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
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
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/
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/
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
(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
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…
+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
