I hope everyone is having a great start to 2024! I'm excited to share some Patina Project improvements and an updated roadmap to kick off the new year.

What's new ✨

Search in Stores

Search in stores is now available in Patina Project! I'm happy to announce that Grant Stone is our first partner in bringing this new capability to life. One of my goals is to keep evolving this experience to become a truly useful tool for deciding which pair to purchase next, and being able to help get a friend into their first pair quality boots.

All purchases made through Patina Project will fund new features, improvements, and upkeep of the platform.

Important Speed Improvements

Improving performance has been a massive project lately. Last month, I introduced new backend upgrades for managing boot and shoe specs. While these upgrades enabled me to review the 1000+ specs requested for Thunderdome 3, the changes increased loading times throughout the app. Therefore, I have taken the necessary steps to fix performance. I am happy to share that:

• Thunderdome Open/Work Editions should load in under one second* now.

• Search results should load in under half a second*. You can now scroll further than before to see all the matching results!

• Large shoe collections should load in under one second* now.

• Lists of makers, models, leathers, etc. should load in under one second* now.

• Tested on a 27 Mbps download speed.

Filter Counts

Maker/model/leather filters for the Thunderdome or shoe collections now display the number of pairs for each filter. They are also now sorted by number of results, rather than alphabetically.

More Like This

To help you find more interesting boots, I've added a new "More Like This" section at the bottom of every album/spec sheet. Currently it looks for pairs that have the most similar specs.

Bug Fixes

• Prevent long descriptions from covering photos.

• User search should now show the correct results.

• Similar in Stores should show more relevant results.

• Fixed defaulting the date to when the photo was taken.

• Correctly show the complete description when viewing the comments.

• Fix an error after writing a comment.

• Prevent boots without a leather from showing "undefined" in link previews.

• Fix a broken layout for the Thunderdome sponsors banners.

• Android only: the double-tap gesture from zooming back out too easily.

• Thunderdome only: Corrected the countdown shown outside of photo submission windows.

• Thunderdome only: Fixed the previous photos not appearing when editing a Thunderdome submission.

Updated Roadmap 🚗

My current plan is to focus on two central themes: Boot Exploration & Decision-Making then Community Experience. In response to votes & feedback, I have moved community & social features ahead of the previous schedule.

Winter 2024: Boot Exploration & Decision-MakingGoal: I want to quickly explore different boot & shoe options, save & organize my findings for later, and have all the data I need to make footwear-related decisions.

• Polish search, filter, and spec-viewing experience

• Save anything and organize it

• Sizing recommendations

Spring 2024: Community ExperienceGoal: I want to share my boots & shoes as painlessly as possible and have a positive social experience within Patina Project.

• Upload multiple photos

• Two-tone boot support.

• Muting specific users

• Polish social features. View your Patina Project notifications in-app.

Future Plans

• Specs & filters expansion. More useful filters such as style, color, and tannery.

• Improvements to the web browsing experience

• More feed controls, such filtering by style preferences

As of Jan 16, 2024. Schedule is subject to change.

Have feedback for any of the improvements? Something you would like to see? Please voice it in on the official Patina Project Discord server!

-Ted