Subsurface-mobile for Android first release

[John Smith]

Sent from my iPad

> On 11 Mar 2016, at 02:11, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
> 
> After some more thinking and discussing things with Tomaz over dinner I
> decided to in fact address the easier ones of these and delay the release
> by a day or two for this.
> 
> On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 04:53:56PM -0800, Dirk Hohndel wrote:
>>> 
>>> App opens to the login page. Straight forward entering details and doing a credential check. It might be an idea to change the font colour on the status messages as they don't standout at all. Maybe red for error messages?
>> 
>> Good idea.

Much easier to see now.
> Tomaz is working on this right now.
>> 
>>> App informs the user that the cloud is being accessed and it's downloading the dive list - that was 15 minutes ago.  Restarted the app and it took approximately 10 minutes to download a 60 dive database.
>> 
>> That is stunning. I load 420 dives in maybe 40 seconds. Or a different user with 50 dives in maybe 15 seconds.
> 
> Miika knows this feeling. Quick question that I forgot to ask earlier. Do
> you have pictures stored in your dive log by any chance? For a while we
> stored pictures in the git repository and that can make the repository
> HUGE. Which would explain why things are so horribly slow.
> 
> But I also know that under certain network conditions we do a very poor
> job, performance wise. Which is disappointing since normally git is a very
> efficient protocol.
> 
I used to have photos but I deleted them after the initial reports of problems. Nothing shows in my desktop but the android file size is massive. 
>>> Add manual dive - can change time but not date, other than that everything works as expected.
>> 
>> What exactly do you mean by "not the date". I tested this several times, my blind guess is that you somehow ended up with something that the program doesn't parse correctly. The parsing is still a little too picky for my taste :-(
> 
> I tried a few edits and they all work for me. So a specific example would
> be good.
> 
I used a fairly standard uk dd/mm/yyyy . I tried various permutations on this - essentially trying to replicate the date as shown,but not using the - or . Separators.  Now I know the format it all works.
>>> Can't see what the gas mix does as it only ever seems to show air and I can't change it to anything that seems sensible I.e. Nitrox 32 or 15/40 trimix etc. It might be better to remove it from the edit list for now.
>> 
>> That would mean delaying the first release. I'll mark it as a "known issue". That's annoying - it's something I never tested... which is why it's so important to have testers try all the different parts of an app... I spend way too much time on the mechanics of getting this all to work that I usually am not thorough enough when testing. As seen here.
>> Definitely something we want to fix for v1.1
> 
Now showing correctly as eanXX
> Actually, something we want to fix for 1.0. Tomaz is looking into that one
> as well.
> 
>>> Dive details show cylinder information but you can't add cylinders. Not a problem, but worth noting.
>> 
>> Dang - both this and the previous issue could have been easily noticed and fixed in the long beta cycle :-(
> 
> This is not something we can fix over night, so this will have to wait for
> the next release.
> 
>>> Uploading new dive to cloud was equally slow and painful, followed immediate after by a crash
>> 
>> The slow I don't understand, the crash worries me. I test this particular part of the app (editing things, adding things, deleting things and syncing with the cloud) all the time.
>> You don't happen to have a stack trace or anything from the logcat?
Sorry, no. I'm not overly familiar with android, I only bought one to play with subsurface! Where would the logcat output get stored?
>> 
>>> Can't see new dive on desktop version - although developer log says 61 dives on cloud which should be correct - possible bug in desktop? No, after clearing memory and reloading, the dive doesn't reappear indicating that the cloud wasn't correctly updated.
>> 
>> The crash might have prevented this from working. Again, this works really reliably for me. Are you connecting over wifi? Or via 3G/LTE? Or GPRS? :-)
>> 
Wifi
>>> Try again. Worked this time.
>> 
>> Good.
>> 
>>> It's noticeable that although the access cloud warning has disappeared, the app is still thinking and everything is locked out until this process completes.
>> 
>> Yes, the notice times out before the access is finished. Maybe that's not ideal. THIS is something we could change quite easily.
> 
> I just implemented that.

I'm just playing with that. If I manually upload to the cloud, the accessing cloud bar appears behind the still open manage dive menu. It might be worth changing the display order for the cloud bar to top, or, possibly more difficult, shutting the menu first before starting the upload. But in normal startup etc it works well.
> 
>>> Made change on desktop, change seen on app after reopening.
>>> 
>>> Deleted dive ok. The undo is there a little longer than I would like, but that's a personal thing. Change replicated on desktop ok.
>> 
>> On some phones where it takes a while for the menu to close it's barely long enough.
>> 
>>> Overall the app is easy to use and reasonably intuitive. The lag in loading and saving is a real bind. It's not a bandwidth issue from my side and the desktop version doesn't have the same delays. 
>>> 
>>> I think that covers most things.
>> 
>> Again, thank you so much for the detailed test!
>> 
>> Would you mind filing bugs for the issues that you found?
> 
> You don't need to file bugs for the three things I mentioned as
> "Tomaz/Dirk are working on it". But do file a bug on the "editing a date"
> issue, ideally with an example.
> And on adding a cylinder from Subsurface-mobile
> 
>> I now need to decide if I want to just ignore the bugs and say "to heck
>> with it" or if I want to once again delay the release... I think I
>> should be delaying the release... and while this seems reasonable, it
>> does not make me happy :-(
> 
> As I mentioned at the beginning of this email... yes, I'll delay the
> release briefly to fix the "easy" ones.
> 
> /D