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What needs to be done

Chris Blyth edited this page Nov 26, 2013 · 4 revisions

#What needs to be done

I would regard Tweet Lanes as containing a reasonable amount of the base features users expect from a Twitter client, but the app is by no means feature complete.

There's still plenty that could be done. And that's where you come in right?

Firstly, here's what I'd like to see stay the same:

  • The Context Tweet Box. For me, this is the feature I am most proud of with Tweet Lanes. As well as being unique, I also think it is a more intuitive way of composing tweets than displaying a new ComposeNewTweetActivity or something similar.
  • The blatantly-stolen Holo styling. I think the fact that Tweet Lanes looks like it was 'born from the fires of Android Design' is a positive. Coming up with good looking UI is tough. Really tough. And I chose to piggyback off the professional work of Google rather than coming up with something different, but in all likelihood less pretty, myself.
  • I very much subscribe to the "before asking if you can, first ask if you should" mindset. This is especially true when it comes to settings.

Features I see as being the most pressing:

  • Clean up the loading and caching of images from a URL. Two systems are currently in place, which is not ideal. I would go for using the latest, stall-free version of UrlImageViewHelper across the board. Making this change should also help greatly help with the app's overall smoothness.
  • Make it smooth. Scrolling in Tweet Lanes is pretty janky ATM. The silky-smooth Carbon is the benchmark here.
  • Optimize the layouts. There is not nearly enough blue on the main feed currently.
  • Username/Hashtag autocomplete.
  • Notifications. There's a shell service in place to handle this, but I never got around to implementing it.
  • Cache tweets/users in a database.
  • Add background sync (this would likely be dependent on caching data in a database)
  • Tweetmarker support. The API component of this has been implemented in TweetMarkerAPI.java, but it needs wiring up, and likely background sync and caching of tweets needs to be implemented first.
  • Revert to using a single press rather than a long press for selecting tweets.
  • There's plenty of others (a widget, keyword filtering, trends, attaching location to tweets, etc.)

What I think would be cool to try:

  • Remove the Tweet Spotlight. I never felt right about implemting this, but I did so simply to try and best match Twitter, Inc.'s Display Requirements. I think this screen is largely superfluous for Tweet Lanes. Instead, I think it could be cool to add a two-finger downward swipe to reveal the conversation for a tweet (ala the Jelly Bean's rich notifications). An overflow button could be displayed on an expanded tweet, containing an option to display the people who retweeted that tweet in an alert dialog similar to "+1'd by" in G+.
  • Incorporate Twitter's Connect functionality. This API is not available publicly, but the API call can easily be found by snooping on twitter.com...
  • Possibly there's an opportunity to change the layout to use a SlidingMenu instead of scrolling tabs. Falcon Pro does a fantastic job of this IMHO.