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  • Sayak Sarkar 8:53 pm on August 7, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
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    GSoC – Week 8: Bugs and Pages 

    Those Pesky Creepy things called “Bugs”

    Last week went a bit slow due to some unavoidable personal reasons, however, I managed to identify some major bugs that had cropped into the Composer Code. Most of these were basically layout related bugs affecting the general layout at varying device widths, however the two most significant bugs that are yet to be resolved via code were concerning the layout of the WYSIWYG toolbar and scroll-ability of the Composer page.

    It seems that the best solution for the first problem would be to remove the toolbar from above the textarea and replace it with a floating toolbar over the onscreen keyboard. A few simple CSS tricks should be quite able to take care of this problem.

    The second problem is a bit tricky though. Ever since I changed the layout of the composer to a single page layout, the scroll-ability of the page seems to have been disabled. This is most likely the result of using overridden fit-able classes, however, I’m yet to investigate further into this problem. I plan to take on this bug sometime later this week and get it done.

    Developing the Pages Module

    The next thing that I started with this week was implementing the Pages module. After doing a brief comparison between the Pages and Posts module, it was pretty clear that Pages is pretty similar to Posts and requires almost the same code with a bit of reduced functionality. The way I implemented this was by rewriting the same code as the Posts module with a few exceptions in the Composer functionality, mainly the removal of Categories, Tags, Status and Post Format functionalities from it.

    Next Steps

    The major work that I will be undertaking this week would be fixing the WYSIWYG and scroller bugs after the Pages module is completed. Once this is done, I would start with a few unfinished functions within the Preview module, and move on to a bit of Styling details.

     

  • Isaac Keyet 6:47 pm on August 5, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
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    Dev chat summary for Aug 5, 2013 

    Chat log

    Agenda

    • iOS Status
    • Android Status
    • Handbook Update
    • Next Week

    iOS Status

    Version 3.7 is still not submitted and the team is working hard on getting it ready. There are still some minor issues but most can probably be in a subsequent bug fix release. Issues are being tracked here. Patches welcome!

    Android Status

    We pushed out a beta of the Categories but it’s been buggy. Plan right now is to submit on Wednesday. We got a patch for adding excerpts to the app so we’ll be looking into that as well this week. Media and Theme selection is coming along nicely.

    For the new native WordPress.com Reader, it was a bit of a slow week. Commenting is working now and performance is improved. For now it’s kept as a separate app to speed up development, but eventually it’ll be merged into the main app.

    Handbook Update

    There’s a new handbook todo list in town, check it out and tick off items with your name on it! @sendhil is going to take a look at the iOS side this week. @aerych noted that it’d be great to wrap up the handbook by the end of the month and that we should make that the goal.

    Next Week

    For next week the plan is to…

    • Submit v. 3.7 of the iOS app, adding the new and improved native WordPress.com Reader and fixes,
    • release the Android categories update,
    • continue working on iOS7-ifying the iOS app.

    Join us for the next dev chat on Aug 12, 2013 at 16:00 UTC. Mark your calendar and join us in #wordpress-mobile on Freenode.

     

  • b0unc3 5:05 pm on August 1, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
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    GSoC – week 7 : midterm is here 

    This week has been marked up by the upcoming midterm evaluation. I would like to do a little summary of what I’ve done till now.

    Once I’ve started the Google Summer of Code, with the help of my mentor, we both decided, as for what was on my schedule, to start the project by making some mockup/skecth of the UI. This was a first exciting step for me, since I’ve never used ( in a ‘professional’ way ) those kind of tools, my mentor suggested me to use Balsamiq to do this stuff; a new tool to learn, but I think it is worth it, I’m quite sure I’ll use it again (sooner or later).
    After this, that maybe has taken some more time than usual since it’s new for me, I’ve started making some code. I’ve improved my skills on Cascades and tried to make a good looking UI. Using Cascades and dealing with the layouts was nice, there are a lot of different layours for different situations and choosing the right one without trying the rest is a risk, so I’ve tried a pair of these, and then I choosed the one that, for me, fits best for the purpose I need (and is also pretty to see).
    Later on I’ve made some code to implement the login process, but, the first move I made was partially wrong. Well, the problem is that the login process is a bit more complex than I had imagined. Anyway, thanks to the great help of my mentor that gave me a good understanding on what are the necessary steps to make a good login process, at last, I made it. The next big move has been to integrate this piece of code, in order to connect it with the interaction from the QML. It has been a little bit harder to do since Cascades connects the C++ classes in a different way than the pure QML does (that is what I’ve already used in the past), but, after some headaches, I got it working. So the big login part is almost over.
    The current situation is then: a working UI with the fileds (username,password,blog address) to make the login, and a button, that once pressed, it will make some C++ call(s) to deal with the network stuff, downloading/parsing XML/HTML and do all the other required steps for the login process.
    Recently I’ve implemented a function to make a new blog post (currently without media). It is in an early stage, but, as far as I can tell, it seems to work.
    For the next week(s) I will take care about the UI, the representation of the posts (I think I will go with the classic listview). I will also implement some more functionality and moreover, try to understand which features are necessary (or mandatory) to implement and decide where to place it (from a layout point of view).

     

  • Dan 9:12 pm on July 31, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
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    A new beta of WordPress for Android is ready! This release has some great updates to selecting and adding categories:

    • You can now remove individual categories from a post instead of being forced to clear them all out at once.
    • The category selection view is now properly sorted by sub categories.
    • Adding a new category will be properly inserted in the category list instead of at the bottom.
    • Adding a new category won’t clear your currently selected categories any longer.

    It also includes some minor bug fixes as well. Tap here to install the latest build!

    If all goes well we will release this on Monday as version 2.4.3. Here’s some screenshots of the new category views:

     

  • Sayak Sarkar 7:17 am on July 31, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
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    GSoC – Week 7: Midterms are here – The story so far! 

    How It All Started and What’s the present Scenario

    I got started with the project during the early stages of GSoC by getting myself accustomed to Enyo.js 2.2 which had clearly been completely overhauled from the 1.0 version. For this, I started by developing a few sample apps using Enyo.js just to get the hang of it.

    Once, I had become comfortable enough with the basics of Enyo itself, it was time to get started with the real work. I started by looking into the codebase for the existing app and trying to upgrade the code itself to the newer version of Enyo, which to be frank turned out to be futile exercise, as the differences between enyo 1.0 and enyo 2.2 are massive. Hence, the daunting realization of writing the whole app dawned upon me.

    At first, this looked like a huge challenge, given the limited time frame of GSoC itself, however, once I got started with it using the Enyo 2.2 bootplate things got much easier. Soon I had a basic layout for the composer ready which was a massive achievement for me as it is most reused component of the app, which is at the heart of all components which is used by the user to post data, like – Posts, Comments, Pages, etc.

    The next thing that I started working upon is the Posts list view, which is identical to that of the Android app. A simple scroller with a list of the post titles separated by horizontal lines.Tapping on each title, would show the content of each post. The next thing that I started working with was the Preview functionality. Currently, I’ve a working version of the Preview component working on my local instance, however, it needs a bit of styling modifications to get completed.

    In the meanwhile I’ve also worked upon a bit on the styling elements for the app such as the icons and color combinations, however until now they are not a priority of the first order, as getting the core functionality done is the first priority. I’ve also been actively designing and redesigning the Composer module a lot to make sure that its at par with the peer applications on iOS and Android.

    Future Work

    Currently I’m working on finishing the Post/Preview/Publish components bundle. This should ideally be complete within the next couple of weeks after which I would be concentrating on implementing the login and stats modules. After this part is complete I would be moving on to the styling part of the application. All in all the project is due for a in-schedule completion.

     

  • Eric 8:03 pm on July 29, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
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    Updated Mobile Handbook Todos 

    Here is an updated todo list for the Mobile Handbook. I’ve put names next to some items as a suggestion of who might be a good fit for a topic and in most cases I’ve doubled up our developers since they have big demands on their time. Its not complete so please feel free to grab an item that interested you or take your name off a topic to let someone else have a go.

    I’ve also consolidated some items into General Guides to avoid having some single page sections. Some of the pages don’t have stubs and need to be created. The contents list on the handbook front page is a little out of date at this point and we might just remove it and go off what is in the sidebar TOC. Its going away at some point anyway.

    iOS

    I moved the UI Guidelines stub to the Contribute Style section since it seems a better fit there. The “Enabling Safari’s Web Inspector on iOS” topic from Tips and Tricks might be a good fit under Tutorials and Guides.

    Other Apps

    I think it makes sense to devote a short page to each of the other platforms so I’ve added those items. I think the content can be an abbreviated version of what we’re doing for the other platforms. Push back if I’m off in left field here.
    Also, we have some great documentation that Sayak wrote for the webOS app that could probably have a home here.

    Contribute Design

    I’m not sure we need to include styles for the legacy BlackBerry app, mostly because there is more demand for native BB10 and we’re not actively involved in legacy BlackBerry dev. @daniloercoli do you have an opinion about this?

    Support Help

    XML-RPC & API Contributions

    I’m not sure what this section was supposed to be about. Maybe we’re talking about native libs that interface with XML-RPC and other APIs? If we’re talking about XML-RPC itself it would belong to the core handbook.

    General Guides

    Credits

    There has been some conversation about the best way to denote a page’s status: drafting, draft, editing. The handbook pages don’t seem to support tags, so I wonder if it would work to just append the status to the title. This way it would at least be easy to see a page’s status at a glance from the admin. Thoughts? If we like this idea I’ll go through and update the page titles for Rachel.

     

    • Eric 3:29 pm on July 31, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I’ve updated titles to reflect their status (drafting, review, reviewing) and stubbed out some missing pages.

    • daniloercoli 10:45 pm on August 6, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I’m not sure we need to include styles for the legacy BlackBerry app, mostly because there is more demand for native BB10 and we’re not actively involved in legacy BlackBerry dev. @daniloercoli do you have an opinion about this?

      Don’t think we need to include a style guide for the legacy BlackBerry app since we’re only doing critical bug fixing for that app. The demand is for a native BB10 app.

  • Eric 4:50 pm on July 29, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
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    Dev chat summary for July 29, 2013 

    Chat log

    Agenda

    • Project Status (iOS and Android)
    • Handbook Update
    • GSoC Update
    • REST API GSoC Project
    • Next week

    Project Status (iOS and Android)

    iOS

    Version 3.6.4 was approved by Apple Friday, Jul 26, and we released it today, Monday, Jul 29th to make sure we had folks around for the release. . This version includes crash/bugfixes and g+ integration.

    Version 3.7 will be submitted to Apple Tuesday, Jul 30th. This version includes the new native reader and a new account storage system.

    Android

    Lots happening on the Android front. Active projects include:

    • category management overhaul
    • media library access
    • theme switching
    • native reader

    We’ll announce a beta this week that includes the new category management feature and we’ll plan for a new release next week. The rest we’ll target a date around the 1st of September.

    Other platforms

    No updates for other platforms.

    Handbook discussion

    Last week we had a few todos for the mobile handbook. @sendhilp has jumped in and started writing some of the iOS content. @mrroundhil swept the Android section and confirmed its up to date. @aerych spent some time on the “intro” section.

    Work will continue this week. @aerych will put together a new todo list of the things remaining for the team. We’ll also figure out a good way to identify which pages are ready for review and which pages are still being worked on.

    GSoC Update

    We’ve reached the GSoC midterms. @aerych and @daniloercoli will be summating their midterm evaluations this week.

    Both GSoC students hit some unexpected snags early on but have worked to overcome them and to get their projects back on schedule.

    REST API GSoC Project

    @mrroundhill gave the team a heads up about the ongoing REST API GSoC project http://make.wordpress.org/core/2013/07/24/json-rest-api-testing-updates and thought it would be cool if we could jump in and help test.

    Next Week

    iOS

    Release 3.7. Continue work on 3.7.1 which includes some improvements to the native reader that won’t make it into 3.7 and some other bug fixes.

    Android

    Release the updated categories feature as version 2.4.3.

    The next dev chat will be on Aug 5, 2013 at 9:00AM PST / 16:00 UTC. Mark your calendar and join us in #wordpress-mobile on Freenode.

     

  • Jorge Bernal 9:08 am on July 26, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    3.6.4 is approved and waiting for us to release. I’ll release on monday because we know better than to release on a Friday ;)

     

  • b0unc3 6:01 pm on July 25, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
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    GSoC – week 6 : things get serious 

    During this week I’ve realized that I should completly re-write the login process. Speaking with my mentor, he gave to me some hints and some steps to follow, to make a good login process.
    These steps, at a first attempt, looks simple overall, but, integrate it in Qt/Cascades was a bit hard. To be honest, the most hard part has been to decide how to parse the HTML to find some useful tags (e.g. Some tags that should contain a reference to the xmlrpc endpoint). The first idea that comes up in my mind was to use a regular expression to do it. But, by reading some articles online, many devs say that is not good to parse HTML using regular expression. Just a mandatory quote from a comment on stackoverflow:

    “Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions, the unholy child weeps the blood of virgins, and Russian hackers pwn your webapp. Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living. HTML and regex go together like love, marriage, and ritual infanticide. The cannot hold it is too late. The force of regex and HTML together in the same conceptual space will destroy your mind like so much watery putty. ”

    Well, I’m quite agree with that, I get the point, but, in this situation, I think I can use a regular expression, without offending anyone, mostly because I had to catch some tags (two at max!).
    So, I come up with a discovery function, that following these steps, ‘sanitize’ (somehow) the ‘Blog Address’ input, switching on determinate actions in base of the input.
    Nowdays these steps have been fully implemented in Qt and integrated (but not completly yet) in Cascades. While I’m writing, I found a little problem with the Qnetwork stuff, but it should be fixable within this week.
    I’ve also created a very first draft of a possible function to implement the necessary API call to make a blog post. For the next week, my milestone, is to fully implement that function and make it work, to get it ready for the midterm evaluation.

     

  • Sayak Sarkar 9:18 pm on July 24, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
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    GSoC – Week 6: A bit of graphics work to add to all the coding. 

    IMPROVING THE NEW POST USER INTERFACE

    Continuing my work from last week, this week I made a few modifications to the Composer UI, to adapt it better to the somewhat restricted 320x480px screen area.

    The primary problem with the previous UI was that the Save Draft and Publish buttons for the app, present in the header toolbar area would disappear out of the screen, due to space restrictions. To solve this issue, I replaced the text based buttons, with icon based buttons so as to reduce the required screen space. I have replaced the preview, save draft and publish buttons with the following three icons respectively:-

    Preview, Save Draft and Publish Post Icons

    Preview, Save Draft and Publish Post Icons

    HANDS-ON GRAPHICS WORK

    Earlier, I started working with a set of icons that I had very generously “borrowed” from the WordPress for Android repository. However, one week in and somehow these icons didn’t really looks quite well on the onyx based design layout for the Firefox OS app. I realized that the colors just weren’t bright enough for Onyx.

    Hence, I decided to jump into a bit of graphics work and put my old graphics skills to some use. I have come up with a new set of icons [still a work in progress!] for the new layout. Basically these are quite simply a re-creation of the existing icon sets with a matte white finish. As of now I have the following set of working icons:-

    Back Icon

    Back

    Drawer

    Drawer

    Preview

    Preview

    Post

    Post

    Refresh

    Refresh

    Add Post

    Add Post

    REUSING THE COMPOSE INTERFACE

    The most reason why I seem to be spending a lot of time fine tuning the new post interface is because, it’s going to be a reusable module, which will be recycled into the New Page and New Comment modules, with small customizations here and there. This is turn means that ensuring that the new post layout is completely done means completing the major portion of work on the Posts, Pages and Comments modules, which is pretty much the bulk of the project. I reckon this should be complete in entirety within the next 2-3 weeks [Posts/Pages/Comments].

    CURRENT STATUS AND NEW DEVELOPMENTS

    This week I have already committed a bulk of the work done to the SVN repository other than the previously mentioned bit of work.

    The next thing that I’ve started working upon is the Preview module. I already have a basic implementation of the same on my local stub, however, the code is still pretty messy and the UI needs quite a bit of work. For this purpose I’ve begun development of a new Preview kind for the module, which would essentially grab the data off the Compose form and show a basic preview. I expect that a basic version for this should be ready in a week. Also, I reckon this module can again be reused by the New Page module, and most importantly this one can be modified to develop the Page/Post View module.

    DEVELOPMENT ROADMAP

    As per my earlier schedule for the project I have moved on to the development of newer kinds for the enyo source, which means the project is right on schedule at moment. However the completion of more reusable modules means that I would have some extra breathing time to concentrate on fine tuning things making the layouts prettier. If all goes well, we should have a 0.1 alpha of the app ready by the end of August/early September, complete with login, posts, pages, comments and stats modules.

    Since the completion of Posts module warrants the completion of Pages and Comments modules in quick succession, the remaining modules: login and stats should be the next major milestones to be completed within September.

     

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