[Devel] Android app for working with OpenHatch

[Mark Freeman]

I completely get that.  I certainly would not think "missions" would
be something that would be usable on a phone based app.  From my
perspective, it's the communication/gateway aspects of OH that are
best exposed this way. Things like looking through recommended bugs
and being able to email yourself the link when you find something
interesting, or being able to look through info on projects and hit a
button for wanting to help, those types of things I can see being very
useful.

All of that being said, Jack makes a good point in that it brings up a
long term maintenance issue.  Because of that, I actually questioned
whether it wouldn't be better to just provide a mobile layout of the
website (think http://m.safaribooksonline.com/), rather than native
apps. Then you wouldn't need to worry about iPhone users, Blackberry
users, etc.

Jack/Parker, should this actually come to fruition, you both have
great ideas for what could be useful!

So question for everyone on the list, if you had a mobile app
interfacing to the site, would you use it?  If so, what aspects of the
site would you use?


On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 12:27 PM, Asheesh Laroia <asheesh at asheesh.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 23 May 2011, Mark Freeman wrote:
>
>> Good morning everyone.  I wanted to see what you all think about
>> something.  My day job is as a Java developer.  One of the few perks is that
>> I get to do some Android development for our Enterprise application, letting
>> users view data through a REST service.  I'm VERY interested in working on
>> an Android app that would allow people to interact with OH through their
>> mobile device.  My thoughts were that it would mimic much of the
>> functionality of the site, viewing suggested bugs, the I want to help
>> button, viewing the profile, etc. Hypothetically, the server side stuff
>> should be just a view pushing out data returned from methods that already
>> exist.
>>
>> I could totally use the practice on Android and I really think it would be
>> a cool feature.  I have a thick skin if everyone thinks this bad idea.
>> Thoughts?
>
> Hi Mark! I guess here are my thoughts.
>
> Generally, I don't really think this would be all that useful. When you're
> trying to learn how to get involved in free software, it seems to me that
> you're going to have to use a computer (to do things like learn about
> svn/tar, or to do things like write documentation or patches that are the
> contributions themselves).
>
> If you're interested in making your original plan happen, then by all means
> go ahead! It will require some extra (trivial) views on the main site's end,
> in terms of exposing more data. To the extent that you'd be willing to
> actually build that API by submitting patches in that regard, that'd be
> totally exciting from my perspective. Even just specifying what you need and
> getting someone else excited about making it would be make me happy. (-:
>
> It might be possible that there's some middle-ground of content that's
> particularly useful for people on phones but that escapes me at the moment.
> Actually, putting our future-theoretical-web-forum thing or videos about
> what it's like to contribute to various projects; that might be really
> interesting.
>
> So my feeling is "I'm glad you're enthusiastic about it! But I'm not
> really". I don't meant to be too much of a downer.
>
> --
> -- Asheesh.
>
> http://asheesh.org/
>
> Of course you have a purpose -- to find a purpose.
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