Thursday, August 27, 2020

Our journey towards a mobile-friendly UI

Our first attempt to provide a better experience for mobile users started in 2016. That was a pretty late attempt, considering that smartphones were already very widespread by then, but better late than never.

We were faced with basically two options:

  1. Developing a mobile app. 
  2. Making the website responsive.

Developing a mobile app would have probably been the better option, but it was not an option we could afford. It would have meant dividing our efforts. The time we spend on re-implementing Tatoeba as a mobile app is time that we don't spend on maintaining and improving the existing website. So we went for the second option: migrating the existing UI towards a responsive UI and improving its design along the way.

This attempt was put on hold by the end of 2016, as we shifted towards other priorities. From this attempt, Tatoeba had some look and feel update, but was still not responsive.

Last year, however, thanks to Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) who granted us an award of $15,000, we were able to resume the initiative.

We first updated what was left to do with the look and feel, to make as many pages as possible visually consistent.

Then next (the hardest part), we re-implemented all the features from our "old" sentence component into our "new" sentence component, with some improvement and an updated design. Even though all the features were re-implemented, we could not completely switch away from the old sentence component yet. Throughout the whole process, our registered members have had the option to use either the old or new design. A majority have started to use the new design but there are still some issues in the new design we need to address before we can comfortably transition.

Lastly, in the past couple of months, we worked on making the landing page and the search results responsive. These two pages represent the largest portion of the traffic on Tatoeba so we figured it would be most beneficial for our mobile users to have these pages mobile-friendly first. The responsive landing page was deployed in July and the responsive search results in mid-August.

So finally! It took four years but we now have a responsive UI 🎉 

...Or at least partially. 

We will, of course, continue our efforts to redesign the rest of the pages, and also improve the speed. This might take another four years, who knows, but we will get there, eventually! You can, in any case, check our progress on GitHub. And if this is a topic which you wish to see progress faster, please consider contributing as a developer :)

We would like to thank MOSS again for their financial support, as well as everyone who helped with the development, with the testing. or who simply took the time to give us valuable feedback.

Wednesday, August 19, 2020

What's New on Tatoeba? - Your biweekly recap #23

What's New on Tatoeba will be published biweekly until the end of August.

KODOEBA EVENT

  • Kodoeba ended last week, on Monday, August 10th.
  • There will be a blog post to summarize what was achieved during the event.

UPDATES

  • The menu dropdowns are no longer hidden behind the private message sidebar. Thanks to Ricardo14 for reporting the issue and Trang for fixing it.
  • Various regressions have been fixed. Thanks to CK, Ricardo14 and jpear1 for reporting them and to rumpelstilzchen for fixing them.
  • The search results page is now responsive and nicer to view on mobile. Thanks to Trang for implementing this and to CK, gillux and rumpelstilzchen for their helpful feedback. 
  • The tooltips that display dates are now more accurate as they indicate the timezone (UTC). Thanks to AlanF_US for reporting the issue and to polkadotazn (one of our Kodoeba participants) for working on it.

ON THE WALL

LANGUAGES

As usual, we thank everyone who helped to translate the website, but perhaps in the future, we integrate something in Tatoeba to better acknowledge this work!



If you'd like to help to the development of Tatoeba, report issues, or are just curious, have a look at the GitHub repository.

If you want to help us translate the website to your language, you can join us on Transifex: https://www.transifex.com/tatoe...ite/dashboard/ and check this article on the wiki https://en.wiki.tatoeba.org/art...e-translation.

If you're especially happy with one of the updates, don't hesitate to personally thank our developers :) They're working in the shadow but they'll be glad to hear your feedback.



Original post on the Wall

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

What's New on Tatoeba? - Your biweekly recap #22

What's New on Tatoeba will be published biweekly until the end of August.

KODOEBA EVENT

  • We are in the last week of Kodoeba and we have five new issues solved on internal code since last time.
    • It is now possible to remove a sentence from a list from the sentence page. Thanks to Ricardo14 for reporting the issue and nummer_001 for implementing it.
    • There is a new visibility option for lists, in case you want your list to be shown on the sentence page to every user (and not just to yourself). Thanks to soliloquist for raising the issue and nummer_001 for working on it.
    • Unicode characters are now showing up properly in list names. Thanks to soliloquist for reporting the issue and ftumsh for fixing it.
    • You can now save create URL for templates from the advanced search. Thanks to Ricardo14 for triggering the idea and jpear1 for implementing it.
    • The sort options have been redesigned. Thanks to Trang for the design suggestion, AlanF_US for the help with the wording and Roverandom789133 for the implementation.

UPDATES

  • Mobile users can now change the position of the cursor in text inputs. Thanks to rumpelstilzchen for reporting this bug and Trang for fixing it.
  • When searching sentences sorted randomly, the results are no longer re-randomized when going back to a previous page. Thanks to AlanF_US for reporting the issue and gillux for fixing it.

ON THE WALL

LANGUAGES

  • Tatoeba is supporting one new language: Karakhanid.
  • Slovak has been enabled on production as a UI language.
As usual, thanks to all the members who helped to translate the website!



If you'd like to help to the development of Tatoeba, report issues, or are just curious, have a look at the GitHub repository.

If you want to help us translate the website to your language, you can join us on Transifex: https://www.transifex.com/tatoeba/tatoeba_website/dashboard/ and check this article on the wiki https://en.wiki.tatoeba.org/articles/show/interface-translation.

If you're especially happy with one of the updates, don't hesitate to personally thank our developers :) They're working in the shadow but they'll be glad to hear your feedback.



Original post on the Wall