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.

Version 1.4 of Connexions for Android Released

Version 1.4 of Connexions for Android was released today. It adds 2 new features and fixes a file downloading bug. The new features are a File Management screen that can be used to open or delete downloaded PDF or EPUB files and Pinch and Zoom was added to the web view for devices with Android 2.1 or above. The bug fix corrected a problem with phones rebooting while downloading a large PDF or EPUB file.

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.

Connexions Adds Like and Tweet Buttons

Last week, we released the addition of Like and Tweet buttons to all Connexions content. I thought I would share some of the details of coding the change. When we first discussed adding the buttons, we all thought it was going to be a quick and easy addition. Just grab the button code off Twitter and Facebook, tweak it a bit and off we go. We were very wrong.

Facebook changed how they display links while we were in the middle of developing the change. They started pulling some of the content for a thumbnail of the text instead of just displaying the title. Because of the way we structure our content, Facebook was pulling the definition of a EPUB file that we have embedded for a help popup for every piece of content that was "liked". To get around this, we added the content summary or abstract to a META tag in the content header. There were some additional problems with embedded CNXML in some of the collection summaries which were solved by creating a new function to provide a plain text version, and using that for the meta tag contents.

Thinking the buttons were ready to go, we started testing the devset. All went well until we tested in Internet Explorer 8. The addition of the Tweet button caused IE8 to no longer render math. The problem was caused by the JavaScript from Twitter creating an iFrame for the Tweet button interacting poorly with other javascript on the page. Rearrange where various bits were called lead to results ranging from nothing on the page rendering to any one functionality being missing (math, twitter, dynamic menus, etc.) The ultimate solution was to create the iFrame ourselves instead of letting Twitter's code handle it.

Many thanks to our developers, Phil and Max and our sys admin, Ross who worked to get this done.

Apply for Google Summer of Code Projects

Starting today, students can apply for Google Summer of Code projects. Connexions has been selected as a participating organization and we have 2 projects students can apply for. The deadline for applications is Friday, April 8. Get your application in today!

Connexions Accepted into Google Summer of Code 2011

We are proud to announce that Connexions has been selected as a participant in the Google Summer of Code (GS0C) 2011. We will be looking for some great upperclassmen or grad students to help us complete our two GSoC projects. Our projects involve using Google Docs as an editor for Connexions and enhancing our author profiles. Students can review GSoC projects and apply at the Google Summer of Code site. Thanks to all that had a hand in Connexions being selected.

Consortium Technology Committee -- Working on focus and plan for the year

The Connexions Consortium has a technology committee charged with the technical direction, planning, and development of the Rhaptos software that powers Connexions and Enterprise Rhaptos.

The committee met just before Connexions Conference 2011 in February to start putting together a development plan for the next year. To start the process, we had everyone around the room suggest things that are strategically important for Connexions and Rhaptos. After a bit of discussion and consolidation we ended up with 11 focus areas and then had people “pitch” them to the group, explaining who they would benefit and how they would help achieve the Connexions/Rhaptos mission. The committee then voted on our top three focus areas. These focus areas are by no means exclusive or exhaustive. They just give the committee concrete goals to work on as a group. The following three areas had the most energy and we will be following up with each.

1. Strengthening the Development Community, with an emphasis on upgrading to Plone 4 to expand the base of developers available.
2. Creating APIs -- In order for members and others to build things that are not tightly integrated into Rhaptos, we need to have well defined APIs (application programming interfaces).
3. Authoring: Authors and educators need easier authoring tools in order to share their OER (open education resources).

Do you have specific suggestions, additions, comments? Do you want to participate more actively with the committee? Please comment here, or email cnx at cnx.org with your feedback.

First Weekly Plone 4 Sprint A Success

We put a call out to the Rhaptos developer community for help with migrating Connexions to Plone 4 and the response has been tremendous. We held the first of the weekly all day Sprints yesterday. The Connexions development team worked with developers in South Africa, the UK and the USA to get Connexions on Plone 4. We had multiple check-ins to our version control and made progress on

• Account Creation
• Login
• Search
• Workspaces
• Unicode Problems
• Content Rendering

We also ended up with some great documentation on how to get our Plone 4 devset running on Ubuntu. Huge thanks to all that participated. We will be holding the sprint every Wednesday until May 18. Join us!