Aeternity native GUI

Hi, folks! I am Craig Everett, a relatively new member of the Core Team, and I have recently posted an alpha release of a native GUI for Aeternity here:

It is called “AEL”, short for “Aeternity launcher” and is run using the “zx” Erlang utility.
Running information is in the project README file.
(TL;DR: If you have Erlang and ZX installed, type zx run ael and it will go.)

Please understand this is an alpha release, support is not fully cross-platform yet, and there are a few known bugs and the intended feature set is not yet fleshed out.
(Debian/Devuan/Ubuntu flavor Linux systems are the most fully supported. It does work on RedHat/Fedora flavors as well, though the names of the packages needed are slightly different. It can also run on OSX if you go to the trouble to get the environment set up juuuust right.)

Mining configuration is not yet supported – I’ve done most of the work necessary to get CPU mining configurations right (and correctly identify whether AVX2 is available, which is pretty important), but still need some more work to figure out how to auto-configure for CUDA, and still have not created a way to manage other nodes in Stratum pools or anything really cool like that.

This project started as a quality-of-life improvement for us in the Core Team, allowing us to have a pointy-clicky way to configure, build and launch nodes while allowing us to have a runtime context actually within the node where we can have an interface component call something within the runtime directly – but it has become obvious there are interesting possibilities here that can simplify our own development time further as well as provide internal stats for the node in a nicer way than tail -f | grep on log files.

A (rough) roadmap is in the project README.
Thanks for checking this post, and have fun out there making things!

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Screenshots of the gui would be great to show it to people.

I am not sure if I understand the benefits of using Erlang here instead of Browser-Technology for this.

Generally, I was advocating to have a “Basic Wallet” for a long time now, which should expose all the features of æternity blockchain in the most minimal graphical “basic” way. Kind-of a dev tool.

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