Repository navigation
4. FAQ
The Stories library is an Android library which provides your app users with a single screen where users can compose and edit colorful slides. It was originally designed for WordPress for Android, but can be used in your project as well.
The Stories library is a creation tool, but not a viewing tool. The viewing experience for the Story itself is not part of the library yet, but since the output is a collection of simple media files, you can build your own viewing experience.
On iOS we're using Kanvas. While this is not a 1:1 translation of the Stories library, it provides most of the composing tools needed in order to get creative. On iOS, the Stories arrangement is being handled elsewhere in the WordPress for iOS app. The good thing is WPiOS is open source, and Kanvas has recently been released as open source as well.
At the moment of writing, there were 2 broad options: Camera2 API and CameraX (which is actually a library that wraps and hides some of the complexities of Camera2 API). We allow using one implementation or the other in our CameraBasicHandling class, but ultimately we stick to CameraX as that's the platform recommendation. Important note on this: as of today (May 2021) we're stuck with version alpha-06 of the library, given the Video capture use case is still in development and that was the version that offered best results for us. See this open draft PR for more information on the state of things regarding CameraX upgrades.
Given this tool allows your users to create media they'll want others to consume, we optimized the output for viewing (consumption). The majority of devices out there are 9:16 or a taller variant of that and as such, we decided the simplest way is to standardize at 9:16.
Fonts are downloadable for the most part and should be easily extendable with some tweaks on the library side. For now there are no plans to add more fonts.
This library is open source and is released under GPLv2
Currently, this library is being used in the WordPress for Android open source project. You can see the announcement here. The github project for WordPress for Android is here.