Springing into Action: Springy! 1.3

So guys, it’s been a little while hasn’t it? I managed to find a bit of time over the weekend to polish Springy! a bit, and 1.3 is the fruit of that labour!

So let’s cut to the chase – what does 1.3 bring to the table?

• Auto correct is now present for both asking and answering questions!
• Improved question preview shortening (now turned on by default)
• Native theme is now the default theme choice
• Experimental landscape support tuning
• Improved search results scrolling
• Fixed the animations on the activity feed, pretty!
• Tuned Inbox animations – should be slightly smoother
• Fix for Inbox crashing

Looking for a more in-depth analysis and behind the scenes tid bits about the update, click on to read the rest of the post!

AUTO CORRECT
Honestly – this was an oversight on my part. Having on tested the application on the PC Windows Phone 7 emulator, I used my laptops keyboard to enter text instead of the onscreen keyboard. I’d somewhat naively assumed that auto correction would be turned on by default, but apparently it isn’t!

So, to correct that, they keyboards for both answering and asking questions have been changed from the generic text entry keyboard to what Windows Phone 7 calls the “chat” keyboard – which handily includes the emoticon button that you may notice is also present when writing SMS’s. Oh, and it also includes auto correct too!

IMPROVED QUESTION PREVIEW SHORTENING
Did you know there’s an option in settings to shorten the questions and answers shown in the activity and profile feeds? This is helpful for quickly scrolling through the list, and actually faster page loading (the ListBox spends less time rendering content for long q&a’s)

Previously, I was using a pretty simple technique – after the first 100 characters, the rest of the text gets cut off and replaced with “…”, to signify there’s more text – but it’s hidden. Now this worked, but I didn’t turn it on by default because it didn’t look quite right. And now with 1.3, I’ve added a slight change that makes all the difference.

Now, after 100 characters, the text is cut off and now replaced with “ […]”. You’ll notice the ellipsis is now within square brackets, and separated from the text by a space – to make it more obvious that the “ […]” is not actually part of the question or answer, but something Springy! itself has added. Infact, it makes such a difference that it’s now enabled by default in the setting"s!

Of course, you can still view the entire questions & answers by clicking on the item.

NATIVE THEME IS NOW DEFAULT
This one’s simple: based on early feedback, the native theme is now the default theme for Springy!, so the colours on login & the menu now match the rest of your phone, instead of Classic’s background art. Of course, you can still enable “Classic” in Settings.

EXPERIMENTAL LANDSCAPE SUPPORT
Something I noticed by pure accident whilst using Springy! in everyday life on my phone – it seems I had accidentally enabled landscape support for the inbox page in my original marketplace release. It’s something I’d originally left out of the program as I couldn’t properly test it and I wasn’t sure it’d work properly.

However, it actually seemed to work quite nicely in the inbox page, albeit with a few small quirks. So, instead of removing it entirely, I’ve actually tweaked it so it displays better. Depending on how it’s received, I might implement it in the rest of the program.

FIXED ANIMATIONS ON ACTIVITY FEED
Did you also know that  the activity feed has always had a loading animation on entering the page? Well, you probably didn’t, because it never actually showed on the phone! Turns out, the animation actually plays when it’s meant too, but unfortunately Silverlight on Windows Phone is a very imperfect thing – and it’s actually playing the animation before it’s drawn the page on the screen. Infact, it actually completed the animation before it’d managed to draw the page on screen, so you never got to see it >__<

How did I fix it? Well, it turns out there is no proper fix, other that too make the animation a lot longer, so it' doesn’t finish before you see it! I actually tweaked the timings a bit, so although the storyboard technically starts at page load, nothing actually gets animated for the first 300ms, enough time hopefully for Silverlight to start drawing the page contents, meaning you’ll actually be able to see the animation when it starts.

TUNED INBOX ANIMATIONS
Basically, applied the same animation delay technique I used above to make it appear smoother. Nice

FIX FOR INBOX CRASHING
Formspring changed their API methods for identifying questions – which unfortunately Springy! wasn’t too happy with, and cased it to crash out and return to the WP7 start screen if you tried to open the inbox with a new question inside it. Easy fix for that, instead of identifying the question ID’s as an INT, they’re now of the LONG class. SO now it’s working perfectly!