We’re excited to tell you about Sander, which is an in-progress desktop web client for Are.na. See below for an update on what’s new with this big update, and what’s still coming.

After our survey last fall with Are.na’s premium members, we came to understand that speed was the most important improvement we could make to the platform. We’ve known this for a long time, and we’ve tried to chip away at it, but we needed a fresh perspective.

Concurrent to this, our long time goal had been to bring back Damon Zucconi as the lead engineer. His long-time goal has been to make Are.na much faster. When Damon re-joined the team a few months ago, we began thinking about the idea that speed is luxury, and we want Are.na to feel as quietly luxurious as possible.

After spending a bit of time investigating the various causes for why Are.na was slower than we wanted, Damon honed in on the front-end. We discovered that only by rebuilding the internals of the front-end could we actually achieve the kind of comfortable speed we were looking for.

So we committed ourselves to at least building a reasonably complicated prototype so we could see the kind of gains we could achieve. Once we saw the difference between the current version of Are.na and the new version, there was no question that we had to pursue a rebuild.

Even though literally everything is being written from scratch, Sander keeps the basic experience and feel of our current system. Apart from subtle improvements and cleanups, the basic paradigm of using Are.na is exactly the same. People should feel almost immediately comfortable with this new front-end client.

The aspect of Sander we tried to focus on is feeling. The feeling of navigating through blocks, channels and connections to distant parts of Are.na should feel effortless. To see the biggest improvement that we're most proud of, try visiting your favorite giant channel in the current client, then try visiting with Sander. The difference is stark.

Another big change that we’re really proud of is that the entire system is written with accessibility in mind. Part of that is an adjustment of colors to have higher contrast, as well as adding themes to better suit those with color blindness. In addition, everything is keyboard navigable.

The last time we entirely rebuilt the client was nine years ago. Needless to say, technology for building web applications has changed dramatically since then, and apart from our primary goal of making Are.na more efficient and accessible, we've tried to make the developer experience more ergonomic for ourselves. Being a small team, it's important that the surface area of the application is well organized and easy to work with. The easier it is for us to work with, the easier we can improve and maintain Are.na for everyone.

It's also important to note that not everything is complete yet and some aspects of the look and feel are still being refined and decided on. There are also many small functional aspects missing from this client that we're still working on. But rest assured: anything that you can do on the current client, you'll also be able to do in Sander once it's widely released. Below is a rough roadmap is what is on our plate and what is still to come.

We’re making this available for Premium members to test early, in an incomplete state, because (as you can imagine) we’re relying on feedback from the Are.na community to make sure that when Sander becomes the main client, we are building a foundation that we’re all happy living with for the next decade and beyond.