What's everyone working on this month? (September 2016)

[Sannyasin Brahmanathaswami]

The app is called

"SivaSiva"  and the main source of content is not (as Jacque said) from

www.hinduismtoday.com

but from 

http://www.himalayanacademy.com

 The app endeavors to provide a more facile interface to a vast array of media resources on the web site via mobile;   AND some interactive edutainment content on top of static media delivery (audio, images, video, ebooks, web pages are all easy), to support the spiritual life of Saivite Hindus, but the app does not sell anything as such… and will be approachable by pretty much anyone with any level of interest in eastern thought….  goal is just to provide a rich "buffet"… take what you like,  no preaching or pushing anything.  

I wanted to have a highly module, "pluggable" architecture where we can have many separate components (called "modules")  allowing for independent parallel development that can then be added easily to the app, but all of which will use common libs. But allow different developers to work independently (somewhat, we do have to coordinate closely on Asana…) 

 Andre Garzia created the overall framework and I finally had to get my Git Hub skills working. We have a mix of binary LC stacks for the top "Views"  where we try as best we can to abstract as much code as possible  "out"  to text only libs/behaviors and/or LC binary stack libraries we can call from anywhere

I worked up use cases with input from over 40 beta testers and we followed a "professional" recommendation by getting them to write full "personas" and the app seeks to meet all the needs of a wide ranges of users.  

Interesting problems: From our users requests we end up with a rather huge set of requirements. From 14 year old girls who want answers to questions. to 55 year-old pharma exec who spend 3 hours commuting and needs audio in his car, to "dedicated" practitioners who want to track progress in their reading/exercises to "fun stuff" like coloring and puzzles and "two clicks to content" for people on the go… 

They would rather just be able to go to one app… 

but  making a "robust" (some would say "bloated")  app  
where at least in the "west" we see many  small apps… into one "mega app"  (which is more popular in China and Korea…) and still make it navigable, actually fit on the phone etc. is challenging. But certainly interesting!  So we have a lot of discussion about tracking, "hoisting" (letting users push what they like to the front of the app) 

Collaborating with GIT newbies (= me and Jacque) where many of the files are LC binaries and Jacque and I get the willies when we see "merge conflict" is another fun game we are learning.

The new browser widget has had issues and libURL +TSNet upgrade also causing some issues, but we have so much content to develop I move to that while waiting for the new LC upgrades. 8.1RC2 should pretty much let us run with our ideas with nothing in the way!

This app is scary big… wish us luck!

We will probably open the source a bit later… in case anyone is interested or would like to help/participate.

Svasti Astu, Be Well 
Brahmanathaswami
www.himalayanacademy.com

 


On 9/1/16, 10:50 AM, "use-livecode on behalf of J. Landman Gay" <use-livecode-bounces at lists.runrev.com on behalf of jacque at hyperactivesw.com> wrote:

    2. I'm also a team member for Brahmanathaswami's project to get the 
    entire Hinduism Today web site into Android and iOS apps. This is an 
    ambitious undertaking given the extent of their existing content. They 
    have a beautiful site: <http://www.hinduismtoday.com/> So far, no 
    particular problems outside of some bugs the LC team has corrected. The 
    app will support artwork, quotations, music, narration, and more. This 
    is fun stuff to work with. BR himself did much of the coding, I'm mostly 
    implementing the mobile port and some optimizations.