Getting apollo working

apollo

I've been working on getting apollo to work for existing records that are found from the HTML. As it currently stands, apollo will only append to the database if it finds a new record in the HTML. This is a good first step but I need to get the application to the point to it updating existing records as well. I already have some legacy code set up for doing this but it only works with an older, unused, database architecture. With the change to the new architecture, I need to reformat a lot of the functionalities to make it work.

I'm trying to make the new functionality very basic and continue improving it after I get it actually working. For example, if apollo finds a record for a new recording in the HTML, and the genre is "Electronic, House, Trance" - the way that I'm currently building it would store that entire string as its own Genre. This is fine for now but in the future, I'd want to seperate the records into 3 different genres. As it is right now, I'm only worried about getting a one-to-one relation between the Recording table and other tables. As the code evolves and becomes ready for beta, I'm planning on creating many-to-many relationships instead. I've already created bridges for this to be possible in the future. My plan is to work my way up, starting from the very basic functionality into more specific functionalities in the future.

I think this is the most important step I can take right now - getting the project working at its minimum. After that, I will want to focus on adding more tools to the project, such as improving Travis, adding test cases, etc. to get the project going and easier for potential contributors to contribute to.

Introducing Travis to apollo & Reformatting UIKit's Cells

apollo

I was recommended to set up Travis CI for my project. This was something that I've been curious about setting up before so I thought it would be a great time to learn how to. Setting up Travis wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. The documentation wasn't too helpful - although I might have just been looking at the wrong parts. I changed the Travis config file dozens of times with different techniques that I found online to try to get it to work. After hours of failing, I finally got it to build successfuly. Right now, the file is very basic so I am planning to look at examples of other open source projects' Travis config files as a reference on how to improve my own.

Something that I found really cool about Travis is the ability to have it email you when a test fails. This a pretty useful just-in-case feature that could prove to be useful in the future.

focus

The issue that I fixed for the focus iOS browser was one where the settings view would have missaligned labels in the newly added cells that had a Learn More button appended to them. After tinkering around with the code, I found out that the reason for this happening was because of the way the Swift framework responsible for the layout of the cell (UIKit) handles their internal labels. The code wanted to reposition the new labels to make room for the added Learn More button and ended up hardcoding the value for the left margin. This doesn't work because of the different widths of iPhone - a margin of 14 will not stay consistantly aligned for the different widths of different iPhones and therefore the width needs to be set dynamically.

The fix for this issue was to create a new cell object and add custom labels. Luckily for me, the view was already doing that for some views so I had a reference to how to create these new cells. I made the custom layout for the cell and adjusted the old code for cell layout to work with the new cell view.

In the below images, note the layout of the labels for the cells with the Learn More button underneath. This issue that looks like an easy fix actually required a lot of effort due to the way the cell's internal label layout behaves. Creating a non-hackish fix for this issue required a complete redesign of the cell's structure to work dynamically.

Before

After

Introducing apollo

The issue for focus-iOS that I was planning on working on ended up being taken. Because of this, I decided to work on one of my own projects instead. Over the summer, I was working on a personal closed-source project. I didn't get too far with it so I decided that it would be a great opportunity to open source it and see if anyone would want to contribute.

apollo

apollo is a webscraper written in C++ using the cURL library. It scrapes and stores information about upcoming music albums in a local postgreSQL database. The goal of this project is to create an internal database that holds information about artists, recordings, genres, etc. - similar to that of Discoggs but available to anyone. I'm hoping on using this as the backend of an iOS application that I'm planning on writing as a compliment to apollo. That application will act as a calendar for upcoming albums. I'm hoping to create an application that can track releases as well as recommend upcoming releases.

What I Worked On

To start off the project, I had to add the README and make sure that any potential contributors know how build and run apollo. To do this, I included the steps to take to build the project. I left some contribution notes to make some parts of the codebase clearer for new contributors. To make it easier, I made a bash shell script to create a user and database, as well as populate the database with tables needed to run the application.

A lot of the code that I was working on had to be changed because I restructured the database. I realized that the codebase as it was initially would not run properly with the new database so I set out on fixing it. I created an issue to log my progress of restructuring the code base. Fixing everything at once would have taken too long and I didn't want that to put off new contributors so I focued primarily on getting the base of the code to work. With this fix, new contributors will be able to run apollo without any errors and would be free to help contribute to the project.

I also made sure to make some issue that others can take. I'm hoping to get this project to a point where others will want to contribute.

Focusing on Focus

I've had a lot of fun contributing to Mozilla's focus browser for iOS and have learned a lot while contributing to the project so I decided to continue along the path and tackle larger issues. I've mostly been fixing bugs while trying to get familiar with the inner-workings of the application but now I've decided to work on something more visible.

What I'll be working on

The issue I decided to pick up deals with a new feature being introduced in an upcoming release. I'll have to look into how the search suggestions are triggered by the search engine to be able to complete this feature.

There is already code in place for the layout of the views and search suggestions which makes it much easier for me to complete my contribution. I can use code that is already implemented as a reference for how to also include site suggestions, instead of only search suggestions.

This functionality was something that I was curious about so I'm excited to begin working on it. Working on an application that I use daily all while learning new techniques and skills is the main reason that I enjoy working on OSS so much and plan on doing so for the forseeable future.