With the proposed reorganization, the side bar is probably gone. It has become cluttered indeed. We will probably be better without it.
DEX does need some GUI adjustments. Your suggestions are good. However, it’s a DApp GUI, so it can be worked on independently of the main wallet GUI. If the dev in charge doesn’t find time for it, then any community web dev can also propose enhancement on the GitHub page.
We could probably open another forum thread to discuss the next iteration of the DEX. Many good ideas have already been shared on Telegram.
FYI: DApps are basically web pages running within the wallet (so, practically the same GUI can be used for the DEX DApp and for the website dex.beam.mw, by instance).
Two more suggestions. They both relate to UI but reach beyond just a little.
Restore Process: I recently had to restore my wallet after trying 7.5 from github and messing things up when I went to run 7.3 again. There are many physical solutions for storing the secret words that only accept the first 4 letters of every word since they are guaranteed unique in BIP-39. I use crypto-keys (no longer avail it looks like) and the the safepal cypher, both of which have this limitation. In any case, during the restore (on the desktop wallet at least) it requires the full word to be entered – so you need to go and find the English BIP-39 word list somewhere and look them up individually – an unnecessary hastle. Auto-complete after enough letters to uniquely identify the word would be great (There are C++ libs for BIP-39 that can do this)
Support for 24 Words. This is only tangentally a UI feature, so apologies… but I wanted to get it out there. I’m 90% sure that while Beam uses the English BIP-39 word list, it does not implement BIP-39. I believe I saw somewhere in the code that it hashes the English version of the words, which isn’t quite correct but just as secure. In any case, it would be nice to have the option of using 24 words instead of 12. I understand 12 is lsufficient and 24 is overkill, but many wallets support 24 and it makes users feel more secure. IF there is ever a push to support 24 word phrases, perhaps key off the number of words: legacy 12: use current method, new 24: implemented as BIP-39. This would keep it backwards compatible with existing phrases. I think BEAM is already registed over at slip-0044 as coin-type 1533.
12 words is only considered secure where none of the words are known. If the words are known but not the order e.g. a key logger, then it’s easily cracked.
I too, therefore, would prefer a 24 word seed. In fact, I would also prefer multiple account access via a 25th word.
