The last posts (from October and November 2018) gave a little overview of what we were doing and what we would be doing in the future: better UX and moving toward allowing developers in the Ethereum ecosystem to build/integrate functionalities on Remix.

So we met in Berlin in the beginning December, not so long after Devcon in Prague, where we formalized our plans for Remix.

One thing was clear, the old UX needed to be refreshed ;) While it was pretty functional, it was not very inviting for beginners. For example, when the app loaded — front and center on the screen — in the editor — was `Ballot.sol` — which is rather cryptic for beginners. Because Remix is a landing page for new users to smart contract programming, we needed to improve their first impression.

We don’t want to limit the development of Remix to what our team can produce. We think it is a lot more valuable for the community to build a plugin framework where any team can create its own plugin for Remix. This means, that YOU can build a plugin for Remix to extend its functionality in a direction that you’d like.

We started to build something in that direction last year. Now it’s time to make it a powerful framework (GrandSchtroumpf is the main developer of the remix-plugin infrastructure) and things are moving nicely!

The basic functionalities are now in place and more will come soon.

Every feature is now loaded as plugin and displayed either in the side panel for plugins suited to vertical format or in the main panel (as a tab) for a horizontal format or if the plugin is a full featured app (lianahus and Rob Stupay were involved on this). We also had some UX test sessions with people from the Ethereum office in Berlin.

Here is the live deployment remix.ethereum.org, you can also check out our cutting edge version remix-alpha.ethereum.org. Feel free to join our gitter channel