Hans Schmidt :  Nov 24th 2020

hans_schm1dt@protonmail.com

Update 2021 May:

The raventoo-qt repository has been deleted.
That project was a personalized and improved version of the raven-qt node for Ravencoin.

A few months ago I decided to work within the Ravencoin community to launch Special Interest Groups (SIGs) in order to lead and expand the amount of code development taking place in the community in a volunteer distributed manner in the spirit of bitcoin. That effort has been well accepted by the community, and now consists of many talented hard-working developers working on different projects in multiple SIGs. As the leader of the raven-qt SIG, all improvements to raven-qt are now made in that SIG.

For more information, please see the SIG website at:
https://github.com/Ravenqt-RVN-SIG/ravenqt-sig-info

and the raven-qt repositories at:
https://github.com/Ravenqt-RVN-SIG/Ravencoin
and
https://github.com/RavenProject/Ravencoin

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Background:

This document describes one of the improvements made on raventoo-qt relative to the official ravencoin node software V4.3.1.

When starting that client, if no "wallet.dat" file is found, a dialog window is displayed for the purpose of creating a new wallet. In particular, the dialog is related to the support for BIP-39 compliant DH (Deterministic Hierarchical) wallets which generate their keys from a 12-word seed and an optional user-supplied passphrase.

The user has the choice of either:

1. Creating a new wallet by requesting a newly-generated set of 12 seed words, and optionally supplying a passphrase, or
   
2. Re-creating a previous wallet from seed words and a passphrase (if previously used) in order to recover lost keys (and thereby coins and assets)

The Problem:

The raven-qt current-version client presents a single dialog GUI window which combines the create/re-create functionality into a single dialog. I find this to be very confusing. Worse still, a poor choice of button selections can result in a wallet being generated from random seed words without the using having the opportunity to record them.

I suspect that new Ravencoin users are equally confused (or worse).

The current raven-qt mnemonic dialog window appears like this:


PS: Don't bother checking- I didn't leave any RVN at these seed words for you to grab :-)


As an exercise to brush up on my C++ and QT coding skills, I decided to take a shot at making some improvements.


The Improvements:


The revised GUI in the raventoo-qt client has three separate dialog windows. The first window asks the user which type of wallet they would like to create:



Depending on the user's selection...

either the new wallet creation dialog window appears like this:




or the previous wallet re-creation dialog window appears like this:



The "Go Back" buttons allow the user to study their options before making a decision, and the "Accept" buttons are designed to prevent an invalid action from taking place.

Portability:

These code changes on raventoo-qt are fully compatible with the official Ravencoin core client and can be used to generate a Pull Request if wanted by the community.

Note: I am primarily a Linux user. I did not verify that everything still looks good on an MS-Windows or Mac computer, but the QT gui toolkit is "supposed to" take care of that.