Weekly Dev Chat Summary for Jan 23, 2013

This week’s chat log.

Agenda

  • WPiOS Status and What’s Next
  • Navigation UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. for WPAndroid
  • WPiOS Sign Up Wireframe Discussion

WPiOS Status and What’s Next

Version 3.4 of WPiOS has been submitted, the main new feature is a Notifications panel for WordPress.comWordPress.com An online implementation of WordPress code that lets you immediately access a new WordPress environment to publish your content. WordPress.com is a private company owned by Automattic that hosts the largest multisite in the world. This is arguably the best place to start blogging if you have never touched WordPress before. https://wordpress.com/ and Jetpack-enabled blogs. It also features stability improvements.

A bug fix update is in the works, in which the UI/UXUX UX is an acronym for User Experience - the way the user uses the UI. Think ‘what they are doing’ and less about how they do it. around Notifications will be improved further. Tickets going into this bug fix update will be listed on the WPiOS TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/..

We’re also working on better Previews for WPiOS, this will likely be the next major version of WPiOS – would be v 3.5 then. Since we have feature-based dev cycles this may be subject to change though. Any new contributors should jump in at #wordpress-mobile on Freenode to a mobile group member for starting work on any major new feature.

Navigation UI for WPAndroid

Background.

We decided to iterate on the UI in an upcoming WPAndroid release:

  • Add ActionBarSherlock and ‘convert’ our homegrown action bar to the native one
  • Remove the ‘dashboard’ home screen and instead put the items in a slide-out menu
  • Make small style updates around the app (lists etc) to better conform to the Holo UI pattern

Tasks delegated so far:

Previews is also in the works, @koke says it’s about half-way there. Whatever finishes first will be v. 2.3.

WPiOS Sign Up Wireframe Discussion

Background courtesy @karmatosed.

We had a discussion around what a sign up flow for WPiOS could look like, based on the wireframe. We like the direction but concluded that some basic improvements to the sign up/login flow might be nice altogether. The team highlighted plans to remove the “Select Blogs” step from the set up flow altogether, but this doesn’t have to happen at the same time.

We decided that another round of wireframes may be in order that ditches the first screen altogether and moves straight into a combined self-hosted/WordPress.com log in form. We want to make sure there’s enough space there for some explanatory copywriting and that there are ways to highlight fields and provide additional instructions (at least for the URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org field). We’ll wait to discuss more until we’ve seen some more wireframes.

It was a big discussion, if you’re interested be sure to check the chat log.

Next week

The next dev chat will be on Jan 30, 2013 at 16:00 UTC. Mark your calendar and join us in #wordpress-mobile on Freenode.

#dev-chat