# Increasing the performance of Scrintal, the tool for visual thinking

> Throughout 2023, we have shipped some exciting features to Scrintal, including some major UI updates, starred items, dark mode, the action bar, web links on…

- Address: https://scrintal.com/blog/prioritising-performance-whats-ahead-for-scrintal
- Blog post by Philipp Temmel, published by Scrintal
- Published: 2024-02-19
- Updated: 2024-02-20
- Topics: Knowledge Management, Product, Visual Thinking, Tools for Thought, Startup

Throughout 2023, we have shipped some exciting features to [Scrintal](https://scrintal.com/), including some major UI updates, starred items, dark mode, the action bar, web links on canvas, visual linking, search highlights, the right sidebar, tasks, a completely revamped text editor, [and a lot more](https://beta.scrintal.com/b/release-notes).

As we embark on this exciting journey together, we want to express our heartfelt gratitude for the unwavering support our users have shown us. Their commitment fuels our passion, and we are eager to share some important updates about the future of our app.

We learned a lot from our users, received multiple feature requests, generated loads of ideas, and worked towards a vision that was not as clear as it is right now.

After long discussions, we carved out our product vision. We want to build the most joyful product to shape and communicate ideas with clarity. We highlight the word joyful because using Scrintal should be intuitive and give nothing but joy. We call Scrintal a place to shape and communicate ideas, because in essence bringing together ideas and turning them into communicable insights is what our users are doing.

![](https://scrintal.com/__l5e/assets-v1/6a1c724b-3614-45cd-8d01-d197865eb1a8/prioritising-performance-whats-ahead-for-scrintal-1.webp)

We have nothing but gratitude for the amazing support of our users. To make the above stated vision a reality, it is time to set the stage and tackle one of the most important struggles of Scrintal, its performance.

The reason we are sharing this update within a blog post is the fact that we want to make sure to keep everyone, but especially our users informed and provide transparency about our current focus points. We have a lot of lovely things in the pipeline, but one thing after the other.

## User Feedback on Performance Issues

While [our community](https://l.scrint.al/join-community) is a great place to discover new feature ideas, as of recently the comments regarding the performance issues have increased distinctly. Users who have archives with hundreds or thousands of cards had to wait a couple seconds until they were able to perform any actions, since the app needed to load. Users who have loads of cards placed on a board were confronted with a halting canvas, which provided a bad experience when navigating through or moving around on a board.

This is not what we were aiming for. We wanted Scrintal to be a fast and joyful app, that offers a lovely user experience.

Receiving those kind of inputs from our users made it clear in which areas Scrintal needs to improve drastically. We are thankful for those kind of inputs, we are thankful for the users who shared their concerns regarding creating an growing archive in Scrintal, because they were unsure how the app would handle the load of thousands of notes.

We are still a small startup and are facing the challenges of such every single day. Our small team was focused on delivering many great features throughout 2023. As a result of that, we did not have the bandwidth to balance shipping those features with performance. However, now is the time to take a step back to clean our technical debt.

![](https://scrintal.com/__l5e/assets-v1/919beba4-0857-495a-81b3-5f4025818ce7/prioritising-performance-whats-ahead-for-scrintal-2.webp)

When people get started with Scrintal, they should be able to rely on the app to 100%. It is our goal to provide the space for all your notes, thoughts, ideas, and projects. It does not matter how many powerful features an app has, how polished its design is, or how many customisation options it is offering, if it takes multiple seconds to load your notes, your projects, your work, nothing else matters.

The Readwise incident was the one that reminded us to stop and take a step back. We’ve been rushing things; and it’s good for a startup until it starts to hurt more than it helps. That’s why we said to ourselves until we come up with a good architecture to support Readwise and many more great integrations, we would park it. It is painful, but it is what it is. It is challenging to create an offline-first app where everything needs to be accessible locally. We want to figure out where and how the integrations fit in an offline-first app, and we cannot do that before tackling the performance and making the app joyful to use.

Your voices have been heard, and we appreciate the valuable feedback you have shared with us. Your insights have played a pivotal role in shaping the direction of our app, and we want you to know that we have been actively listening and learning from your experiences.

## Our Commitment to Performance Improvements

Therefore, we are announcing our commitment to improve Scrintal’s performance. This means, over the course of the upcoming months, the team is dedicated to work on the areas which will improve Scrintal’s performance, reduce loading times, and make the app faster in general.

This is not a temporary commitment, this is a commitment for Scrintal’s future. Scrintal should offer a clean and lucid interface, a beautiful and accessible design, powerful yet simple features which assist your workflows, but in first place it should be fast and reliable.

We believe that a seamless and efficient user experience is not just a goal; it is a fundamental aspect of what we strive to offer. Our users’ satisfaction is at the core of everything we do.

As of recently, we discovered some problems in the current state of the app. Users can not reliably know if their data is safe, the app’s data loading performance is poor, it is an inferior user experience to lack immediate feedback after doing an action, and the developers can not confidently change the code involve with data flow. To tackle and ultimately solve those problems, we set ourselves some requirements for this new and updated version of Scrintal:

- The app should provide a joyful experience. This includes getting immediate feedback whenever the user interacts with the app, it should work smoothly without any lag, and it should provide a beautiful design.
- The app should load and be ready for interactions within seconds, regardless of the size of the user’s archive.
- The app should be reliable, which means the user should not have to fear about data-loss. Additionally, the app should be transparent about the content’s status, the user should be aware if a document has not been synced yet.
- The user can have thousands of documents locally without performance drop.
- The app should be local-first and usable when offline. This includes the possibility to create new documents while being offline, as well as working with existing documents that are already locally available while the app is offline.
- The app should support basic collaboration on text documents and boards.
- When the network is available, the data should sync over the cloud between the user’s devices.

![](https://scrintal.com/__l5e/assets-v1/e9aa052c-bf73-45ce-afb1-cd0b7a19d571/prioritising-performance-whats-ahead-for-scrintal-3.webp)

## The Key Areas to Improve

In the coming months, we will be focusing on several key areas to elevate the app experience. From reducing loading times and improving responsiveness to ensuring stability and optimizing resources, we are dedicated to addressing the performance issues that matter most to our users.

We will focus on how we store the data in the client application and how the data will flow both within the app and between the client and our servers. We will completely rewrite our synchronisation service. Currently, the client and the server periodically sync changes between them. The new version will ensure a live connection between the two so that all your changes will sync immediately as long as there is an active internet connection. Apart from making it a fast sync, this will create reliable communication between the client and the server so that you will not lose any data.

We have much more work in the client application. We are abandoning our current approach to storing the data locally. Right now, the app loads your archive from the persistence layer into the application memory before doing anything; this takes time if you have thousands of documents! As you can see, this is not scalable. Instead, in the new version of the application, we are working on ways to make the client application work with the data right through the persistence layer and react to the changes immediately. This will remove the need for high memory requirements for running the app and ensure that it loads without delay since it will not wait to load the archive into the memory. Furthermore, this new data flow architecture will enable us to implement optimistic data updates, giving the users immediate feedback on their actions.

## The Timeline for Changes

We understand that time is of the essence, and we want to keep you informed about our progress. While these improvements may take some time, we are committed to delivering tangible results. Expect phased releases and updates over the next few months as we work diligently to elevate your app experience.

## Getting Involved

Your feedback has been invaluable, and we encourage you to continue sharing your thoughts with us. We’re not just making changes; we are making them with you. Stay connected through our [Slack community](https://l.scrint.al/join-community) and social media channels for regular updates on our progress, and let us build a better app together.

Once again, thank you for being an integral part of the Scrintal community. Your trust and support mean the world to us. As we set our sights on a brighter, more efficient future, know that we are committed to delivering an outstanding user experience. Here is to the journey ahead!

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Scrintal (https://scrintal.com) is a visual note-taking and research app. All pages and articles: https://scrintal.com/llms.txt