This is great work Afzal! I would be happy to help design and code a basic skin for it. How can I get this on my Android phone to play around and how do I skin it?

If you want, you can fork the github repo. Use the Android SDK to compile it, enable debugging mode on your phone and run.

I'll be more than happy to code the skin, it's the designing part that I can't do, like a guideline that will tell me how much padding/margin to use, what font styles to use and how much space to put between each element and some assets like backgrounds/borders.

The design docs for Android are located here: http://developer.android.com /design/index.html

We need designs for the following:

1. The messages screen, with a list of all messages. I think a good idea would be to make the message collapsible or hide-able, using something like how Reddit Sync hides comments. It also needs a text box for user input (formatting and everything will be handled using the SlidingMenu mentioned in (2).

2. We'll probably use something like SlidingMenu (https://play.google.com/store/apps/d... gmenu.example) to show the list of users and some options (on the right and the left like the facebook app) so we need designs for those. You will only need to design the content in the menu, not the menu itself.

Something like the sketch below maybe (?) except that the top-left screen is missing the text box

Great. I've never coded or designed for Android before so this will be a first (an an exciting project). What sort of file would you need for it. If I can mock it up in photoshop or Adobe Fireworks and get you a PSD or transparent PNG files would that get you started? Not sure how you need to slice it all up.

Originally Posted by Chad

Great. I've never coded or designed for Android before so this will be a first (an an exciting project). What sort of file would you need for it. If I can mock it up in photoshop or Adobe Fireworks and get you a PSD or transparent PNG files would that get you started? Not sure how you need to slice it all up.

I think PSD or png would work fine. I can take care of the slicing since there's a little optimization technique with 9-patch pngs, which is probably what will be used for borders.

Update: This is still being developed. There was a slump in between where I stopped working on it though.

I'm sort of re-writing the app with a "UI-first" philosophy.

Here's the design right now:

The screenshots look fantastic!

I'm not sure what you mean about the cookie. Send me an email and we can try to troubleshoot it together, maybe over Skype.

I'll also make sure you get set up with some database credentials.

Originally Posted by Chad

The screenshots look fantastic!

I'm not sure what you mean about the cookie. Send me an email and we can try to troubleshoot it together, maybe over Skype.

I'll also make sure you get set up with some database credentials.

I switched from HttpUrlConnection to Google Http Client. I wanna say that the params I'm passing are not correct, will try alternatives later.

Edit: yup, the parameters have to be passed as form-data and not url encoded. And I have no idea how to pass them as form-data using Google Http Client >_<

Edit 2: Fixed that issue.

Originally Posted by Afzal

Edit 2: Fixed that issue.

Awesome. Let me know how I can help [email protected] om

Originally Posted by Afzal

Edit: yup, the parameters have to be passed as form-data and not url encoded. And I have no idea how to pass them as form-data using Google Http Client >_<

Edit 2: Fixed that issue.

lol isn't that how I was doing it in my code?

Originally Posted by Ownaginatios

lol isn't that how I was doing it in my code?

Google's client has some benefits over ApacheHttpClient (supporting both HttpUrlConnection and Apache Http Client for older versions of Android). Had to find a class for multipart form data.

For now I've switched to android-async-http, a library that uses Apache Http Client and would leverage a bit of your code for cookie stuff. Might visit Google Http Client later on once everything else is in place (or maybe never for this app).

Or we could just use this https://code.google.com/p/httpclientandroidlib/ and compile android-async-http using that.

Originally Posted by Chad

Awesome. Let me know how I can help [email protected] om

Lol, my account got locked out for 15 minutes last night because of lots of wrong password attempts. I was only clicking the login button to test the wrong password scenario

App workflow readme updated. Should be much much simpler now. I cut a lot of crap from the concept which should help in the long run now that we don't need to care much about each byte and each header that goes in and out.

You can log in now (it won't show an updated message list though) and see the beautiful wrong password error message if it's a wrong password

Oh and if you're successful in logging in, you don't need to ever enter the password again UNLESS it fails to login.

Loads the user list now. The messages list shouldn't take much time. After that, only posting the message will be left before the initial release (which won't have colours, images, emoticons etc).

If anyone wants to help, implement the same thing with Messages as it is with Users.

Originally Posted by Afzal

If anyone wants to help, implement the same thing with Messages as it is with Users.

I can start helping out probably next week when I move back to Toronto. Looking good so far

Good news! Now it loads messages and scrolls to the bottom of the list.

1. Still a manual refresh, only the first refresh is automatic.
2. Scrolling to bottom isn't animated. --> DONE
3. Progress indicator on first load (when list is blank) and progress indicator in title bar when refreshing. --> DONE
4. Fast scrolling thumb that you could drag to scroll. --> DONE
5. Parsing each message to be user-friendly. Like "/login User" becomes "Chatbot: User has logged in", and links are clickable, images are either loaded, loaded in a dialog box on clicking the link, etc.
6. Progress bar doesn't disappear if no new messages were added to the database.
7. Still no progress on the posting message side.

For (1), an infinite for-loop might not be the best idea, would be a very battery-intensive app that way.
For (5), not sure where to begin but this would most probably go in MessagesCursorAdapter where we read each row and set its style etc.
For (6), Something with CursorLoader callback.

For (7), we need to figure out an elegant solution to storing the <infos> tag, I don't like that I'm using a database to store one row for a one-time thing. Storing in SharedPreferences might be better (?)

Something like: If the <infos> tag is present, update the user details stored in the SharedPreferences.
Then to post a message, you'd just pull the user details from there.

So for anyone who wants to help, try to do one of those 7 things, preferably the top six.


Fork, update, submit a pull request.

Looking great! I'm more a designer than a dev, but any way I can help with visuals or otherwise let me know. How can I try the app out on my android phone?