We had another community call yesterday, with 7 folks in the room. We made a bit of an introduction round, as we had a couple of new folks!
Paul & his wife shared, after thanking everybody for the great work, some feedback about the queue displaying days:hours (instead of hours:minutes) (issue #6799) - which will be fixed in the next version.
They also noted that the ‘skip silence’ feature is maybe a bit too aggressive/strong - which someone happens to be working on (#6903)! We discussed that maybe not just the remaining silence (currently 20ms, to be 50ms) should be adjusted, but also the threshold (cut-down only happens if silence of 150ms or more). Maybe we should give the user the option between ‘normal’ (300ms threshold & remaining gap) vs ‘strong’ (100ms threshold & 50 remaining gap). To be discussed further!
Nikhil introduced themselves as well; they’re a developer and discovered the project just 2 days ago (hadn’t used the app yet). They were asking what to pick up, so we suggested the ‘Good first issue’ list.
@and4po joined us again as well, and asked for an update of releasing the Catalan translations. Yours truly had it on the list, but forgot about it. Now I’ll show @femmdi how to do that, so he can move ahead and I’m no longer slowing things down here.
@TDevelopbit chipped in again also. We confirmed that an exploration of the automated tests of the app would be helpful. Some parts of the website (especially those linked from the app) could benefit from automated tests as well, but not really a priority.
I shared some happy news: AntennaPod reached 150k Monthly Active Users via Google Play! That is: so many people opened our app at least once in 28 days. (Though we suspect, without being able to know, that this number is higher for F-Droid installs.)
Lastly, we concluded that we probably have enough stuff to release a new version (3.3). @ByteHamster will prepare the beta.
It was a fruitful one. Thanks everyone for joining!
A bit late, but a quick recap of the previous community call on Saturday 12 October:
We discussed the website translations. We have previews for Japanese & Catalan, but @femmdi noted that Norwegian & Turkish are also progressing. I promised to create a single PR so that a single link could be shared with folks on Transifex for completion & review.
Paul also brought up an issue with the a podcast that’s behind an auth, where it gives a 403 even though in another podcast app it does work. In the browser it doesn’t work either, so it’s something on the podcaster’s side. It seems as if they’re only allowing specific user agents or something.
We had another community call yesterday, in which we discussed the following points:
The current priorities: autodownload improvements, issues with streaming jumping back and forth, player screen improvements. (On the latter, we need to get back to the designers that offered help.)
The state of the Open Podcast API: description of subscriptions endpoint done, description of episodes endpoint in progress (discussions mostly done), then authentication to be discussed and covered. After these three we can mark it as first ‘beta’ (at which point AntennaPod can implement).
PR for all website translations, promised by @keunes in previous call. He didn’t get round to doing the PR in the meantime but during the call showed how to do it, so @femmdi can do it in future.
@TSampley joined us for the first time and brought up the topic of episode online search. Conclusion is that it’s dependent on another issue (ability to open/deep link to a single episode), which is, however, relatively simple to address. And we discussed the UI/UX approach for episodes search - of which we shared the conclusions in the issue: Option to search episodes (of not-subscribed podcasts) · Issue #7486 · AntennaPod/AntennaPod · GitHub
bottom navigation, specifically the order of screens/menu items. Discussed earlier that ‘episodes’ isn’t that important to have in the first 4 items, subscriptions all the more. Order is currently fixed and users who use it often probably have muscle memory for it. Two options:
Change the order only for new installs.
Change the order for everyone.
We opted for the latter: if only for new installs, existing users might disregard (have objections to) bottom nav when trying it out for the first time because the offered menu entries aren’t convenient. We want to prevent this because in the long term we want everyone on bottom nav and drop the side menu. Existing users which are disturbed by the new/changed order can change it back to their liking as this version also introduces menu reordering.
We discussed the planning for the next release. There are currently 46 commits with many bug fixes, bottom navigation and ability to reorder navigation (side menu & bottom). That is quite enough to have a beta, and the bottom navigation probably needs a long(er) test period. @ByteHamster said he’ll try to prepare the beta release.
Are translations fully migrated to weblate? I got a message yesterday from Transifex but everything is locked. I also saw a PR about translation update from weblate. And when going to it it seems translation are migrated but not fully? And it is also locked ?
Am I correct thinking migration to weblate has been launched ? Is it normal some string are not translated there? (I guess they are new strings and it is) Well I am confused since I don’t recall any messages confirming migration !?!?!
We can offer ‘As is’ in a ‘migration scripts’ repo in the AntennaPod organisation (with e.g. a python script per app). @Eliot can’t commit to being (long-term) maintainer.
The script currently (needs) AntennaPod to run and pull the data, then episode states are migrated over. This means that the migration script also needs to do episode matching. We can do a future improvement to just migrate episode data into an empty AntennaPod database, and then let AntennaPod do episode matching upon feed refresh.
@Eliot can submit their PR with their improvements against our repo (the original script doesn’t work any-more due to database schema changes)
We add a ‘As is’ disclaimer (‘this is user-contributed’, ‘this is not maintained’, ‘if you want to maintain or contribute, let us know’)
Migration scripts for other apps (e.g. Pocket Casts) can go in the same repo.
The database correction script from @ByteHamster could go into the same repo (there are empty databases from different AntennaPod versions which could be reused for the migration scripts).
First beta of the next release uploaded - we need to write release notes
Conference on podcasting in Berlin on 23-25 May (https://subscribe.de) with 300-400 visitors. Mainly for developers of hosting platforms & audio production. Some of the talks are in English.
If there’s anyone thinking of things that would fit in an AntennaPod talk, let us know!
Someone wanted to join the community call and emailed us at 17:00 CET asking where everyone was. Probably the Discourse plugin is not handling timezones properly. We’ll just remove the plugin and link to the website instead.
Not sure where schould I pop in this question: Will the configurable skip silence be in the next version or will it take a bit longer? (the pull request on github is still open)
After the bottom navigation it’s the next nice feature I’m looking forward to.
We started off with introductions as @viariable joined us for the first time. We also discussed a bit the point & content of these meetings, vs the ‘Needs: Decision’ meetings.
@cos brought up Please notify user after having moved a corrupt database [has-patch]. We discussed whether and concluded that there’s still a point in more elegantly handling database corruptions, because it still happens occasionally. The patch would need further changes as it leverages the empty state screen (the one after fresh install) but we don’t have that one any-more. We should also update the website text (‘run this python script or ask us in the forum to do it for you’) as currently it’s a bit wooly and doesn’t link to the correction script. The UX idea now:
Title block: Oh no, AntennaPod crashed!
Explanation: [concisely: what happened & why, and how to recover]
