Version 3.3 of WordPress for iOS was announced earlier today. This release introduces Sound Effects and is a minor release (only one enhancement). This is a first example of feature-driven dev cycles.
Announcement is here: http://ios.wordpress.org/2012/12/03/version-3-3/
Tweeted (please RT!):
Version 3.3 Is Here To Be Heard: Announcing Sounds wp.me/pgi3r-l9
— WordPress for iOS (@WordPressiOS) December 3, 2012
Version 1.7 of WordPress for Windows Phone launched today, it features Local Drafts, Media improvements, Post Format support, and the app is now fully compatibly with Windows Phone 8 devices.
The announcement is live here: http://wpwindowsphone.wordpress.com/2012/11/29/version-1-7/
Official tweet:
Introducing Version 1.7: Local Drafts, Post Formats, Windows Phone 8 Compatibility. wp.me/p17dis-4l
— WP for Windows Phone (@WPWindowsPhone) November 29, 2012
Congrats all around!
Mobile Dev Chat Summary for Nov 28, 2012
We’re going to create a WordPress mobile handbook to help new contributors get up to speed quickly when wanting to help out with all things mobile. Some notes:
Join us for the next weekly chat Wednesday at 1600 UTC on irc.freenode.net in the #WordPress-Mobile room.
Sounds release (should be v 3.3):
Ready to go, asking for some final feedback on the sounds on Twitter and in the forums.
Notifications release:
No update, but development is progressing.
1.7 (Local drafts, Windows Phone 8 support):
Complications when submitting, the update doesn’t work as expected for Windows Phone 8 devices. We’re in touch with Microsoft to help resolve the issues, but can only wait right now. Announcement pending.
1.7.1 bugfix update is pretty much ready to go.
1.8 (Moderation and Comments):
Work is progressing. If everything goes well we’ll submit early next week (shooting for Monday), but depends on when we can push the 1.7 and 1.7.1 releases through.
Just a heads up: over the next few weeks we’ll work on moving all the dev blogs, app sites, public blogs, and forums/support over to WordPress.org. This will happen gradually starting with the simple bits (like moving all the /development pages on the various sites) to one central location (most likely on this blog or in the upcoming Mobile Handbook).
We spent a good chunk of time discussing how we should go about feature-driven development in Trac (full log here). In the end we concluded the following:
Feature-driven development enables us to iterate faster and quickly submit app updates when a particular feature or set of enhancements are ready. Any new feature or major enhancement means a version number bump (e.g. 3.X).
We acknowledged the overwhelming amount of “defect” type tickets especially in the WPiOS Trac and recognized that something has to be done about this to build sustainable, bug-free apps. The steps above are intended to deal with this.
Some concerns were brought up as to what the Mobile Handbook would contain. To the best of our knowledge, the Mobile Handbook would have a bit of the same content as the Core Handbook. We acknowledged the guidelines already posted, and that the Mobile Handbook would need at least in part specific sections for each app (because the platforms and how you develop on them are so different). We’ll also want to mention that the apps are on GIT as well as SVN. As previously noted, mrroundhill, koke, and daniloercoli will help write it as the lead developers for their respective platforms. Jkudish mentioned in the chat that he’d be up for providing some pointers for us as he recently got started with mobile development himself.
Join us for the next weekly chat Wednesday at 1600 UTC on irc.freenode.net in the #WordPress-Mobile room.
A little more info on the Handbooks here: http://make.wordpress.org/support/2012/11/handbooks/
Read the chat log.
Version 1.7 was submitted to the Windows Store. It take about a week for it to be approved. This version includes:
We learned that when submitting an app to the Microsoft Store you have to upload images separately for each XAP, and for each language that is supported for that XAP. This is rather time consuming.
There is a milestone for version 1.7.1 that will focus on improvements and bug-fixes. We would like to have it ready by the 23rd.
We’re planning to release version 2.2.5 today. This version fixes a few bugs, including an issue with some multi-user blogs not being able to view Jetpack stats.
Version 3.2.1 has been out a bit and we’re seeing reduced crash levels. Down from 15.48/h in version 3.2 to 12.04/h in 3.2.1. This is roughly a 20% drop. (Yay!)
Koke has fixes in place for some of the remaining crashes, and the thought is the switch to ARC will fix a few more. We’re thinking it probably makes sense to include these in the release of 3.3 than to 3.2.2.
Beau should have a prototype of the new notifications view by the end of the week.
Dan plans to fix a few layout issues on the iPad mini.
Eric is finishing wiring up in-app sounds on the remaining pull to refresh views.
We’ve had a new contributor to WPiOS this past week. fklu is his IRC handle and we’re glad he’s around.
Last week we talked a bit about making the weekly dev chat an hour later now that so many of us are on daylight savings time. Today we took a vote and the motion carried so the weekly chats will now be at 1600 UTC, at least while daylight savings time is in effect.
Join us for the next weekly chat Wednesday at 1600 UTC on irc.freenode.net in the #WordPress-Mobile room.
Read the chat log.
Submitted 3.2.1 to Apple. This is a bug-fix release that fixes the top 10 crashes in the app.
The plan for 3.3 is to add a Notifications panel which would be a WordPress.com only feature.
Version 2.2.4 was released.
Nothing new planned for Android for the time being.
Development for version 1.7 is underway. This version includes:
A beta should be ready Friday, Nov. 9th.
It was mentioned that we’re targeting Windows Phone 8 but currently do not have a device for testing. We’ll discuss internally what makes sense as far as acquiring devices for the team for testing.
Version 2.2.4 of the Android app is available for the BlackBerry PlayBook.
At this point no other releases beyond bug fixes are planned for for the classic BlackBerry app.
Join us for the next weekly chat Wednesday at 1500 UTC on irc.freenode.net in the #WordPress-Mobile room.
We had a short meeting in IRC this week. Chat log.
Version 3.2 was released yesterday and seems to be working fairly well so far. There has been quite a few bugs fixed since we submitted the update though, and there are pending translations, so we decided to issue a bug fix update (will be version 3.2.1). We noted that we need to pay closer attention to the app store reviews as some of them highlight fairly severe issues with the app.
Currently WPiOS trunk is not suitable to work on the bugs so we’ll work in a branch for any WPiOS 3.2.X releases, and move on to have trunk always be functional come version 3.3 of WPiOS.
Join us for the next weekly chat Wednesday at 15:00 UTC on irc.freenode.net in the #WordPress-Mobile room.
Isn’t that how it should? Trunk needs to be the code for 3.3 and bugfixes that also apply for 3.2.X goes then in the 3.2 branch.
Also I don’t really like the post thumbnail feature. You can only set it by uploading an new image and not by using an already uploaded image. Partly this can be done in the image view of all connected images of that post.
Also not that sure about the icons for inserting an image and selecting an post thumbnail.
We’re still trying to figure out the best way to iterate on the app.
There’s currently no way to access existing media on a WordPress website through the app. Once we have that we could offer ways to use images that have already been uploaded in different contexts, featured images being one of these.
What’s the icon and what’s wrong with it?
View the discussion in the chat log.
The team will be adding support for two-step authentication for WordPress.com blogs to the apps for their meet-up project. We want to add support for all four major platforms, time permitting, but will likely focus on WPiOS and WP Android first.
Two-step authentication is an optional feature that adds an extra layer of security to the apps. Our implementation will be similar to what was done with Google Authenticator (source).
We are updating to AFNetworking 1.0 and using this as an opportunity to also update the app to use ARC.
We discussed limiting support to iOS 5.0+ starting with WPiOS 3.3 and everyone present was in support of taking this step. This will let us take advantage of some modernizations to Objective-C, and remove legacy libraries that now have native support (e.g. Twitter, Facebook).
We talked about what to prioritize for WPiOS 3.3 and decided that Notifications and modernizations should be the focus. We will include the rich text editor in this update if its ready to go, otherwise we’ll look to make it the major feature for 3.4.
Last week the team made progress on local drafts and media improvements.
This week development is on hold while we are focused on other things. Development will resume starting Oct. 29th, the week after our meet-up.
No new development last week.
We fixed a few bugs over the weekend.
Danilo had a chat with a RIM representative during the Blackberry Jam in Milan about the posting issue some folks are experiencing and whether there was a bug fix in the works. We’re waiting to hear back from RIM.
The team chatted about the future release of Blackberry OS 10 and what we have planned for the new OS. At this time there is nothing on our road map. The likely option is that the WP Android app will be repackaged for BB10, but several of the team mentioned a desire to create a native BB10 app so we have the best experience. It was observed that this is what Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare have done.
Join us for the next weekly chat Wednesday at 1500 UTC on irc.freenode.net in the #WordPress-Mobile room.
Propose agenda items for the mobile weekly dev chat tomorrow at 15:00 UTC.
Suggesting:
iOS: AFNetworking updated and the looming move to ARC.
A Two Step heads up.
View the discussion in the chat log.
WPiOS 3.2 submitted to Apple App Store review on Tuesday, Oct. 9 2012 and is now awaiting review. In-app notifications view and rich text editing have been pushed to a future release.
In-app sound effects have been pushed to a future release as well.
String translations need to be reviewed. Polyglots will be notified.
The team unanimously chose to implement a native interface for the notifications view instead of embedding a UIWebView implementation. Notification polling will require using REST API use so it would make sense to use the same data for the UI.
The goal is to add some new features that are glaringly absent as well as fix any major bugs for the WindowsPhone 8 launch.
New features:
Development is quiet at this moment. One ticket closed this week to fix a bug.
No new development. WordPress 3.5 is removing the AtomPub API so it needs to be removed as an option from the app.
Join us for the next weekly chat Wednesday at 1500 UTC on irc.freenode.net in the #WordPress-Mobile room.
Eric is discussing.
Hi there, I’ve put together a spreadsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiTZlIvtDmPEdDQxQkV6bGdTN3VWWHVhYlpEU0NENWc
You’ll see the main sections, and you can insert a line underneath the sections for the individual document title. Use – to show a hierarchy. I’ve added some content so you can see what I mean.
I suggest using the following workflow:
1. Create the table of contents.
Add all of the titles of the individual articles you need. Move the rows around to create the table of contents. This means you’ll have a complete list of things that need to be written when you get started.
2. Start Writing
Author puts their name in the Author column, creates page and adds a link. Change the status to In Progress. When you’re done change Status to Needs Editor. It’ll be looked at by an editor. When they’re happy they’ll assign a proofreader. When the proofreader is done they’ll mark it as complete.
Comments can be added to the comments section – this could be on issues you’ve got, or suggestions from the editor.
Where will be build it?
There are a few options:
1. Build it on make.wordpress.org/events/handbook
2. Create another site and then migrate it when we’re done.
I was naturally thinking about building it on events/handbook/ but it could actually be good to set up a site and build it on there. That way we can use something like Edit Flow for comments, create tags and custom statuses, and have a bit more control. Then when the content is done we could migrate it to make.wordpress.org/events/handbook
I don’t mind either way though, and would appreciate any input or thoughts you guys have on it.