Mobile-l November 2014

mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org

27 participants
32 discussions

[Apps] Using Swift for new feature development on iOS
by Dan Garry 10 Apr '15

10 Apr '15

*tl;dr: The programming language used to develop new features by our iOS app engineering team is changing from Objective C to Swift at some point in the near future.* When making a native app, the language you have to implement the app in is chosen by the third party responsible for the platform. For iOS apps, Apple chose Objective C to be the language the app is written in. Objective C is a... very strange language. It has a lot of quirks that slow down development. To solve the above problem, you can now write apps in a new language called Swift. Notably, Swift has features that make it less error prone and more concise than Objective C, which should increase our velocity of feature development. Swift is also much more readable and in-line with other languages, which lowers the barrier of entry (which is currently very high with Objective C). Importantly, Objective C and Swift can live alongside each other. So, when we "switch to Swift" we do not need to rewrite all of our existing code from Objective C to Swift. Instead, we can just start developing new features using Swift, and slowly rewrite the old code from Objective C into Swift as time allows. On the downsides, Swift is only supported on iOS 7 and above. iOS 6 only represents around 5% of our user base, and we can pin iOS 6 users to the last version of the app we released before we used Swift. We need to decide what the last set of features we're want in that build are before we switch. Here are our next steps: - Evaluate more concretely whether Swift actually fits our needs or not. [Engineering] - Decide last set of features for our iOS 6 build. [Product/Design] Thanks, Dan -- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps Wikimedia Foundation

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Pulling the Commons app
by Derk-Jan Hartman 27 Nov '14

27 Nov '14

I propose we remove the Wikimedia Commons app from the store. Clearly there is no time available to work on it, there is no one maintaining it or following up on the problems that have been reported since 2013. Yann is just brining it up on wikimedia-l and I think that it is bad to have an app out there that no on is taking care of. So we should pull it and whoever wants to continue with it can release it under a name of this own. DJ

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[Web+Apps] Introducing KPhab, our new bug migration system
by Dan Garry 26 Nov '14

26 Nov '14

Hi everyone, In light of the Phabricator migration, a few people in the Mobile Web and Mobile Apps teams met to discuss how we're going to handle this. In a meeting with Quim a few weeks ago, Mobile Web and Mobile Apps decided that the long term plan was to switch to Phabricator, but for now we're going to stick with Trello because Phabricator is missing a few bits of functionality that we really like. We communicated these so the team upstream is aware. For now, people will be filing issues with our products in Phabricator. So how do we get those into Trello? We may make Phabello, a tool to automatically import things using the Trello and Phabricator APIs, but that's not on the cards right at this moment. Here were our outcomes of how we're going to interact with Phabricator: - All engineering team members should make sure they're receiving information about bug escalations. Do this by clicking "Watch project" on the relevant projects on Phabricator: - Joaquin, Kaldari, Baha, Rob, Jon, Max, Sam, Maryana: MobileFrontend - Adam, Monte, Brion, Dan: iOS app <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/wikipedia-app-ios-app/> - Dmitry, Bernd, Dan: Android app <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/489/> - Kristen will volunteer to serve as Phabello for now. Say hi to KPhab! The process will be: - Look at all new bugs entered since last standu - Enter those as cards in Trello: - Create card with same title as bug in Phabricator - Add link to Phabricator in the card description - Add link to Trello in the Phabricator bug, saying that the issue is tracked in Trello - Mark bug as "Normal" priority All hail KPhab! Dan -- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps Wikimedia Foundation

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mdot webroot redirects on Wikipedia Zero
by Adam Baso 26 Nov '14

26 Nov '14

Hi, just wanted to give people a heads up about language-sensitive redirects on the m.wikipedia.org/ (and zero.wikipedia.org/) webroot: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero/Accept-Language_Aware_Redirec… Dan Foy, Maryana, and I spoke on this stuff, and we thought it would be best to see how this works in Wikipedia Zero land, and then if it works well, continue dialog for the mobile web Wikipedia webroot afterward for the non-Wikipedia Zero use case. Usually we don't like to vary the cache on Accept-Language, but this is one place where we're exploring the concept. It's possible to try to figure out the language prefix in Varnish, but for now we're trying this as a pure MediaWiki thing. -Adam

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15 mil pr�mios, voc� ja ganho? PROGRAMA DE VANTAGENS CIELO S/A (11674)
by mobile-l＠lists.wikimedia.org 26 Nov '14

26 Nov '14

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Re: [WikimediaMobile] [Wikitech-l] Open source mobile image recognition in Wikipedia
by Tomasz Finc 24 Nov '14

24 Nov '14

CC'ing mobile-l to let them know of this Exciting to see projects like this showing up. I do notice that it's not compatible with Nexus5, Nexus7, and a number of other standard devices. Looking at your manifest it should just work. Did you put in a Google Play restriction on which devices it works on? --tomasz On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 2:25 AM, Adrien Maglo <adrien(a)visualink.io> wrote: > Hello, > > > I am not sure this is the right mailing list to introduce this project but I > have just released Displee. It is a small Android app that allows to search > for images in the English Wikipedia by taking pictures: > https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.visualink.displee > It is a kind of open source Google Goggles for images from en.wikipedia.org. > > I have developed Displee as a demonstrator of Pastec http://pastec.io, my > open source image recognition index and search engine for mobile apps. > The index hosted on my server in France currently contains about 440 000 > images. They may not be the most relevant ones but this is a start. ;-) > I have also other ideas to improve this tiny app if it has an interest for > the community. > > Displee source code (MIT) is available here: > https://github.com/Visu4link/displee > Pastec source code (LGPL) is available here: > https://github.com/Visu4link/pastec > The source code of the Displee back-end is not released yet. It is basically > a python3 Django application. > > I will be glad to receive your feedback and answer any question! > > Best regards, > > > -- > Adrien Maglo > Pastec developer > http://www.pastec.io > +33 6 27 94 34 41 > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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Update on QA resources assigned to Apps and Editing
by Dan Garry 24 Nov '14

24 Nov '14

Greg, James, Kristen, Rummana, Elena and myself met today to discuss our next steps for the QA resources assigned to Editing and Mobile Apps. We decided that both Elena and Rummana will split their time roughly 50% between Editing and Apps. As we agreed that QA should be integrated into the teams, Elena and Rummana will attend the standups and meetings of both teams. This will help ensure that both QA testers are aware of ongoing feature development and can allocate themselves accordingly. That said, we acknowledged that with any assignment of our very limited QA resources, there would be need to be some inherent flexibility. Perhaps the Editing Team needs more QA than normal one week due to a big release, and perhaps the Mobile Apps Team needs more in a different week. That flexibility is agreed going in, and we can evaluate that on a week-by-week basis. Although both testers will test for both Editing and Apps, there will be primary points of contact for QA in both teams to ensure continuity of communications: - Elena will be the primary point of contact in QA for Mobile Apps - Rummana will be the primary point of contact in QA for Editing Mobile Apps will continue to engage with The Specialists Guild for broad regression testing and testing of compatibility with different versions of the iOS and Android OS. The success of this arrangement will be reevaluated in early February, or sooner if deemed necessary. Thanks, Dan -- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps Wikimedia Foundation

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[Web] Spike: Explore using CSSLint/LessLint in mobile
by Bahodir Mansurov 24 Nov '14

24 Nov '14

After reading benefits of CSSLint there is no doubt in my mind that we should use it. Here [1] are some of the benefits. They range from possible errors to compatibility to performance, etc. With grunt we can use grunt-lesslint [2], which employs CSSLint under the hood so we can also tweak it using CSSLint rules. What do you guys think? [1] https://github.com/CSSLint/csslint/wiki/Rules <https://github.com/CSSLint/csslint/wiki/Rules>. [2] https://github.com/jgable/grunt-lesslint <https://github.com/jgable/grunt-lesslint>

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Chinese Wikipedia
by Jon Robson 24 Nov '14

24 Nov '14

I spoke to some Taiwanese students learning English (with help from a translator) about Wikipedia, Wikimedia and mobile. Age range was 17-35 so quite a mix. I was hoping I'd find some developers in the room but sadly no so I focused the talk around using the mobile site. Interestingly everyone here used Wikipedia, but when I asked them if they used the mobile site of Wikipedia they all said no. When I probed more I discovered "Google" was where they got their information. I managed to confirm that they were going to Wikipedia but most of them didn't realise. Some things I notice: * They actually were disappointed they couldn't upload images anymore. Most wanted to edit but didn't know how. Post wikigrok it would be interesting to see if we can use the saving mechanism there to queue up uploads to the site. * When I showed them Listen To Wikipedia they got really excited and registered straight away just to see their name. Interesting tactic we might want to explore for signups :) * They struggled with the captcha when registering (surprise surprise). It's English words not Chinese words. I notice everyone has WiFi passwords here that are numbers. It would be interesting to explore captchas that involve numbers if that is at all possible. * In the language overlay in 3 out of 3 cases where people have used it they all seemed to scroll down, no one realises they can search for the language at the top. That's a UX problem I guess we need to fix. * When they have flicked from Chinese to English Wikipedia and then use the search bar at the top of the page to search for information they type in chinese and expect search terms to show up there. * They didn't seem to recognise the hamburger as a menu icon * They asked to edit and surprise surprise I saw lots of templates in every example I tried. The keys to the templates are English e.g. in infoboxes. I think this makes a strong argument for being able to edit infoboxes from wikidata (I've got an example below). Today is my last day working remotely from China but I'm happy on my travels to do anymore Chinese research if you find this interesting and want to know more about potential Wikipedians here :) Example infobox: {{Taxobox | color = pink | name = 斑尾鹃鸠 | status = LC | status_system = iucn3.1 | image = MacropygiaUnchall.jpg | regnum = [[动物界]] Animalia | phylum = [[脊索动物门]] Chordata | classis = [[鸟纲]] Aves | ordo = [[鸽形目]] Columbiformes | familia = [[鸠鸽科]] Columbidae | genus = [[鹃鸠属]] ''Macropygia'' | species = '''斑尾鹃鸠 ''M. unchall''''' | binomial = ''Macropygia unchall'' | binomial_authority = (Wagler)<ref name='id2051'>{{cite web | url = http://www.bioinfo.cn/db05/BjdwSpecies.php?action=view&id=2051 | title = 斑尾鹃鸠 | work = 《中国动物物种编目数据库》 | publisher = 中国科学院微生物研究所 | author = 中国科学院动物研究所 | accessdate = 2009-04-04 }}</ref> }}

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Fwd: [Web] Spike: Explore using CSSLint/LessLint in mobile
by Derk-Jan Hartman 24 Nov '14

24 Nov '14

I notice I accidentally only sent this to Joaquin. DJ ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Derk-Jan Hartman <d.j.hartman(a)gmail.com> Date: Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 4:07 PM Subject: Re: [WikimediaMobile] [Web] Spike: Explore using CSSLint/LessLint in mobile To: Joaquin Oltra Hernandez <jhernandez(a)wikimedia.org> Ehm, I tried working with CSSLint several times and in my opinion it simply doesn't (yet) work at our scale. We have WAY too many overrides. It also horribly fails on anything that is not known to it yet (new browser specific properties or values) and it doesn't have 'comment' overrides to ignore warnings or errors (at least last time I checked). If you are starting from scratch it is great (I even contributed a few patches to it), but I found it horrible to work with (unlike JSHint) in real world practice where exceptions are simply the norm to make stuff work cross platform. If you want to use it, plan on spending quite a bit of time tweaking upstream. DJ On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 9:45 AM, Joaquin Oltra Hernandez < jhernandez(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > CSS is a beast and any help is going to be useful. > > As Jon said, we probably need a longer spike/task to see if any other > teams are doing CSS linting and there are already conventions we can use, > and to determine what validation rules we want to use. > El 21/11/2014 2:53, "Jon Robson" <jrobson(a)wikimedia.org> escribió: > > Which rules would MobileFrontend be able to use from the start? >> Which rules might be controversial to adopt? >> >> >> On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 9:00 AM, Bahodir Mansurov >> <bmansurov(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: >> > After reading benefits of CSSLint there is no doubt in my mind that we >> > should use it. Here [1] are some of the benefits. They range from >> possible >> > errors to compatibility to performance, etc. With grunt we can use >> > grunt-lesslint [2], which employs CSSLint under the hood so we can also >> > tweak it using CSSLint rules. >> > >> > What do you guys think? >> > >> > [1] https://github.com/CSSLint/csslint/wiki/Rules. >> > [2] https://github.com/jgable/grunt-lesslint >> > >> > _______________________________________________ >> > Mobile-l mailing list >> > Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org >> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l >> > >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Mobile-l mailing list >> Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l >> > > _______________________________________________ > Mobile-l mailing list > Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l > >

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Mobile-l November 2014