Mobile App (Android variant) review/ General Suggestion
!-- I'm gonna apologize in advance if this is going to be long, because i kinda focused on the technical part. Take a grain of salt, because that's just my opinion! thanks. --!
Soo, I've been using the App for quite some time now and compared it to my personal variant of the app and looked into the code, here's what I've found:
- There are some faults with the overlay and animations. The development team might want to take a look at Google's MD guidelines, they're really convenient and a good way to redesign. Many old libraries and calls (mainly supportv4) are handled via the newer AppCompatv7 in a smoother way.
- Instead of fixed elements, i suggest dynamic ones (the hamburger menu is enough, I wouldn't say there's a need for another swipe activity from the other side to trigger the login screen). Also, a WebView with shared cookie access (via db/sqlite) sometimes is easier to manage than creating a Fragment. Although, the Fragement solution is design-wise a better option in combination with the hamburger menu
- There are small redundant calls, optimizing the code will lead to a faster performance on all devices as you know.
- The chat. Oh boy lol, where do i start. It's not that it's bad, but the implementation is a bit poor. While having the Chat.Main as a Fragment activity, inflating another Fragment for each chat would be a very convenient way to style and enhance the performance. of course there will be difficulties achieving this, but it'll most likely prove to be a solid method. (main problem would be retrieving data, JSON/ JScript should be implement-able via additional libs in AndroidStudio).
There are other things which i noticed, but those would be the main ones to outline. As always, I don't mean to say that the devs behind the app did a bad job, but rather I'm very happy with the app, because it shows that it has alot of potential and still works very well. Also a huuuge shout-out to the devs, ty for making 7cups go mobile in a convenient way for iOS and Android and the hard work!
Btw, Android 7.x support seems to be missing, but I'm sure it'll be added soon! (Tested on a personal built 7.0 on S7E).
Thanks for reading this, have a wonderful day ahead!
PS: Any other suggestions/ feedback on the App is welcome here, I haven't found a proper thread so i just started this one!
@Krinkthemellowunicorn @DevTeam
@KrinkTheMellowUnicorn @DevTeam
Ahh, okay! That's something which i partially recall from one of our conversations, yes, but i honestly forgot that the app has used trigger.io as "base". Thanks for clearing that!
Of course then my points would be somewhat not true because the app isn't native.
I'd just have following to add:
Right now I do have a partially functioning client for 7cups, essentially a secure login + Material Design updated with regular functionality and access to everything important. just the forum management is missing. (of course I'm not testing it straight with 7cups, I'm using a pretty similar custom page to simulate). Once i got that done, I'd pass on the finished project to you, so you might want to take a look at it and probably use, it shouol be a single config file in the end. (well that's what i aim for , I'm sure that's a dream in the end hehe).
If i recall correctly, i hinted at this project but that was awhile ago in our chat. now i finally do have some time to continue working on. I'm sure there will be some argument as to why I'm doing it, but it's just that i feel i might help a little because it's fun.
As a last note, i do hope trigger.io implements the material design lol. Accents are a beautiful way instead of fixed bg for any menu drawer.
thanks for reading!
@Saadatx - looking forward to seeing it.
We have plans to migrate to a Cordova-oriented dev process in the future, in our "copious spare time" lol
Btw, one thing i noticed it how similar triggerIO is to PhoneGap. I've tried compiling a variant with PhoneGap and it was terribly slow, that's just my result tho. These "webcompiler" aren't too bad, but in my initial testing it was a tad slow.
(In case you're wondering how I'm testing that; I've setup a set of hooks which "highjack" the original 7cups app data and put it as shared data so my test apps can utilize them. So basically the 7cups app works as a router to relay data to my test builds.
That's just on Android sdk24, a certain framework (xposed) is necessary which isn't compatible with sdk25.
I do want to apologize if my descriptions are terrible, my English got a bit rusty haha!
What about a spy apps for android? Did u tested this app?
@vondes - why would we want a spy app?