Mobile-l October 2014

mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org

34 participants
44 discussions

Plans for audio/video playback on iOS app: VLCKit
by Brion Vibber 27 Oct '14

27 Oct '14

I've just met with Jean-Baptiste and Felix from the VLC media player project about integrating their player as a library that we can drop into the iOS Wikipedia app to get Ogg and WebM audio/video playback working. This will be *a lot* easier than maintaining our own media player library (which I'm already doing with ogv.js in JavaScript to get things working in Safari and IE, so that saves me having to duplicate the work in Objective-C!) Using the player is just a few lines of code and will take very little time to integrate once the clean library build is available. I'll whip up a provisional patch on the weekend after we've landed some general app refactoring which is currently higher-priority. *= Performance =* Native code playback is much faster than my JavaScript solution, so the app will be able to play back high-definition WebM files that we can't play in Safari. Nice! *= Patents =* Felix is working right now on adjusting the build scripts to make a "free-codecs only" build easy, which thus won't have any patent concerns. (They've done it before manually for consulting customers, but it'll soon be a simple switch on the build script.) Once this is set up it should be very easy for me to make a local build with the options we need, without having to maintain a fork or anything. We can then just drop the pre-built library into our app. *= Copyright licensing =* libvlc/VLCKit is LGPL-licensed, and between the VLC team's interpretation and our legal team's interpretation (thanks Luis!) and Apple's de-facto treatment of existing VLC-based apps, we're pretty sure this should not be a problem for our open-source app. (The individual codec libraries are mostly BSD-ish licensed.) -- brion

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towards Android 5.0
by Dmitry Brant 27 Oct '14

27 Oct '14

I've been digesting the new updates introduced in Android 5.0, and it looks like there's at least one thing that we'll need to do relatively soon, if we want to embrace the latest libraries and components. In the new (v21) AppCompat library, it looks like they're gradually deprecating the use of ActionBar, in favor of the more general "Toolbar". Don't worry - the work we've done towards using a native ActionBar was not in vain; there's a simple and straightforward migration path from ActionBar to Toolbar. Nevertheless, it might take ~2-3 story points to transition to the new Toolbar, which I suggest we try to squeeze in during the next couple sprints. Visually it won't be much different, except for a three-dot overflow icon (instead of three squares), and a slick new slide-out animation in the top left corner (see attached screen-grab). device-2014-10-26-122152.mp4 <https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/file/d/0BzcksMsMNpY1dDJjOUlPWHIzNkU…> The most (relatively) annoying thing is that the ActionBar in the v21 library no longer has a built-in ProgressBar, which we've been using extensively, so, that'll take just a bit of restructuring. All of this will allow us to start building the app with the new v21 library, and use the Material theme, and future-proof more of our code! -Dmitry

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[MobileWeb] LD change "Use login page design in beta"
by Florian Schmidt 24 Oct '14

24 Oct '14

Hello all together! Today we fixed a little problem[1] with the login page, when you access it in beta mode (not stable, nor alpha). Now the bug is in wmf/1.25wmf5 branch, which is currently on group0 wikis (mw.org, testwiki, ) and will be deployed next week on group1 (wikisource, wikivoyage, , Tuesday) and on group2 (Wikipedias, Thursday) wikis and will be online one week (7 days). I would be happy to LD the patch to wmf/1.25wmf5 [2], but Jon pointed out, that its only a styling issue and no functionality is broken. LD or not LD, that is the question :) Opinions? [1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72482 [2] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/168616/ Freundliche Grüße / Kind regards Florian

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iphone 6+ and tablet mode
by Jon Robson 22 Oct '14

22 Oct '14

The iPhone 6+ is currently being treated as a mobile device. This is because the thresholds for window.innerWidth and window.innerHeight are 414px by 736px Currently we invoke tablet mode only when one of those values is over 768px. It's hard to get an idea of the sort of traffic we get from iPhone 6+ as it doesn't have its own unique user agent. I looked on James's iPhone 6 and I can confirm that the site generally renders well on it in tablet mode. Once strange thing I noticed however is that if in landscape mode, clicking edit gives you the option of VisualEditor however if you click edit in portrait mode you get wikitext editor with no VE option. When in landscape mode and switching to portrait mode, you stay in VisualEditor but the interface becomes too cluttered. We'd need to make some optimisations to the toolbar in conjunction to enabling tablet mode on an iPhone 6+ See http://imgur.com/JsOOM2K to see how it currently looks in portrait mode. Proposed actions: * Optimise the text 'Editing' next to the title in VE mobile mode * Optimise the VE toolbar for display on a 320px screen - I would suggest hiding the bold and italic buttons via media queries * Drop threshold from 768px to 736px

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early WikiGrok data analysis
by Ryan Kaldari 22 Oct '14

22 Oct '14

I took a look at the early data from the WikiGrok prototypes. None of this data is being posted to Wikidata yet since we want to get an idea of the quality level before we do anything with it. The bad news is we have very little data so far, the good news is that the response we do have are very high quality. We collected a total of 229 responses. About half of them were from a short-lived bug that showed WikiGrok on all articles (for logged in Beta users), a quarter were internal tests, and 45 were legitimate user responses on appropriate articles. All 45 of the legitimate responses were from WikiGrok version A (which is the version in Beta). Of the 45 responses, 42 were definitely answered correctly. The other 3 were ambiguous, i.e. it isn't 100% clear what the correct answer is. As an example of an ambiguous case, a user marked the following claim as true: 'Kailash Satyarthi: occupation->engineer'. The article states that Kailash Satyarthi studied engineering in college, and may have taught engineering, although it is unclear if he ever practiced engineering. The article is mainly about his career as a political activist. The most interesting thing about the responses so far is that there are zero blatantly wrong claims. In other words, it appears that all of the users so far have at least tried to answer the questions in good faith. Only 9 of the 45 claims are anti-claims, i.e. 'John Doe was not a teacher'. It isn't clear, however, if this is due to the fact that negative claims are much harder to be certain about or due to most of the potential claims in the suggestions database being accurate claims. Looking at the data from the bug period (Oct. 16) is also interesting. Due to an API bug, we temporarily surfaced WikiGrok on all articles. This resulted in nonsensical questions like "Was Supersymmetry a politician?" Even in the face of nonsense questions, 94% of responses were accurate. Kaldari

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Collapsing sections in app
by Pine W 21 Oct '14

21 Oct '14

Dan and colleagues, I appreciate the table of contents flyout in the Android app. Would it also be possible to have sections collapsed by default, as happens on mobile web? See for example English Wikipedia's page WP:GAB for a long page that may be easier to navigate with sections collapsed by default. Thanks, Pine

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MediaViewer on mobile
by Pine W 21 Oct '14

21 Oct '14

Hi Multimedia and mobile folks, I have found that I like MV on mobile, particularly when browsing galleries. I have a request. While I can zoom in on an image that is loaded in MV on mobile, I can't pan the zoomed image. Is that a feature in the queue? Thanks, Pine *This is an Encyclopedia* <https://www.wikipedia.org/> *One gateway to the wide garden of knowledge, where lies The deep rock of our past, in which we must delve The well of our future,The clear water we must leave untainted for those who come after us,The fertile earth, in which truth may grow in bright places, tended by many hands,And the broad fall of sunshine, warming our first steps toward knowing how much we do not know.* *—Catherine Munro*

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[Apps] Formalising our release process
by Dan Garry 20 Oct '14

20 Oct '14

Hi everyone, Our current release process does not give anyone outside the team visibility in to when we are doing releases and what is included in them. By virtue of our deployments system being apps, we've not got the same integration as other teams at the WMF. It's difficult for someone like Erik or Greg to, at a glance, know when things are being deployed in Appsland. We should strive to integrate our process more so that the senior management can have visibility in to it. As such, I'm proposing the following process. Beta releases [1] are performed as frequently (or infrequently) as required for testing purposes. The base criteria for a feature going in to beta are that: - The feature has some basic functionality that delivers some value to the user. - The feature does not crash during basic usage. - The feature behaves as expected during basic usage. Production submissions [2] occur on the last Thursday of every month. Features that are currently in the beta are evaluated to see if they should be included in the production release. The base criteria for a feature going in to production are that: - The feature has functionality which provides value to the user. - The feature is aimed to advancing us towards meeting our quarterly goals. - The feature has been QA tested and found to: - not crash even under stress. - behave as expected in typical use cases. - not introduce regressions. - The feature has undergone qualitative or quantitative user testing which validated its objectives. - The feature has clear criteria for success set which are measurable (quantitatively *or* qualitatively), such that post-hoc analysis can be performed about its effectiveness. In a nutshell, the above is simply a formal documentation of our current process, except that we've agreed a specific date to do the submissions, and explicitly included QA (now that we have limited QA resources in The Specialists Guild, and we are set to get more with Elena and Rummana joining us). I plan to officially declare this our release process within a few days, probably on Friday. Thoughts? Dan [1]: On Android, "beta" refers to the Wikipedia Beta app in Google Play, whereas on iOS "beta" refers to our latest build in TestFlight. [2]: As we have a review process on the iOS side due to Apple, which will stretch releases out an unknown amount, I have specifically denoted this phase as "submission" and not "release" so that there is congruence between the iOS and Android teams. -- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps Wikimedia Foundation

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New beta Android version
by Bernd Sitzmann 20 Oct '14

20 Oct '14

I just pushed out a beta release (versionCode 85) 2014-10-20 with the following changes: * Search results ordering updated to be consistent with mobile web. * Use real action bar for pages and navigation changes: ** Back button will revisit saved pages, history, nearby, search, ... ** Search input is collapsed by default. You had to press on the field anyways to bring up the keyboard. ** Search/find in page use standard search component. ** Use horizontal progress bar in action bar when page is loaded. ** Highlight the nav list item that is currently shown. ** On 2.3 devices with a menu button this could result in the overflow menu indicator to disappear; you can open it using the menu button. * Nearby: Long press starts geo: intent (allows to open in Maps, Google Earth) + crash fixes. As always, it'll take some time to propagate. Enjoy, Bernd

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new alpha build server
by Bernd Sitzmann 20 Oct '14

20 Oct '14

For people who are using the Android app alpha apk: Yuvi has switched to a new server at https://android-builds.wmflabs.org/. You can download the latest alpha build from there. Enjoy Bernd

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Mobile-l October 2014