Connexions Sprint at Plone Symposium East

We are holding a coding sprint as part of the Plone Symposium East. Developers from across the globe have come together to improve Plone, the software Connexions is built on, and to improve Connexions itself. We will be working today and tomorrow if you want to join us. Info about the sprint is at rhaptos.org. Click on one of the links at the top of the page for details.











Coders gather to discuss sprint options.

Connexions Sprint participants at work. We have developers from US, South Africa, Sweden, Mexico, the UK and Vietnam working on Connexions today. Most are in the room, but some are working with us remotely.

New Release of Connexions for Android

Version 1.5 of Connexions for Android has been released. It contains cosmetic and usability changes along with a bug fix. The changes include:

• Search is now a popup window instead of a separate tab. This makes search quickly and easily available on every screen. I also removed the Google search. Only Connexions search is used now.
• The app is a little more colorful and better looking.
• Added option menus to all of the views. List views previously only had context (long press) menus. The long press menus are still there and necessary for some operations.
• The Lens tab is now the Content tab. Added Connexions Featured Content to the Content tab to allow new users to quickly find something to view. I will probably add the new content feed to this tab at some point.
  
• Added a one time popup Toast message that explains a little about using the app. It is only displayed the first time a user opens the app after installing it.
• Fixed a bug that caused the app to force close when the orientation was changed when viewing a list of lens items.

I made most of these changes after reading the Apple User Interface Guidelines in anticipation of writing an iPhone app for Connexions. The previous versions of the Android app were made with functionality in mind, not looks. If you have tried the app in the past and were unimpressed, please try it again and give us some feedback. I want to continue to improve it.

As always, the code is open source and is in our repository. You can download the app directly from Connexions or from the Android Market. If you try the app and find it useful, please leave a comment in the Android Market.