Signpost Mobile App

The following document describes the design for the Signpost Mobile App.

Rationale

The Signpost is a weekly newsletter from English Wikipedia which is a nice way to keep up to dated on the happenings on enwiki (and sometimes on wikipedia as a whole). However, according to stats [1] [2], the Signpost gets about 10,000 front page views a month, with about 1,000 talk page subscriptions. The current signpost is also pretty hard to discover on mobile, and the layout is not exactly easy to read. Building a dedicated app to this makes it easier for people to read the signpost when they've 10 minutes waiting for the metro (or 8 hours when sitting bored in class), and also helps introduce it to a wider audience who haven't encountered it before.

Status & Schedule

User:Yuvipanda is working on this in his free time. The source is on Github. There is a RC1 available for download. Please file issues on GitHub.

Screenshots

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Proposed Design

Screen 1 : Once the user clicks the launch icon on his android phone, he lands on this page. The page always shows the current issue of The signpost. The action bar allows the user to search and go through the archives. Every article is a widget that showcases the content using the title, image and tag associated with the article.

Screen 2: The article page. The read the article the user scrolls vertically. To switch between articles, the user swipes horizontally. The grey/black marker shift as the user flips between articles. This indicator tells the user which article he is on currently, and how many more are there in this issue. He/she can also share this article by tapping the share button on the action bar. On scrolling to the bottom of the page, one can access related articles, comments on the current article and pervious articles under the same article tag.

Screen 3: On Clicking the archive page, the user is brought to a list of previous issues sorted by date. Here he can launch a specific issue or search through previous issues by tapping on the search icon on the action bar.

Screen 4: The search page. On typing a keyword in the search box, the results show the article title, the content specific line, the release date of the article and the associated tag.

App Developement

The app is Android-only (at least for now), and will be developed as a native app (Java) instead of PhoneGap. A scraper based API service (eek!) is also being developed so that the app can talk to a rationalized proper RESTish API for content instead of having to scrape wiki html itself.