Welcome

[marnanel]

What? Dwim is (going to be) an Android client for Dreamwidth.

Why? A lot of people have been asking for this over the years. It hasn't happened because of DW's lack of workable API: the current API was inherited from LJ, and hasn't been updated to handle DW-specific features.

I have experience here. When I first wrote Joule, LJ's API didn't support the search it needed. So it worked by scraping-- that is, requesting the pages as if it was a browser, and parsing the HTML directly. Dwim should work the same way. It's especially easy with DW, because you can request pages without any styling in the way.

How? I've got a lot of ideas, but I'm carefully not diving in to coding it before we've talked about it here :) In particular we should discuss:

• the UI
• how the back end will work
• caching
• whether and how we deal with posting while offline
• what we're going to do about including images (especially for "share to DW")
• what toolkits would be appropriate
• whether anyone wants to help with coding or design or documentation
• a roadmap of what features should appear in each iteration

I don't know much about iOS development, so my horizons here are limited to Android. If anyone does, that'll be useful to know.

I'll post more in the next couple of days as I write up my notes. Feel free to post and discuss too.

Comments

Thanks for working on this!

[brainwane]

I am grateful that you are working on this! I've seen several friends say "argh" about the current Dreamwidth experience on mobile. I signal-boosted this community in dw_dev.

A Google Summer of Code student in 2010, i_xerxes, worked on an iOS client -- relevant info, code, etc. I don't know whether that's at all useful to you.

You might also be interested in this discussion about speccing out a better DW API.

Re: Thanks for working on this!

[marnanel]

thank you! that's all useful stuff.

Re: Thanks for working on this!

[deborah]

The spec I have been working on with allen is more recent than that but we haven't talked about it publically yet (not for any good reason; just because that sets expectations of timelines and things). We be happy to share that work.

Re: Thanks for working on this!

[thistleingrey]

Thank you for your post there, and thank you to marnanel for working on this!

[deborah]

Hi! allen and I have been working on an ios client, which has meant reworking the API. WE'd be happy to collaborate!

We have an API spec we ran by mark which we have been working from; should we post it here? We have work which is so skeletal nothing is commited but that could change.

[marnanel]

Wonderful! Yes, please do.

[mark]

+1!

[swaldman]

Woo! I don't have the competency to help much with this, or the time to learn, but I am willing to offer design feedback and testing, of both the UX and QA varieties.

Initial thought : what does an app gain over a good mobile website (which is admittedly something that DW doesn't really have right now)? There's probably more, but the big two in my mind are Share to DW, and offline use (reading and writing).

[marnanel]

Pretty much those two, yes.

I've made a tentative UX post here: I'd welcome your thoughts. http://dwim.dreamwidth.org/1025.html

[zaluzianskya]

This is a great idea! I can't offer anything in the way of coding, but I can help test.

One thing I want to float out there -- even though I'm sure it won't come up until waaaay down the line -- is the idea of a quick username switcher; allowing users to store multiple usernames and associated passwords for rapid-fire logging in and out. That would come in major handy for a lot of users who have multiple accounts.

[marnanel]

Good plan. As you say, it'd be further down the line, but it's good to think of it now so we can plan around it.

[ephemera]

I have no useful technical know-how to offer, but enthusiastic cheering on of the idea, that I can do :)