TLDR: If you want to skip all the reading, we now have a Worker Proposal Fund in the account “scatterfixes”. Go donate EOS tokens so that we can pay devs to make Scatter better. Go go go.

If you’re only interested in suggesting features, go here and add issues to our repository.

The long way around

Nathan and I have been working on Scatter for two years now. We’ve had a lot of ups and downs, with some great successes and some pretty disastrous failures. So it goes in startup land, and we have to find a way to keep going because we are quickly coming up against the end of our runway.

Turning a wallet and its satellite components into a thriving business has been an elusive dream that we have come to accept as possibly beyond our capabilities. We are technologists and dreamers, and there were many forks in the road which we refused to go down because we believed that free and open software should work a certain way (i.e. not gather user analytics and resell it). We always tried to treat our users with respect in the decisions we made while designing features and implementing them.

The hard truth is that there is a big gap between being a successful application, and a successful business.

We at Scatter are shifting gears now, and as I’ve written before we are actively seeking members of the open-source community to come and help us continue to develop Scatter into what we think that it can be.

It shouldn’t just be Nathan and I who steer the project, but a diverse group of core contributors who set the tone, direction, and make decisions together.

A party of five

We’d like to create a core group of five or more developers, Nathan and I included, who would be the steering committee that decides what Scatter becomes. We think we have a chance of growing beyond the EOS ecosystem and becoming the defacto standard wallet for all blockchains.

In the spirit of free and open-source software, we want to take a more democratic approach when it comes to how Scatter is developed. If you think that you’d like to take on this role and be part of that committee, please contact us.

We have created a public Telegram group called “Scatter Steering Committee”, which will be used for public discourse.

The project will be managed through the Kanban here.

Anyone can add issues here.

Since EOS does not currently have a Worker Proposal Fund to pay bounties from for work that needs doing, we’d like to set up an account specifically for Scatter which bounties would be paid out from: scatterfixes.

The more donations scatterfixes gets, the more work can get done on Scatter by qualified developers who want to be fairly compensated for their time and expertise.

The intent would be to do bi-monthly calls where the committee decides what features we’d like to develop and what kind of bounty we would set. These would be recorded and uploaded to a video hosting service such as YouTube.

For each issue, a contributor must fork the repository and create a new branch. A successful PR to the repository would go through a code review and only then would the code be merged in.

Payment would require three out of five votes of the committee to sign the transaction that pays out the bounty.

Bounties themselves will be assigned to issues in Github, and will be up for grabs for anyone who will be interested in fixing them.

In the case that there is not enough to pay out a bounty for code completed in a PR, the code will not be merged until there is.

It’s a fair and egalitarian way of making sure that good work gets paid for, and can help keep Scatter alive over the coming years.

We think that we have built enough of a technological foundation that others can spring-board off of successfully.

Things like Walletpack and ScatterEmbed are very powerful architectures and we think that people should take a look and build on top of them. The tech is really revolutionary.

It is a complex system, with many moving parts, but it gives us as a community the flexibility to do cool things that were never before possible. Things like developing Scatter for multiple platforms (bringing back the extension, launching on mobile), and updating a user’s Scatter on the fly to give them a better user experience without having to download a new version.

What do we think that needs doing?

Testing

So some of you who have been paying attention have seen that we’re transitioning to “Scatter Simple” which basically boils Scatter down to one account per network. It streamlines every workflow and makes it dead easy to use. It’s very extensible and we’d like to have more eyes helping us finish up the last leg of this sprint. We need testers and bug hunters pronto. You can join the https://t.me/ScatterTesters Telegram group and get started right away.

Ideation for features

Up until now we’ve largely worked in a vacuum, where we design and build Scatter according to either our specific needs, or according to user feedback.

There needs to be a more nuanced discussion with the community about what features they’d like to see implemented. For those features that are really worthwhile, we’ll assign bounties and have them paid out from the scatterfixes fund as we laid out above.

Removing all promotional aspects

We have been selling ad space to provide funding for development and, frankly, it makes for a poorer UX experience than we would like. Since we’re moving to a community driven approach we should remove promotional materials from Scatter entirely.

Mobile

As part of our new architecture, we have a working (but slow) version of Scatter Simple for mobile. We need help getting this out the door, and an experienced Java developer would be a huge asset.

Extension

Again, because of the way that ScatterEmbed works, we can now bring back the Extension that users loved so much.

UI/UX Improvements

Scatter 12 is better, but still hard to use. There will still be plenty of users who want to manage many keys and accounts and we can’t forget about them. The interface for things like single accounts, sending, receiving, etc. can all be improved. We’d love it if someone from the community took some time to tell us how we could be doing those things better.

Better account creation and account funding

Account creation in Scatter as it stands today is a painful process where you have to send EOS tokens from another account to the EOS smart contract makeaccounts with the public key and name of account in the memo.

Many exchanges don’t support this method because they arbitrarily cut off the allowed length of memo. For networks like Telos who provide free accounts, we should support that, too. Basically the whole thing needs a rethink and an overhaul.

We have already created a credit card system to replace this old method, but who knows what the future holds and we should support many options if possible.

In short, there is lots to do and we’d love a hand.

Get started by creating issues here: https://github.com/GetScatter/ScatterEmbed/issues/new

You can always help support us by voting for our BP candidate “vote4scatter” on the Telos Mainnet.

Click here to vote.

— Rami James | Telegram: https://t.me/Scatter | Website: https://get-scatter.com

Scatter is a blockchain application signature provider. We provide high quality tools for developers and users.