Mastodawn

Pendell 🔜 TFF 5h ago

I made a keyboard because I needed one and nothing on Android was built for blind users. I put it on GitHub because someone else might need one. Then I woke up this morning and Mastodon had eaten it.

New blog post — what overnight virality actually looks like from the inside, the TalkBack problem nobody else bothered solving, Flexy, and why I spent the day building instead of panicking.

https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-made-a-keyboard-nobody-asked-for-my-experience-making-taptype/

#TapType #Android #Accessibility #BlindTech

I Made a Keyboard Nobody Asked For: My Experience Making TapType — fireborn

@fireborn Noice! what's the GitHub Link? This sounds pretty cool.

@mcourcel https://github.com/aaron-gh/taptype-releases/releases/latest

Release TapType 2.0 · aaron-gh/taptype-releases

Multi-language support TapType now supports multiple languages with full translations for all keyboard speech, announcements, and UI. Languages English (US) — QWERTY layout English (UK) — QWERTY l...

GitHub

@fireborn Coolio, thanks. Looking forward to trying this out. Very good post by the way.

Alex Chapman 7h ago

@fireborn About the thing about not putting the source out there because of merge requests, I think Github lets you turn off pull requests, or you can just say pull requests will be ignored, I've seen other projects do that and its perfectly OK to do that.

@alexchapman i'll see if that really is an option. In the post I was just commenting on the original reasoning

Alex Chapman 7h ago

@fireborn Ye and that's understandable, when you've got a shitload of other stuff you don't wanna be reviewing pull requests every hour lol. Oh and I just looked it up, there's a page on the GitHub docs about disabling PRs: https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-repositorys-settings-and-features/enabling-features-for-your-repository/disabling-pull-requests

Disabling pull requests - GitHub Docs

You may wish to modify pull request access for your repository if you want to restrict contributions, or disable them entirely.

GitHub Docs

@alexchapman Good to know :) I didn't even think to look to be honest. It was messy, like I said, and dealing with prs was not on my list of things to do. For projects that I actually want collaboration on, I absolutely want prs. I'm 100% in favour of open source contributions and free software. It just so happened that in this particular case, GitHub was just my distribution method, like the play store or a dropbox link or an ftp download. It preserves old versions and was almost no friction for me because I was using git to manage the source anyway.

Alex Chapman 7h ago

@fireborn Oh right, well yeah for this you could plop the source in and just turn PRs off on the repo.

@alexchapman I hope the original decision makes more sense than it did before. I didn't really have the words to fully articulate my thought process last night when I had a lot of people asking about this exact thing.

@fireborn @alexchapman y'all this is making me wanna turn off PRs on some of the repos I built more as smaller hobby projects, gosh darn it ha. Totally would get this feeling if your intent is to be just more experiment, left alone, code something, see where it takes you in learning and fun and the world doesn't need to leave you issues or PRs especially if you had just started it and put it out. Would be irritating TBH.

@Tamasg @alexchapman It's not so much about the learning process or anything, more the fact that the code works in very particular ways because it has to work in those very particular ways, and I learned by doing. Any pr could break that, and I can't trust it wouldn't do something I didn't want without reviewing every line, which... spoons.

@Tamasg @alexchapman Issues, feature requests, bug reports are fine. Because I can choose what I do with them easier than I can with something that took a real person real time to put effort into making because they had to understand the undocumented hell that is android accessibility to make a well thought out request, or not and then I have to reject and have this back and fourth about why I won't be merging it.

Alex Chapman 7h ago

@fireborn @Tamasg Yup, that'd be a whole load of extra work, so its a good job that GitHub has the option to turn PRs off but still be open source.

@fireborn @alexchapman oof yeah! Tell me about it, all the random compose bugs I come across both at work and now when building the Android app... Yeah. Totally a hellscape. But one that if you do right, it can be good, it just requires hours of debugging sometimes and 30 app reinstalls on a phone. Ha, ha. Will read this post more after work, I'm glad you put that out.

@Tamasg @alexchapman compose is its own special hell

Alex Chapman 6h ago

@fireborn @Tamasg Oh you mean that Jetpack Compose shit? Uggghh why do ya think I decided to go the Expo rout with my mobile Thrive app lol I still need to work on that at some point but other stuff's been getting in the way.

@alexchapman @fireborn oooh wait doesn't that one compile to React Native though? From what I hear that one has weakpoints on iOS. When I saw some of them used React and reimplemented it as React Native, hmm, I was a little wheery. Gosh oh gosh. Nothing's perfect in this framework-filled world. xD

Alex Chapman 6h ago

@Tamasg @fireborn SDK 54 fixes a lot of issues, but they're coming out with SDK 55 which makes the native IOS integration much better, its not as bad as some people make it out to be.

@alexchapman @fireborn I'm excited to know that. Will be useful to also hear of any bumps even you come to, there's certain teams at work who are thinking of going React Native rout and while I've discouraged it a year or two ago maybe my answer can be more optimistic if there's real work getting done. Especially if you're ever able to bridge things like custom actions over with one React code on both platforms, hella cool.

Alex Chapman 6h ago

@Tamasg @fireborn Oh yeah I was able to do custom actions, if you wanna take a look at what I've done so far here's the repo: https://github.com/g4p-studios/thrive-expo

GitHub - G4p-Studios/thrive-expo: The Thrive Mastodon Client mobile app

The Thrive Mastodon Client mobile app. Contribute to G4p-Studios/thrive-expo development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

@alexchapman @Tamasg i thought about just going the route of xml views but ive figured out enough of compose's strangeness

Alex Chapman 6h ago

@fireborn @Tamasg Oh right, that's good then. If only Google made things simpler like how Apple did with Swift lol.