In this post, I am sharing a bunch of updates that have been in the works over the past few months on Geodesignhub and are now public for your project.
Recently, we have been undertaking projects with larger and larger study areas and more and more number of diagrams and complex negotiations. For e.g. we worked on a study area that was more than 6 million sq. km and many projects that have more than than 60 designs and negotiations across these.
If you have been using Geodesignhub for a while, you may have noticed some lag / slowness when processing, especially if the project gets too big. This is because of the way Geodesignhub is designed: data processing happens in your browser and all the processing workload has to be done by your laptop. However, as the size of the project grows, more and more pressure is put on the browser and while the browser tries to catch up, this leads to performance issues.
With these new changes, you will see a fast, responsive Geodesignhub no matter the size of the project. Most of the changes are in how the software works in the backend and in the browser so not really visible to you as a user but some notable things that you will experience immidiately are:
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Projects load faster: The first thing you will immediately notice is that even for large projects the data is loaded much faster. The size of the software itself has been drastically reduced up-to 50% in some cases, and you should see smoother scrolling even for large data. The whole software will feel fast.
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New look notifications: In addition to increase in the speeds of the project loading I have updated the notifications as well. This is mainly to keep pace with the speed at which data processing happens with these updates! You will see new notification system and a fresher look to the notifications themselves, see example below:
- Sharper controls: Common controls for picking and selecting designs and diagrams have been refreshed and it should load and process data faster as well. This should mean that the checkboxes are more pronounced and taps more accurate and the dropdowns more responsive:
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Browser support: Support for older computers and browsers has been kept. With these improvements the support for older devices has also been extended so older laptops can also join Geodesignhub projects and most browsers old and new, this will mean that you can use your older computers for large projects.
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Consistent Look: Geodesignhub is feature packed because of the number of things it can do, and as the number of features increase so does the amount of data transferred. With these changes, you should see a reduction in data transfers by upto 40%. We have been able to keep the look and feel consistent across the different parts of the system, see examples below:
Profile page
Project Homepage
As a result of this, you should see increases in the diagram limits, the size of evaluation maps and other limits have been increased as well.
Over the past few years the number of projects conducted on Geodesignhub has increased dramatically. You will be surprised to see how effectively computing resources required are utilized. We extract every ounce of performance from the infrastructure and ensure speed and stability of the system and make the system fast, performant and stable under large workloads. Your projects should feel fast, fun and responsive with these improvements.
Wishing you a very happy new year!
