Monthly community call!

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!

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Hi all,
Since quite a few of us will be travelling, no community call today. See you next month!

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@community-callers On the community call today, we plan to discuss automatic downloads, and more.

I’m having friends from out of town visiting tonight, so am afraid I will miss this one.

Is it possible to share the Antenna Pod stats?

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My son has a soccer game at the same time today. Hope to join another call again soon!

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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.

@tonytamsf demoed the note-taking capabilities that he’s been working on (See Custom chapter marks / Timed episode annotations · Issue #1946 · AntennaPod/AntennaPod · GitHub). We discussed a bit about some UX aspects, for example: how do you quickly add a new note? do we need a new button on the player screen? And whether personal notes should be part of (presented together with) chapters. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.topicfinder.podcastdiscovery seems to have some interesting UX that we can take inspiration from).

Paul also joined the call again and reminded us of the customisable ‘skip silence’ functionality. It’s been hanging because the person who started working on it didn’t reply any-more (#7185). A new PR has been spinned up: Make skip silence configurable - pull from #7185 by tonytamsf · Pull Request #7471 · AntennaPod/AntennaPod · GitHub

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.

On to the next community call in two weeks!

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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.

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@keunes - is there a test server we can use to test the subscription API?

There is no server implementation yet, as far as I know

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Indeed for OPA, ‘done’ I was referring only to the spec. Maybe Q1 next year we’ll have a reference server.

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 !?!?!

I tried to migrate the files yesterday, but it is not working as intended yet. That’s why they are locked

Edit: The translations are migrated now: AntennaPod @ Hosted Weblate

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