Are they still working on speeding up the UI?

I still notice quite a bit of UI lag in menus, inventory, retainer management, ward browsing and search, etc.

It is far better than release, but still very slow when compared to most online games. I can understand the wards and searches where you need to query servers and get results back, though it seems like it should be a little faster when compared to FFXI which also had JPN based servers.

The upcoming 1.19 contains quite a bit of UI improvement, as far as new functions and the like, but I have not seen any mention of further speeding up parts of the UI in a while now. The game has improved enough, especially the UI, that is is bearable, but several things still need improvement prior to launching on PS3.

One of my big gripes right now is the on going issues with trying to chat during a long crafting session. It would be cool if you could just auto pause the synth timer when you make the chat window active. On the plus side, my wpm is improving.

The other thing I feel needs a bit more fine tuning is the navigation of the UI menus as well as all the confirmations and pop ups for various UI interactions. This is another area that has been vastly improved versus release state of the game, but it still does not seem quite right.

I hope they continue to improve it and speed it up, especially before PS3 release. Of course, SE often includes a lot of additional tweaks, changes, and other "unannounced" changes in their patches, in addition to the changes they preview or discuss. Perhaps, since they have shown they are interested in improving the UIs speed and overall quality, they don't feel the need to discuss up coming UI tweaks that center around speeding up the UI in general.

I believe they are still optimsing the servers and 1.19 will see the start of them speeding the servers up.

I don't think 1.19 will do much to the fundamentals. They've said they are removing some of the unnecessary server checks when it comes to combat and streamlining the system a bit but I don't think the UI is affected.

They've said that they are looking into the way the client and server interact, so that could mean anything. But the lag is due to inefficient server/client communication and design so they are definitely doing something about it.