Greetings,
As it is the last Thursday of the month, the Mobile Apps Team submitted [1]
its latest work to production. This month the majority of the work was
backend work.
On iOS, the primary user-facing change is that we redesigned the "Credits"
screen to instead by an "About the Wikipedia app" screen. On the back-end,
our network operations code, migrating from a home-baked solution to an
open source networking library called AFNetworking
<https://github.com/AFNetworking/AFNetworking>, which should increase
stability, reduce random crashes and freezes, and reduce the amount of time
we have to spend in the weeds of networking.
On Android, the primary user-facing change is that our app is now more in
line with Google's standards for the look and feel of Android apps. On the
back end, we transformed almost all of our Activities
<http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html> into
Fragments <http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Fragment.html>,
which allowed us to also transition away from our custom-baked
pseudoactionbar to using the actual ActionBar
<http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/actionbar.html>, and is also
a requirement for the app to be featured in Google Play.
We're hoping that next month's releases will contain improvements to search
so that users can find what they need, and on Android we're also hoping to
ship improvements to the styling of the lead of articles so that it's more
consistent, usable, and beautiful.
Stay tuned for future updates!
Thanks,
Dan
[1]: As always, the discrepancy between iOS and Android here means that the
Android update is now live, and the iOS update will be at some point in the
future when Apple is done reviewing the update.
--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation