCtalk as a PM - I can't seem to find the PM here - lol
 
1/- It would be great if the more advanced user would be allowed to set a custom directory for the Darkcoin wallet directory.

Maybe we have different views of what being an "advanced user" implies but this is possible relatively easily.

Either by changing the data directory https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Data_directory or by symlinking wallet.dat to a location of your choice. Yes, Windows supports symlinks since Vista.

If somebody were to get into my machine hosting my client, he would not be able to access my wallet, as that would be stored on (for example) a Truecrypt encrypted USB stick.

You'd need to decrypt it to use it anyway, so I don't see how this would help you. Someone being able to "get into your machine" will usually install resident software that will just grab your wallet once it's available.
 
'Advanced' is perhaps not the right word to be used there, but I used it to differentiate from standard users who always install in the standard directories. I know you could implement this yourself. I'm well aware of symlink (mklink) for Windows and have used it before, but not for a crypto wallet. I'm not saying that it wouldn't work, but this would be outside the functionality provided by the wallet itself, which was not my "suggestion/request".

Your latter remark is also true, but imho it would at least be one more step to prevent "easy" stealing of your wallet (simply copying it from the standard folder) the moment they have compromised your machine. Anyhow, I know that a good password to encrypt your wallet should prevent anyone trying to spend your coins even if they can get to your wallet. It's really more of a request to take it one step further and keep your wallet.dat outside the standard directory, preferably 'offline' even, for those who are a bit paranoid about security. You could always verify (to some extent) if anything malicious is ongoing on your machine before you put your wallet 'online'.

Perhaps others do see some value in it, perhaps not... no problem.
 
DRKLord, we received this message on Facebook:

Hello there, my name is Craig Mcgee, and I am totally blind. I use a screen reader on my computer and unfortunately, the dark coin wallet, like most cryptocurrencies uses a QT wallet, which won't work with my screen reading software. Normally I'd be happy to settle for an online wallet/exchange to store my coins and be done, but I'd like to run a master node, and because the QT wallet isn't accessible I assume this is going to be difficult?
I was wondering if you'd be able to look into making the Dark Coin wallet accessible, either by modeling it off the devcoin wallet, which works perfectly or the timekoin wallet which also works perfectly with my screen reader?
thank you for your help
take care
craig
 
DRKLord, we received this message on Facebook:

Hello there, my name is Craig Mcgee, and I am totally blind. I use a screen reader on my computer and unfortunately, the dark coin wallet, like most cryptocurrencies uses a QT wallet, which won't work with my screen reading software. Normally I'd be happy to settle for an online wallet/exchange to store my coins and be done, but I'd like to run a master node, and because the QT wallet isn't accessible I assume this is going to be difficult?
I was wondering if you'd be able to look into making the Dark Coin wallet accessible, either by modeling it off the devcoin wallet, which works perfectly or the timekoin wallet which also works perfectly with my screen reader?
thank you for your help
take care
craig

I feel bad for not even thinking about this... :sad:

Too often we take our sight and other things for granted, and forget about the people who don't have the advantages that we do. Everyone should be able to use Darkcoin, whether they're blind, def, no matter what. I think that we should, in addition to our localization (culture/language) efforts, also focus on an accessibility effort for the visually and physically impaired. I'm sure there are handicapped users who are unable to type who could benefit from speech-to-text and voice commands also.

I have a little experience with Microsoft/.NET text-to-speech and speech-to-text APIs and using them to control applications, execute scripts/programs, etc. If Craig is using Windows or is able to install Mono I could probably write him a simple control app in C# to act as a temporary solution to his problem. But a full-scale, built-in, platform-agnostic solution to the difficulties faced by the blind and disabled should be put on our agenda. Since I only know a little about the Microsoft technologies in this department, I'm going to need some help in figuring out how to approach it and with implementation.

Regards,

The DRK Lord
 
It is a valid concern to accommodate to all people, be it a different language or screen reader. This should be addressed.

In the mean time, I would suggest a Master Node pool for Criag McGee for now.
If he can get in touch with vertoe on here, he has daily automated pay outs can be sent to Craig's exchange wallet address.
Start a conversion with vertoe and he will tell you the rest.
 
Another wallet privacy improvement (suggestion) to be considered would be the requirement of entering a password to access the client. Hence preventing anyone using your host/account to verify the details of your wallet.

Probably some day there will be a lot of Windows based end users who have shared machines and are only using one account (families). I'm well aware this is not best practice, but I suspect this is the situation for many people. The owner of the wallet would probably prefer their balance not to be known by everyone using that shared machine/account.

Even if it's not the case, some end users would still prefer an additional password to access the client. Who hasn't left his machine in the hands of his girlfriend or trusted friends? It would be better if they are not able to start the Darkcoin client without knowing the password.

PS: I just want these ideas registered somewhere and currently this seems to be the best place to suggest wallet related improvements.
 
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Another wallet privacy improvement (suggestion) to be considered would be the requirement of entering a password to access the client. Hence preventing anyone using your host/account to verify the details of your wallet.

Probably there will some day be a lot of Windows based end users who have shared machines and are only using one account (families). I'm well aware this is not best practice, but I suspect this is the situation for many people. The owner of the wallet would probably prefer their balance not to be known by everyone using that shared machine/account.

Even if it's not the case, some end users would still prefer an additional password to access the client. Who hasn't left his machine in the hands of his girlfriend or trusted friends? It would be better if they are not able to start the Darkcoin client without knowing the password.

PS: I just want these ideas registered somewhere and currently this seems to be the best place to suggest wallet related improvements.
I would suggest to use https://github.com/darkcoinproject/darkcoin/issues also
 
Any chance we can add an in-built exchange platform to the Darkcoin wallet? I think the future of decentralized coin is in decentralized exchanges. Too big to fail centralized exchanges like Mt.Gox are the biggest threat to the crypto-coins.
 
Hey guys
i did a post on the Official FB page regarding a new wallet and got a lot of good feedback (for you)
i am happy to do a "vote" on FB if you are still between different Wallet options !
Let me know
(the public loves it, well done to all of you !!)
 
Hey guys
i did a post on the Official FB page regarding a new wallet and got a lot of good feedback (for you)
i am happy to do a "vote" on FB if you are still between different Wallet options !
Let me know
(the public loves it, well done to all of you !!)
We're doing both the white and blue versions (#3 and 4) so people have a choice between them.
 
ok tx
i will put it up
and see what comes
i keep you posted
(there is not much action, i try to create some)..>
 
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