Hello, Zcash and privacy & cybersecurity news fans! The newest version of the zCat - the Android app was released! Please, check if you run the newest version 0.1.2. What can you expect from the latest version? Let's have look together.

Halving Countdown

I noticed people shared on social media their estimates when we will get halving. Many projects are on the track, such as the offical page, pro.zcash.ru, or zcashprice.com. So, I was thinking why not to add it into the app, too. Here it is.

Countdown data is fetched from the Bitquery service and processed. I did not dig deep about difficulty adjustment period for Zcash, so I decided for now to set the window for relevant data for 14 days (like Bitcoin). Thus, the average block time is based on the block times in last 2 weeks. It might be probably less exact than other tracking tools. We will see.

Just for fun I added also estimation based on weighted average block time, where the weight are defined by 10 seconds intervals. This is probably totally useless estimate, but it was fun to implement it, so you can laugh at me how I wasted my time. Also, there was quite some fun on the server side, but that's not visible to the user and it is not even interesting story.

Nostr integration

OK-OK, this is not new. But there were a couple of bugs which were annoying (at least to me, since I do use the app). First fix is related to picture loading from the post, now it should not overlay post ID on the top. If you tap on the ID, the app should redirect you to the nostr.band website to see the post there. And finally there are clickable links and quoted posts. Yay!

Another bug fix was focused on the fetching of the data from the Nostr protocol. Hopefully, the loading progress bar will improve UX (to see that something is going on) and handeling of incoming data should not show fail screens anymore. (OK, you can see some bugs on the picture (label and error message), but that's smaller issue comparing to previous fail screen (right?), and I noticed it only when preparing the pictures (ノ-_-)ノ ミ ┴┴ )

Smaller bugfixes

There were smaller UI fixes here and there, for example on the info screen with an overflowing texts, or stability issue on the news feed when you tapped on the share button.

Added localizations

Initial idea was to bring the app to the most people and support multiple languages. I knew that's pain (from previous experiences with localizations, but did it anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ), becasue every update gets longer to finish thanks to translating. I usually use DeepL service, but lately the output quality feels like going down. I tried to adapt languages I have some (even limitted) knowledge, but you will judge the final result. If you can, please, try to use it in English :)

tl;dr

• Zcash halving countdown,
• Nostr feed bug fixes,
• smaller bug fixes on UI & stability issues
• discovered smaller UI bug when adding Nostr account
• newly added localization might be confusing

Summary

That's all folks! If you will find any bug, or if you will have any idea how to improve the app, please, let me know. Thanks and enjoy the app!

Happy halving day :)

P.S.: Sorry for all the typos and grammar mistakes, but I am not writting a book :)