Mobile-l March 2015

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[Apps] Summary: Sprint 53, Android (16 March - 29 March)
by Dan Garry 06 Mar '15

06 Mar '15

Hi everyone, This is the summary of the work the Android team is planning on tackling in sprint 53. You can see the full workboard in Phabricator <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/mobile-app-sprint-53-android/>. This will be our final sprint this quarter, so our number one priority will be to fix bugs that come in from the release of the Share a Fact feature to the Wikipedia Beta app yesterday. It's our goal to get this feature out into a production release by the end of the month. We're going to be spending some time trying to figure out if there's a good way to strip/collapse information that's displayed in the first sentence. A particularly blatant example of the problem can be seen in this image <https://trello-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/54f9fbdb2ddb36b3be7f1cf9/984x75…>, where the sentence is broken up by pronunciation information. We recognise, however, that stripping this information completely (like Hovercards does, in the right screenshot) is suboptimal because it causes too much information loss. In the long run, we think Wikidata descriptions serve this use case better, but we want to see if there are any quick wins to be had in the mean time. We're going to meet on Monday to explore solutions. We're going to push ahead with deploying our first iteration of the mobile apps content service as an experimental API in RESTBase. When it makes it to production, this service will give performance increases to all users of both the iOS and Android app by performing work currently done on the client on the server instead. The largest performance increases would, fittingly, be on the devices that suffer the most from performance issues. Yay! Finally, building on the work in the current sprint to cache pages to the file system instead of RAM, we'll be performing some refactoring of the way that the app uses a WebView <http://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebView.html> to display content, trying to reuse a single WebView rather than creating and destroying new ones for each navigation event. Users of less powerful devices have been experiencing random crashes and out of memory errors, and our work will help address this. If you have any questions, feel free to let me know! Thanks, Dan -- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps Wikimedia Foundation

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beta testing win
by Amir E. Aharoni 06 Mar '15

06 Mar '15

Hi, Just wanted to say how happy I am that the mobile team releases beta versions of the iOS app! Thanks to this bugs like https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T90032 can be reported and fixed. It's the whole point of beta testing, but I like saying it out loud and not taking positive things for granted :) -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

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Android Wikipedia beta app release
by Bernd Sitzmann 05 Mar '15

05 Mar '15

The next episode in this season of "Android Wikipedia beta app releases"[1] has been produced and published. Right after a short wait[2] you can enjoy a new feature right on your Android device screen: - New beta feature: Share a quick fact from a Wikipedia page as an image card on Twitter or other social networks. Either use the share menu from the overflow to share some text from the lead section or select some text from the article and tap the share button to use the selected text. - Toolbar adjustments: dark toolbar and some more adjustments[3] Cheers, Bernd [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia.beta [2] to get today's apk from the Play Store -- it takes a few hours to get it propagated as always [3] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/192916/

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Android Arsenal: libraries for Android dev
by Bernd Sitzmann 05 Mar '15

05 Mar '15

FYI, while searching for Android libraries I came across the Android Arsenal site[1], which is a directory of libraries for Android. Warning: I admit it got me a bit sidetracked because of all the interesting links there. On there it also has some best practices and pattern links. One of the many I like is [2]. My Design layout attributes patch[3] was inspired by it. I couldn't resist. -Bernd [1] https://android-arsenal.com/demo?sort=rating [2] https://github.com/futurice/android-best-practices [3] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/194263/

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[ios] re-mapping your Xcode hotkeys to uncrustify
by Brian Gerstle 05 Mar '15

05 Mar '15

Now that the iOS app is using uncrustify to standardize code formatting, we recommend that you setup the BBUncrustify Xcode plugin <https://github.com/benoitsan/BBUncrustifyPlugin-Xcode> to reformat your code instead of using Xcode's default Re-indent functionality. *Optional*: if you want to re-map Ctrl-I (default re-indent hotkey) to use uncrustify, you should first remove the default mapping in Xcode: 1. In Xcode, go to "Preferences" and click the "Key Bindings" tab 2. Search for "indent" and remove the key binding for Ctrl-I [image: Inline image 1] Now add an application keyboard shortcut for Xcode: 1. Open the System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts > Click + 2. Set the application to be Xcode 3. Set the menu title to an action title, e.g. "Format Selected Lines" 4. Set your shortcut, e.g. Ctrl-I [image: Inline image 2] Happy code linting! Brian P.S. You can also use this approach to set shortcuts for any other functionality! You might want to run "scripts/setup_git_hooks.sh" to install the uncrustify pre-commit hook. -- EN Wikipedia user page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Brian.gerstle IRC: bgerstle

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Re: [WikimediaMobile] [Apps] Tracking task for hackathon projects
by Dan Garry 04 Mar '15

04 Mar '15

(moving to mobile-l) Excellent work! Compared to the "easy" tag this list serves a different audience; short tasks for total newbies for the "easy" tag, as compared slightly more involved tasks for more tech-savvy but apps-inexperienced devs for this tracking task. Could you also tag a few more tasks as "easy" so we've got both bases covered for the Hackathon? Thanks! Dan On Wednesday, March 4, 2015, Dmitry Brant <dbrant(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > Hey all, > > I created a tracking task for aggregating hackathon-worthy projects > related to our apps (feel free to add other blocking tasks to it). We can > use it for organizing and submitting our proposals for Lyon, Wikimania, and > beyond: > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T91510 > > This is specifically for tasks that would benefit from some level of > collaboration (with volunteers and/or other teams), rather than simple > bugfixes. > > I linked to it from the Lyon Hackathon task: > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T89084 > > > -Dmitry > > -- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps Wikimedia Foundation

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Android: evaluating third party libraries
by Bernd Sitzmann 03 Mar '15

03 Mar '15

Since I'm evaluation third party libraries for onboarding, I thought it would be good to create a checklist[1], similar to what the iOS engineers did. If you'd like to propose changes to that checklist you can either add something to the talk page or reply to this mail. Thanks, Bernd [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Apps/Team/Android/Thi…

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Re: [WikimediaMobile] [Apps] Wikipedia Lite app?
by Florian Schmidt 03 Mar '15

03 Mar '15

+1 for this idea. I still have an Android 2.3 device, but the Wikipedia app (and others too) is very slow and becomes more and more unusable, while it's agreat user experience on my Android 4.4 device. If dropping 2.3 support means a faster development of the main Wikipedia app and the <2.3 users still have access to Wikipedia through a lite app (which will be faster and more usable) i would say: do it, it has advantages for both sides :) Florian Gesendet mit meinem HTC ----- Reply message ----- Von: "Dan Garry" <dgarry(a)wikimedia.org> An: "mobile-l" <mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, "Carolynne Schloeder" <cschloeder(a)wikimedia.org>, "Toby Negrin" <tnegrin(a)wikimedia.org>, "Lila Tretikov" <lila(a)wikimedia.org> Betreff: [WikimediaMobile] [Apps] Wikipedia Lite app? Datum: Sa., Jan. 31, 2015 06:45 Hi everyone, Those of you who were at the Mobile quarterly review heard me mention Facebook Lite, an app that's designed especially for the developing world. Notably, their app has a lot of optimisations which make it good for users in developing world: It's only 252kB, good for limited data plans.It supports down to Android 2.2, good for older devices.It's data-efficient, good for 2G connections and for people on limited data plans. From a development perspective, some advantages are: You no longer have to support older versions of Android in your main app. You can tailor the performance of the lite app to the older devices so it's faster.You can tailor the features of the lite app to the developing market.So obviously there are a lot of advantages for our users if we do this. And, selfishly, I can't stress enough how much dropping Android 2.3 from our current app would speed up development. As an example, almost all of the edge cases with lead images occurred on 2.3 devices, and they required quite a lot of investigation and hacking to fix them up. Obviously we've not dropped 2.3 so far because it's a very strategically important part of our user base, which I'm sure Carolynne can attest to! I'd say that we should put some serious thought into whether we'd prefer to have a Wikipedia Lite app for the developing world, rather than our current "one app to rule them all". Comments? Questions? Dan -- Dan GarryAssociate Product Manager, Mobile Apps Wikimedia Foundation

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Mobile-l March 2015