feat: add hot network questions widget #144

G-Rath · 2023-06-25T04:14:53Z

Description

This implements the widget aspect of #142, which I realised is the main thing that is important to me - I'm happy to edit that issue to explicitly remove the ask for a view, but figure it's not a big deal as this still the meat of what's needed for that too.

~~Overall this is pretty complete, there's just a couple of minor things I need to address - specifically:~~

ensuring the widget can recover from a bad state, especially as I think Android kills it for taking too long to load initially
- I think this can partly be improved by ensuring the refresh onclick handler is registered asap, but also know this is because I'm probably incorrectly doing async calls i.e. I should be deferring the load of the hot questions to the background or something...
its possible to get the widget/app into a state where it doesn't open the question; I'm pretty sure this is related to create vs resume logic, because when it happens the app doesn't disappear the question details content
- I think I know how to fix this as I spent an annoying amount of time initially figuring out how to get the app to open specific questions (namely I was having trouble with the intent extras getting passed around, until I discovered I had to give a unique request identifier and action) but have not had the time to try it out yet
misc. UI improvements, like having the refresh button actually show feedback when touched and ideally be grey (for some reason android:tint works but android:app doesn't...), and ideally it would be nice to have the question title text size itself according to content to always fit like the original widget (though that's not critical imo)

I've tried my best to do things sensibly but this is my first time writing Koltin and my first time working on such a big Android app so I totally expect and am prepared to be told parts are wrong and that they should be redone - this is also why I've not written any tests.

I'm happy to keep working on this, but would appreciate help and guidance from some folks with more experience with Android and Koltin 😅 hence opening this as a draft until I've addressed some of the above.

Checklist

I self reviewed the submitted code
I ran ./gradlew ktlintCheck detekt before submitting this PR
I ran the app on a device/emulator or added unit tests to verify this change

Resolves #142

G-Rath · 2023-07-02T00:40:15Z

I think I've gotten it as good as I can for now by myself - there is still a bit of an annoying initial loading UX race that goes on that isn't helped by how long it can take to load the list afresh, but I think it sits in the OS space (in particular, I think sometimes the widget is delayed because Android itself has delayed processing the intent) and I've not found anyway to handle that better.

Ultimately this boils down to users just having to sometimes press the refresh button a couple of times initially - this is actually consistent with the original widget, which is also why I think it's more of an Android OS thing.

Also I couldn't figure out the bug where the app would sometimes open on the old question and not switch to the new one - while I've had this happen frequently, I've not found a consistent way to reproduce it and it always can be fixed by just refreshing the widget to a new question so I don't think it should be worried about for now.

Finally, I ended up decompiling the APK for the original app to have a look at the layouts so the widget now resembles the original a lot more (not that it was too differently, but mainly the refresh button is now better and gives visual feedback)

G-Rath · 2023-07-02T00:53:31Z

@tylerbwong I've run the majority of CI locally and confirmed it passes since GHA won't run without approval :)

tylerbwong · 2023-07-02T01:22:33Z

@G-Rath This is awesome, thanks so much for your contribution! I'm unfortunately a little busy right now and haven't had much time to work on Stack lately, but I'll hopefully be able to get to this in the coming weeks. Again, thanks so much for your hard work!

tylerbwong

This is awesome! Always wanted to find a use-case for a widget and this is perfect. Just a few comments, but it's lookin' good 👍

app/src/main/kotlin/me/tylerbwong/stack/data/repository/NetworkRepository.kt

app/src/main/kotlin/me/tylerbwong/stack/data/site/SiteInterceptor.kt

tylerbwong · 2023-07-10T01:33:16Z

app/src/main/kotlin/me/tylerbwong/stack/ui/widgets/HotNetworkQuestionsWidget.kt

+    }
+
+    private suspend fun buildRemoteViews(context: Context, question: NetworkHotQuestion): RemoteViews {
+        return RemoteViews(context.packageName, R.layout.hot_network_questions_widget).apply {


Would you be open to exploring Glance? It uses Jetpack Compose to build out the UI for widgets. Also open to merging this as is and making it a follow-up.

Yup happy to do that as a follow-up

app/src/main/kotlin/me/tylerbwong/stack/ui/widgets/HotNetworkQuestionsWidget.kt

tylerbwong · 2023-07-10T02:18:40Z

4x2 Widget	Widget Selection

This is what it looks like for me when I run it on API 33. Is there a reason why I can't resize them?

app/src/main/AndroidManifest.xml

app/src/main/res/xml/hot_network_questions_widget_info.xml

G-Rath · 2023-07-10T19:18:59Z

This is what it looks like for me when I run it on API 33.

That's odd - would you mind playing around with a smaller minWidth setting? My guess is that it's because thats dp based (and probably why in Android 12 you can specify cells rather than dps but the min android version means we can't use that for now).

When I'm back on the laptop I use for doing Android, I'll look into what values the original app was using too.

…prove question title textview id

…tions

…space

G-Rath · 2023-07-13T20:15:28Z

@tylerbwong ready for another look - I've also adjusted the minWidth and minHeight of the widget to match the values used by the original widget; this might resolve your size problem, but if not could you play around with those values as I suspect that's what's doing that.

tylerbwong · 2023-07-15T07:14:25Z

@tylerbwong ready for another look - I've also adjusted the minWidth and minHeight of the widget to match the values used by the original widget; this might resolve your size problem, but if not could you play around with those values as I suspect that's what's doing that.

I think those values looks fine. Can we also look into specifying targetCellWidth and targetCellHeight for newer API levels? More info here.

Seems like there are other sizing attributes to use as well:

android:minResizeWidth="40dp"
android:minResizeHeight="40dp"
android:maxResizeWidth="120dp"
android:maxResizeHeight="120dp"
android:resizeMode="horizontal|vertical"

G-Rath · 2023-07-15T07:18:09Z

I didn't think that you could use them with the min android level, but maybe I'm wrong.

I'm on mobile right now so if you're comfortable would you mind just pushing up the min cell sizes if that's the last thing needed to land this? Otherwise I can try take a look over the next couple of days (or as a follow up if you're happy to merge as is for now)

I don't think it makes sense to allow resizing though because the widget is only really designed for one size - which makes sense because titles are generally less than three lines...

tylerbwong · 2023-07-15T07:17:57Z

app/src/main/res/drawable-hdpi/ic_refresh_light.png

Can we use the asset studio to generate this icon as a vector drawable?

I can update this real quick after it lands. No worries.

tylerbwong · 2023-07-15T07:18:14Z

app/src/main/res/layout/hot_network_questions_widget.xml

+<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
+    android:layout_width="match_parent"
+    android:layout_height="match_parent"
+    android:background="#FFFFFF"


Should this be hardcoded? I think we should let the app theme take care of this.

I can update this real quick after it lands. No worries.

tylerbwong · 2023-07-15T07:21:52Z

I didn't think that you could use them with the min android level, but maybe I'm wrong.

I'm on mobile right now so if you're comfortable would you mind just pushing up the min cell sizes if that's the last thing needed to land this? Otherwise I can try take a look over the next couple of days (or as a follow up if you're happy to merge as is for now)

I don't think it makes sense to allow resizing though because the widget is only really designed for one size - which makes sense because titles are generally less than three lines...

I think they would just get ignored on newer API levels, but I agree that resizing probably doesn't make much sense. Never mind then!

tylerbwong

Thanks for the awesome contribution!

G-Rath · 2023-07-15T07:40:57Z

No worries, thanks for landing it! How long does it usually take to get published to the play store?

tylerbwong · 2023-07-15T07:42:09Z

No worries, thanks for landing it! How long does it usually take to get published to the play store?

It's been quite awhile since I've published a new release to the Play Store. There was never a set cadence, just when there was something new/stable enough to release.

There have been a few changes since the last release so I have to do some testing, but I will try my best to land it within the next week or so.

G-Rath · 2023-07-15T07:46:55Z

Sweet as - let me know if you find anything that could help address, and I'll see what I can do

G-Rath marked this pull request as ready for review July 2, 2023 00:40

tylerbwong mentioned this pull request Jul 10, 2023

Refactor Appending Site to Each Request #147

Open

tylerbwong reviewed Jul 10, 2023

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app/src/main/AndroidManifest.xml Outdated Show resolved Hide resolved

tylerbwong reviewed Jul 10, 2023

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app/src/main/res/xml/hot_network_questions_widget_info.xml Show resolved Hide resolved

G-Rath added 20 commits July 14, 2023 07:49

feat: create initial widget

c67a0b8

feat: fetch an actual hot network question from the exchange network

dbdbc91

feat: cache the list of hot network questions for 5 minutes

3907dc3

refactor: use scope functions

9649efc

feat: improve widget UI

1c86fd9

feat: fetch and show question icon

8f9dac8

feat: open current hot network question in app

b9f6a66

refactor: remove unused code and deduplicate a little

177dcbd

refactor: use apply with remote views

f969cb8

fix: attempt to ensure a different hot question is picked

50f3d0c

refactor: use strings (with English and Spanish translations), and im…

01d1a4c

…prove question title textview id

feat: use Coil to load question icons to take advantage of disk caching

8094e0d

fix: don't consider null or empty as being a cache hit for hot ques…

a93c49e

…tions

fix: show a loading message and setup reload button in onUpdate

89bb467

feat: improve widget refresh button

48f089e

fix: restructure padding so that refresh button area fills the whole …

350313c

…space

chore: remove resolved todos

d8b9e45

fix: adjust widget label

b7df8cd

refactor: use private constants for shared preference keys

b1c1d1f

refactor: use string resource

d713ca1

G-Rath added 3 commits July 14, 2023 07:49

refactor: use a less generic name than Network

5613c9a

fix: add widget description

9a13232

fix: adjust widget min width and height

0711f5f

G-Rath requested a review from tylerbwong July 13, 2023 20:15

G-Rath and others added 2 commits July 14, 2023 08:41

ci: adjust build timeouts

85e0320

Merge branch 'master' into add-hot-network-questions-widget

9a96a8a

tylerbwong reviewed Jul 15, 2023

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Merge branch 'master' into add-hot-network-questions-widget

eb6c295

tylerbwong approved these changes Jul 15, 2023

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tylerbwong merged commit 3025407 into tylerbwong:master Jul 15, 2023
7 checks passed

G-Rath deleted the add-hot-network-questions-widget branch July 15, 2023 07:38

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feat: add hot network questions widget #144

feat: add hot network questions widget #144

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feat: add hot network questions widget #144

feat: add hot network questions widget #144

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G-Rath commented Jun 25, 2023 • edited

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