Bitcoin Forum

I am an Android developer with quite a few years under my belt.  I've been unimpressed with the current Bitcointalk.org Android app offering ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.elbandi.forum.bitcointalk ).  I want to make a slick, android-design-compliant app that doesn't suck.

Here's a proposed roadmap:

ALPHA:

• guest access ( no login )
  
• browse meta topics
• browse forum list
• browse forum topic ( will include a paging function so swiping left and right will get you to the next page of replies, next page is pre-loaded )
• reply formatting ( avatar, user stats, quote formatting, link highlighting, html )

BETA:

• view user profile
• search
• forum caching
• text resizing
• contextual menu for each reply ( user profile, user stats, user signature )

v1:

• fix all medium-severe bugs
• setting for hiding showing things ( avatar, signature, stats, reply timestamps )

v2:

• user login
• post reply
• quote reply
• my profile
• my recent posts

v2.5

• my messages
• send messages

v3

• tablet support
• topic list on left

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu.android.reddit is my design and usability inspiration.  If you think you will use a stable, well designed app with the above features then please reply to this poll.  If you have some feedback beyond the above poll or have questions then ask below.  Thanks.

Edit: also, if there are features that are not on the list or functionality that you would like to see then let me know.

Edit 2: work on the app has started, see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=606796.msg6696331#msg6696331 for announcement and tracking

As long as the connections do not pass through another server and anyone using the app directly connects to BitcoinTalk.org: Sure I wouldn't mind having a more compatible app.

Be prepared for a long development time. You could throw some of the development on Github to speed up the process and allow other members to contribute.

Connections will hit bitcointalk.org directly as running an intermediary server seems expensive and I can't really think of any benefits to that.

The only real reason as to why you would want to hit a server is to provide server based caching or a bit of an easier way to query the website (in terms of scraping).

Yet still people do it.

How do you plan on altering the app upon the new forum software?

Don't know when that would be ( does anyone really? ) but I make apps with TDD ( test-driven development ).  I will be using the current html as test cases for parsing.  If/when new forum software appears the job is straightforward ( although non-trivial ) to make the parsing engine handle the HTML ( replace the old HTML in the testcases with new HTML and make all the tests pass ). 

Fair enough. Sounds great.

As a recommendation, maybe within v4 or v3, would be to include notifications upon reply to thread if the thread is watched within the app.
Basically the same thing as email notifications, but within the app itself.

This would take more continuous querying to the server however, so it should be able to be turned off on mobile (in case the person is low on bandwidth/data).

Notification for watched threads would be cool.  But yeah, you run into a polling issue on mobile ( bandwidth, battery, data consideration ).  Maybe a server that does the polling and does push messaging to the app  on updates might work.  Don't know bitcointalk.org's policy on scraping or whether they would ban for one server/ip continuously pounding the server looking for updates.

Good Point. Well, this would be later within the app. I don't believe BitcoinTalk would ban an IP hitting the server every few seconds. Worst comes to worst you could message Theymos and have him whitelist the IP if a blacklist method is in place. The app would most likely be known at this point.

work on the app has been started, see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=606796.msg6696331#msg6696331