Sorry for the strange layout, the proposal editor of google is awful and I was too lazy to improve the layout for my journal entry :).
Project
General project description
The overall goal of the project is to develop an iPhone application, which allows the user use Dreamwidth. I discussed on the dw_dev community and on my journal, what the people would like to see in an iPhone application.
The final outcome was that the community likes to have following features:
- Post entries / comments
- Read "Reading page"
- Read inbox and send messages
- Manage profile
- Granting access / subscribing to users
- Multiple account support
- editing comments / entries
- iPad friendly
The iPhone application will communicate with the dreamwidth server via the Live Journal protocol.
Unfortunately I do not have an iPad to test later on, but I already tested the simulator and I guess it is sufficient to develop it based on the iPad. In addition already two users mentioned that they would love to test the iPad application.
The best way to get a first glance of the features and the navigation is a activity diagram:
Remarks: The initial node represents the main menu.
In addition to the previous mentioned features I would like to introduce a function called Favorites. You can add any user to your favorites. Finally it is easy to access a journal with 2 clicks (one for opening favorite list), another one for navigating to the users journal.
UI
I am not so good in photoshop, so I started to implement a prototype of the iPhone application and made some screenshots to get you a first impression. Unfortunately I did not find the time to complete all of the important views in the application, but you can get a first impression of my intent.
This is the main menu. From here we can access all the features. The switch button will lead us to the next screenshot / view where we can easily and fast change the accounts.
The "Switch Account" view, just select another user to switch the account. With the plus in the top right, we can add additional accounts.
This is one of the features you can reach via the menu icons, the Reading Page. Here we display all the entries on the users Reading Page. The username is clickable and will lead to the journal or profile of the user (we have to think about what is best). If the entry was posted in a community we also display it here and a click on that link will navigate us to the community. We also display a fragment of the whole entry (again here we have to think about how much of the whole entry we want to display). A click on the entry will navigate us to the detailed entry view, where we display the whole entry, users icon, comments and additional functions (see activity diagram).
The layout is of course not the final one and I would do a lot of enhancements (other font, adjusting of fonts, colors etc.), but like I said I want to give you a first impression, how I think we could display the data.
Roadmap
General
1. Discussion of functionality and layout proposal with the community. Get feedback on the suggested ideas. (until May 24th)
2. Implementation of client (until August 9th)
3. Acceptance testing together with the community (until August 16)
4. Continue and enhance the project (open end)
Milestones
Milestone 1 > June 20th
- Setup project
- Read "Reading list"
- Post entries / comments
Milestone 2 > July 16th (Mid-term evaluation)
- Manage profile
- Multiple account support
- View other users profile
- Editing comments / entries
- Granting access / subscribing to users
Milestone 3 > August 9th
- Read inbox and send messages
- iPad friendly
Milestone 4 > August 16th
- final testing including acceptance testing
The milestones are not fixed and open for discussion with my mentor and maybe the community, but they give a brief overview of the project plan.
Other question / answers
There are some other answers you request I did not mention yet:
Your email address: jenslukas@gmail.com or contact@jenslukas.com
Your Dreamwidth username (if applicable): jens
Have you submitted a patch to Dreamwidth before, or participated in another part of our community?
Unfortunately not, I started playing around with my dreamhack and will soon start to work on some bugs, bugsy is throwing around :)
Are you familiar with Perl and web application development concepts such as security, AJAX, HTML/CSS, cross-browser compatibility, etc?
Like I already mentioned I just started with perl, but I had a course on web security in Norway and had to take this into considerations always when I developed web applications.
I am also familiar with HTML / CSS, AJAX and cross-browser compability. I did a half year internship at a web company, where my main focus was on testing (selenium), PHP development
and all those stuff included. I made pretty much use of the javascript libraries jQuery and mootools and really like this AJAX stuff (as long as it is not too much :)).
Bonus: Do you feel that web sites should continue to support IE6? Why?
No. I see no reason to continue support for IE6. People should be forced to update their browser, because IE6 is an open door to your computer and security updates are no longer provided. When web site owners start to stop support
for IE6, even people not aware of the risk will upgrade.
Conclusion / Remarks
I hope that you got a chance to get to know me a bit better and that I mentioned relevant details of my idea and how I want to accomplish its realization.
In case of any questions, do not hesitate to contact me. For further documentation of my progress I would like to use my journal.
Code examples
Maybe you woud like to see some code examples. I uploaded some code examples at http://luklabs.de/CodeSamples.zip. Please read the included README file for more information. Contact me anytime if you wish to see more / other code.
In addition, I will post the current source code of the iPhone app tomorrow on my journal, for those who are interested in...
