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marnanel posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
dwimWhat? 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:
I'll post more in the next couple of days as I write up my notes. Feel free to post and discuss too.
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'll post more in the next couple of days as I write up my notes. Feel free to post and discuss too.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-13 10:22 pm (UTC)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).
no subject
Date: 2016-01-21 08:45 pm (UTC)I've made a tentative UX post here: I'd welcome your thoughts. http://dwim.dreamwidth.org/1025.html