Great work!!! I will definitely leave a 5* after testing and reviewing the code a bit. In one week I will show it on a bitcoin forum here in Viña.
(Disclaimer: When I test stuff I try to document my first impression as closely as possible as this first impression can never be brought back, so if people consider this blabla pointless: It's intended for the developer, not the general forum reader.)
...
Hey Giszmo,
I was looking forward to some feedback from you. Great to see that you like it so far, and I agree on your thoughts on first impressions. So let me sum it up a bit.
General comment: We are trying really hard to make this wallet easy to use. So features that are useful for the 1% hard-core bitcoiners and confusing to the rest are not going to make it. We want to have as few settings/options as possible while having a feature rich wallet. This is a tough balance.
1.
Shuffle/Use on key creation: Since you understood the UI after half a second I think we got it spot on.
2.
Vanitygen-ing keys: Phones are awfully slow at this even with just 3 letters, and it really is a special use-case. I think it is best to leave it as something hardcore bitcoiners do on powerful computers, and then import them into Mycelium.
3.
Swipe delay: I agree. On older phones it feels sluggish when you swipe left/right. We have discussed this internally and we have some ideas on hoe to improve it.
4.
Redundant servers: Like BitcoinSpinner, Mycelium depends on a custom made super node which is not open source. The company (also called Mycelium) has invested heavily in developing it and we are going to use it for other projects (hint: for instance bitcoincard.org) and commercial services.
Unlike BitcoinSpinner the Mycelium wallet is backed by two 100% redundant physical servers in two different datacenters. Whenever the wallet makes a query to get its balance, get unspent outputs, transaction history etc it connects to random server (SSL encrypted with certificate pinning). If it does not respond it chooses the next. This way the wallet continues to work while a server is down for maintenance/upgrades. The Spinner server was down 3 hours yesterday because the hosting provider chose to do some maintenance (first downtime for months). With Mycelium this is a lot less likely.
5.
Should I use Mycelium instead of Spinner: Mycelium is in beta (so is the Spinner by the way along with most things in bitcoin land
![Wink](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/wink.gif)
). We are doing our best to make sure that it has no bugs and has 100% uptime. However, at the stage we are at right now we are requesting feedback, improving things, fixing bugs etc. I think you should test it and judge for yourself. I have used the Mycelium wallet hundreds of times and sent transactions worth more than $1000 with it and didn't loose a coin so far. A few weeks from now I would definitely say that you should use Mycelium. Eventually Spinner will be phased out
6.
Enter amount to send before scanning: The thing is that often the QR-code contains the amount to send. In those cases we can skip the entering-amount step entirely. If we did it the other way around you would have to enter an amount, then scan a QR-code, which may overwrite your amount. Too confusing and IMO leads to mistakes.
7.
Enter label on the send screen: Some wallets always present a dialog asking you whether you want to add the address to your address book just before/after you send the transaction. This is totally annoying, and I don't remember ever using it. If more people ask for it I would probably add second button along with the send button for that finctionality. Annoying dialogs are annoying ;-)
8.
Open sourcing servers: As mentioned in 4. we don't have any current plans of open sourcing the server.
grau has made an open source server with similar capabilities (
bitsofproof.org) and is making a living on running it as a service.