Development Plans post-Syndetics Unbound

On another topic ( https://www.librarything.com/topic/237957 ), we announce Syndetics Unbound.

We've been working on SU hard for about six months. (And I mean HARD!) We can now turn our attention and money toward other things, and LibraryThing is clearly the next target of both.

First, I can announce that I've green-lighted development on the Android app. Our iOS app was developed together with an outside developer. We've decided the best way to get an Android app out is to continue this arrangement, and pay him to work on the Android app. We can't make any promises, but four months is our expected timeframe. It's not going to be as expensive as the iOS app, but it's a significant investment in LT's future.

Creating the Android app will also involve some updates to the iOS app, but they will be small- to medium-sized ones, not major ones.

Second, we're finalizing plans for a bug-fixing spree. My tentative plan is to have a certain day devoted to bug fixing—probably Tuesday or Wednesday. Expect an announcement there.

Third, we'll be posting about our other plans soon, here, including developer-by-developer assignments for the short term.

Help! I can't catch all these people fainting dead away!

lol

Sounds great, Tim. I will review my personal pony list and get back to you.

This thread makes me happy :)

>2 Bookmarque:

The pony-list is my worry. But, yeah, some ponies will get shod.

For reference, here is my personal pony list (though I'm not sure it's quite up to date) ;)

Now if we give everyone ponies, you're going to be responsible for feeding and walking them and mucking out their stalls. ;)

(Edited for typos)

For now, this is mostly "this is what we're doing." We have our own ponies.

>7 Collectorator: That's my favorite part of this site.

>8 timspalding: Please share your ponies. Everyone else does!

Any chance the fixes to the iOS app will include stopping to fill up non-English catalog records with garbage characters?

>7 Collectorator: I'm in favour of this proposal.

*faints*

Love to see a 'price" field in LibraryThing. Would help with keeping a record for insurance purposes.

Congrats on getting the other project out the door ... and did I mention 'Yay!'.

Multiple price fields would be very useful: (1) the publisher's recommended price, (2) the price actually paid, (3) the valuation price (e.g. as per Amazon marketplace). Plus a currency for each. I'm keeping these fields in a parallel Access database until LibraryThing implements this.

The renewed development focus on LT is great news.

I've looked through the sample Syndetics Unbound (will that be LTSU here on Talk?) and like the information, the dynamic interface, and the design. It's an initial impression, but it's a good one.

>17 elenchus: LTSU is a good candidate. We've been referring to it as "SU" in staff chats, which always comes with a dash of confusion for me, having attended Syracuse University.

Yippee for an Android app, and for regular bugfixing! It'll be good to see you folks around here more.

>1 timspalding:: This is good news. Please may I make a plea that any bugs squashed and changes made are compatible with the old design, as well as the new.

>20 Cynfelyn:

I really can't promise that. The "old" design is deprecated. We said in June 2013 it would not be permanently available, because "it's simply too much work to try and maintain two different systems." I don't think members want us maintaining it, at the cost of slowing down bug-fixing and development.

Well, I'll stick around as long as I don't have to see that new design. I really dislike the colour.

As far as I can tell the two big things are

the Spoiler alert doesn't work.
Notices about new PMs only show on the profile page.

I can live with that.

I know it's a pony but I'd really like to see some work on touchstone relevance. That would be more like a shiny unicorn floating on rainbows than your bog standard pony...

WRT the Android App: If you make use of Visual Studio, you can also leverage Xamarain. After Microsoft's purchase of Xamarin, they started giving it away like it was Halloween candy. The best thing is: Xamarin is cross-platform, so you could leverage it for future iOS/WinPhone development.

I'm glad that this new product will bring more resources to LT. It seems like the site has been stagnating for a couple of years now, and I have been very concerned about its future. I'm looking forward to seeing things happen again!

Hurray for LT development! *glances to Android phone* and Hurray for App coming soon. (I'll keep my "two weeks" estimate for now...)

ETA: Wait. Does this mean the pony list that Kristi created before TinyCat will get some perusal now??? Maybe???

>14 njtrout: >16 kleh:
Um, if you use site search, you'll find five conversations specific to a field related to price. Each time, the answer is no. In fact, here's a link to those five discussions:

https://www.librarything.com/search.php?search=price+field&searchtype=4&...

In fact, here's a thread with all the relevant links within:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/90675

>26 gilroy: I'm pretty sure >8 timspalding: means they'll continue with their usual approach of doing whatever they feel like. Which is still much better than nothing.

>27 _Zoe_:

Hear, hear.

I'm sure everyone here other than the staff knows what my own personal pony is (FIX TOUCHSTONES) but really I'd be over the moon to see any work on bug-fixing and site improvements again.

Update on development: I'm spending the day on LT back-end stuff.

In short, if we don't act soon, we're going to run out of space for new author IDs. (This happened some months before with work ids.) To fix it without a 12 hour downtime, we have an exceptionally laborious process, taking a server out of "rotation," making the changes table-by-table, bringing the server back into rotation, and moving onto the next one.

Not glamourous, but if I didn't do it, everything would break soon.

I know it's a pony but I'd really like to see some work on touchstone relevance. That would be more like a shiny unicorn floating on rainbows than your bog standard pony...

Yeah, the search system--on which touchstones is based--is on the short list of things to work on.

Yay for search/touchstone repair. It is so dismal right now.

"Android App"

Be still, my beating heart!!!!!!

>29 timspalding: Thanks for the update! I think I can speak for most of us when I say that we don't care whether it's glamorous or not; it's just good to hear that necessary stuff is getting done.

>29 timspalding: Woohoo!

>34 Collectorator: Hear Hear!

Any chance of deleting the thousands and thousands and thousands of useless author names?

Can you describe the problem more?

I personally don't care much about the 'glamour' stuff either. I ditched GR for LT and I've been with LT since 2007/2008. I'm eternally loyal.

I guess I tend to touchstone books with curious titles because I rarely seem to have any problems with touchstones ...

(That said, I obviously approve if the system is made to work better for all the people who do have problems.)

Something that would be really cool would be if one could filter connection news to exclude stuff based on media type. I use LT for books and am unhappy about music CDs and movies filling upp my connection news. Filtering recs by same would be cool too. (Obviously, such filtering would be imperfect because not everyone sets media type on their records, but it'd be better than nothing.)

>1 timspalding: I am thrilled to hear about the android app. My life is complete now. Like >38 Teacup_: I am not here for the glamour. I would be very sad if there was no LT.

>37 Collectorator:

I think you mean that there are authors who have no books, including many variant names. This happens when someone uses an author name, and then changes the author--the old author name is in the system, ready for its next use. I don't really see the problem with the existence of these pages--just as I don't see the problem with work codes that have been superceded. On a data level, getting rid of unused normalizations is generally a bad idea, as you have to be ABSOLUTELY sure the code isn't used anywhere.

However, there may be some UI solution to the problem you feel is important. So, again, I'd be interested to understand just where the pain-point is.

I'd be interested in getting rid of the empty CK search pages that are not going to be repopulated. Like this one:
https://www.librarything.com/place/Golden+Gate+Bridge+%28San+Francisco%2C+Califo...

Where is a link to that appearing? Because you can make any page. Here's the same page, but happening in USA2, not USA.

https://www.librarything.com/place/Golden+Gate+Bridge+%28San+Francisco%2C+Califo...

How about doing something so that pages can still be read after someone puts in long links such as in >42 gilroy: and >43 timspalding:?

>44 MarthaJeanne: What is the page doing for you? It doesn't give me any problems...

It fits the screen. Which of course means that the whole page is made tiny until I expand it.

>43 timspalding:

Steps to find that blank page:
1) Go to site search
2) Select Common knowledge on the left bar
3) Select places on left bar
4) Search for Any of the following: DC, Mesa, Golden

It shows up in all those searches

Okay, that's something I can act upon.

So, I ran it across the range that that happens in—and it got rid of it. The trick is, why wasn't it working normally? The script has been running reliably every day, and I see no errors in its output. But obviously something is going wrong.

I'm running it now over everything. Anyone got another one?

That's one I stumbled across regularly in my usual CK workings, but I'm sure I'll find more if I look... It's been there ... years.

Here's another couple that's been around years:
https://www.librarything.com/place/Warrenton%2C+NY%2C+USA
https://www.librarything.com/place/High+Voltage+%28tattoo+shop%29%2C+Hollywood%2...

Okay, trying it another way. If you have any others, I'll take 'em.

>51 timspalding:

Updated: Good. Thanks. That's two.

Okay, the tattoo shop's problem is that the string is using parentheses, "High Voltage (tattoo shop), Hollywood, CA, USA."

CK uses parentheses for things like volumes and so forth. It was causing the work, https://www.librarything.com/work/6821797, to end up here: https://www.librarything.com/place/High+Voltage

At some point we fixed how these were calculated, allowing interior parentheses like this. But we didn't recalculate the IDs eveywhere. So I edited the work, saving what was already there. It caused it to go where it should, https://www.librarything.com/place/High+Voltage+%28tattoo+shop%29%2C+Hollywood%2...

This is a very hard one to solve automatically. I guess I need to run through all CK entries and make sure the current calculation is correct. A little dangerous.

The other one was attached to a no-title work with no copies. http://www.librarything.com/work/4517934

I've made it so these don't count toward living-ness.

I'm recalculating all those now.

I love the idea of a weekday set aside for bug-squashing, so thank you for that. I also think it's the correct response to those members who were feeling increasingly disillusioned with staff feedback and apparent development time spent on the site: thanks, too, for that.

I've been advocating for a weekly bugfix day for quite some time now, so I'm very glad to hear it's being considered.

Weed-whacking Wednesdays? 😄

Whichever day of the week is chosen, I nominate Bookworm Brigade for the Group Name.

We had a fairly subdued one yesterday—pretty much only me. But I got a number of bad ones killed.

>57 timspalding: It was still noticeable and encouraging :)

>57 timspalding:

What _Zoe_ said. Believe me, seeing staff names as the last post in a whole bunch of Bug Collector threads was enormously encouraging.

What will an Android app accomplish that a good mobile website would not (with the added advantages of not leaving Windowsheads out in the cold, not cluttering phones, etc.) ?

>60 Kuiperdolin:
The app is not intended to be a replacement for a densely-featured website, but more as a quick way of adding and lightly editing books, and checking a catalogue. Also, an app runs natively (not through third-party browser apps), and interacts reliably with, say, your phone's camera in ways that browsers (or mobile websites in general) simply can't.

>60 Kuiperdolin:

The app allows you to add by barcode and cover images.

Fair enough.

Apps are generally designed a slightly different way. And people expect them. Honestly, I'm dubious about them—they're so damn expensive to make. But I think we need to do it.

I've always felt that apps did clutter phones. Especially with places like Facebook constantly making more and more that you are forced to use over their website.

>64 timspalding:

I think given that you have already gone down the road of app rather than mobile web with the iphone app, you sort of need to stay the course.

At my previous job we had both mobile web and apps (both Android and iOS). The apps got much more use. If people specifically want to do a specific thing on their phone, they're likely to use an app; mobile web is, IME, more for browsing. I wouldn't use an app for a newspaper, for instance.

Hooray for Android app! I will love being able to quickly check my to read catalog when I'm in a bookstore, and to add things I buy with a barcode scan. (Yes, apps do clutter the phones. I try to add few apps, but LT would be one I'd definitely use.)

Huzzah for Android App! Been dying to see this for years. Thanks so much for continuing to improve the site and the service as a whole.

FYI, the Blog on this change offers readers to "check out the Hartford Public Library in Hartford, CT. Here are some sample links...". The sample links are all blind links.

Is any part of the librarything codebase open-source? Developers on librarything might want to contribute!

>69 danielx:

How so?

I've been enjoying the visibility of the bug-whacking Wednesdays. Any chance of an update on what's happening during the rest of the week?

They spend the rest of the week grooming ponies.

Commenting as placeholder so I can come back to this to check Android app progress.

>74 Linkmeister:
You'd be better using a star and following this thread:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/247434

Instead