Status update

[Mike Hearn]

Hey there,

I realise things have been very quiet around here lately. Do not fear! I remain interested in smart contract wallets and hope to get back to serious Lighthouse work as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the block size issue and subsequent Bitcoin fork are soaking up most of my time right now.

When time allowed I have been doing Lighthouse development though. The changes are mostly internal and are about making the app more stable, faster, easier to add features to and laying the foundation for an Android port in future - if that becomes a priority.

If you're interested in the technical details, the changes are:

1. Removing most disk watching in favour of straight line IO. The server still watches disk for new projects though. This simplifies the code and makes it more robust.
   
   
2. Rewrite of the startup sequence. This is helping to attack startup time, which was getting way too slow. This work isn't committed yet but will be soon.
   
   
3. Converting big chunks to Kotlin, from Java. This is easy because there's an automatic converter tool. Kotlin is a better language than Java but the biggest advantage is that the resulting code can run on Android easily. Previously I was using Java 8 which requires some special hacks to Android-ify.
   
   
4. The app now does a forced online update when run for the first time. This ensures every new user who downloads the app starts out on the latest version.

These changes are all coming in the next release.

So - quite boring stuff I'm afraid, but sometimes I have to eat my vegetables.