Changelog 0.15

To cap off the year we've been revamping docs and polishing the IDE experience with an eye toward our open beta launch. And on that note, we're collecting user feedback and would love to hear yours in a live session or via email or Discord.

If you like reading these changelogs, you also might like reading about the Membrane program we wrote to automate changelog drafts.

Docs makeover

Juan led a massive rewrite of docs.membrane.io. You'll find much more depth in explanations of Membrane concepts ("Membrane-isms") along with visuals to match the visual language used in the IDE (e.g. how grefs appear).

This is an ongoing effort, and we'd appreciate hearing any feedback!

More schema options

Thomas shipped support for editing more properties in the schema editor. For example, you can add hints to format data like URLs in the Navigator. This complements Thomas's recent work to allow editing descriptions in the schema editor.

There's less and less reason to manually edit memconfig.json, but it's always there if you prefer to work with JSON directly.

Improve state type inference

Thomas doubled down on his previous work to infer state types. Now, state will expect a Record<string, any> by default and infer more specific types upon assignment or explicit annotations.

Navigator UI polish

Romet cleaned up a few widgets around the Navigator, including better schema error messages and nav bar tweaks. He's also been working on reducing jumpiness as data loads in the IDE. This should lead to less flickering UI, particularly when installing and publishing packages (we still have more work to do here for a fully smooth experience).

Pete also worked on reducing layout shift when the Navigator first loads (a deprecated file explorer view was flashing, previously).

Speed up IDE load times

Juan shipped incremental improvements to load Membrane programs in the IDE faster. Expect more performance gains down the line as we move the IDE to its own subdomain and keep an eye on bottlenecks.

Email signup verification

Thomas has been polishing the signup experience, most recently creating pages for email verification.

Fix website template

Juan fixed an issue with our website template that was led to stale state data being returned from the program endpoint.

Fix deploy-on-save bug

Automatic deployment on save was sometimes hanging because of a bug with the website and webhook templates. Juan fixed that, too.

Fix Safari logo UI bug

Pete fixed a bug on Safari where the (now removed) M logo hyperlink in the IDE overlapped the new nav bar.

- Pete Millspaugh (pete@membrane.io)