Latest Updates: May
This month comes around with us pushing out a lot of new and exciting features! Terra is getting closer and closer to its ultimate vision, and we're happy to have you along. Obviously there are lot's more, but we are adding only these 3 here
- New and revamped docs!
- Why? Our old docs sucked (and we're not afraid to admit it). Both the UI (incredibly slow and clunky, unintuitive) and the actual content were not up to par with the quality we aim to provide to devs. We want to make Terra as easily accessible as possible, and our our docs just didn't sit right with us.
- What's new? New structure, new design, new content. We chose a layout that would group things together in a logical order, picked a design that was easy on the eyes, and criticized the content itself so that we would rewrite it to be easily digestible. You can check this out for yourself on https://docs.tryterra.co. Additionally, we chose a docs provider with some incredibly cool features! You can make API requests and see response straight from within the docs, and test out all the different endpoints without opening anything else. This keeps everything in one place and makes it easy to test things out for yourself, and allows devs to learn by doing and playing around with Terra.
2. Real Time Data
- Why? Our vision has always been to enable a transition from static snapshots of people's health to a continuous data flow. This is perfectly in line with our core goals and is a step in that direction, providing access to users' health and fitness metrics on a per-second basis.
- What's new? Websocket API, TerraRealTime: Our brand new Websocket API and accompanying SDK, which when combined allow you to access users' heart rate, steps, calories, distance traveled every second, and lays the foundation for many more metrics to be added. The SDK forms a websocket connection with the Terra backend, and if a developer has an open connection to the backend as well, users' data are streamed to them within milliseconds of being generated. If getting your users' heart rate from their Polar chest straps every second isn't exciting then we're not sure what is!
3. Terra Dashboard - V2
- Why? Our old dashboard was clunky, pages needed to be refreshed for things to be loaded again, and it just didn't feel great overall. We want to provide the best dev experience possible, and having a reliable tool to manage API access facilitates this.
- What's new? Everything has been rebuilt from the ground up. We're using Next JS as a framework, meaning that everything is fully reactive, individual components are loaded separately, and everything is rendered on the server, taking load away from the client side. Settings are saved easily, and the experience feels a lot more interactive. This also means that adding new features has become a lot easier and manageable, as this amounts to including a few more components in the code to perform additional functionality. We're always eager to hear feedback, so we're looking forward to understanding what more you'd like to see on it!
