Micro.blog 1.4 manton.org
@manton @cheesemaker Really appreciate the accessibility improvements in 1.4 of the iOS app. Only major issue right now is that the text when composing a post is still not exposed to VoiceOver, making it impossible to review or edit. This is a very nice step in the right direction though. Thank you. (Are image descriptions coming to the API as well? Hadn’t seen that anywhere yet, but I may have missed it.)
@devilgate how odd - my version is 1.3.5 and all apps up to date ... US app updated in US App Store before US ... no fair!
@Lioncourt Thanks! I’ll look at fixing the text view accessibility for 1.4.1 and update the API docs. There’s a new mp-photo-alt parameter when posting.
@Lioncourt I appreciate the feedback! We definitely are committed to making the app as accessible as possible. If I understand correctly, VO should (and doesn’t currently) read back to you the contents of the text view when it regains focus? // @manton
@manton Wow! Fantastic. That’s a great set of updates, timely on the 1-year anniversary too. Picture viewer and auto-complete of user names are huge improvements for me. Kudos! 👍🏽😊
@cheesemaker Correct. VoiceOver also has various commands (via the VO rotor) for moving the insertion point through the text, which also don’t seem to be doing anything. Those may or may not resolve themselves ones VO knows the text is there. I’m guessing you’re doing some kind of custom display on UITextView that overrides the normal behavior of the view, making VO just think the view is empty. CC: @Manton
@manton Great update! Was any of the username stuff based on IndieWeb Micropub query stuff or is it just micro.blog API stuff?
@EddieHinkle it’s actually almost entirely client side. I’m caching the user names both of the people you are following as well as when you reply to someone.
@manton @help - on the latest iOS app update, after adding the photo: clicking on the photo (to go to the new captioning mode), app crashes. Happened a few times in a row. using 2016 iPad Pro, iOS 12.1, SmartKeyboard was attached. Ended up posting image w/o caption, no problems there.
If I could make a recommendation for that flow: could the caption (area) just be added on the screen where you’ve got the filters. It is a break in the flow to add a image, resize/filter, leave it, then come back to it to add a caption. Not sure how that would break/help that image module, but for user purposes, it would do all the image items in one step.
@EddieHinkle Nope, I want to do that but it seemed like the IndieWeb stuff was still a moving target (and I had forgotten that I already built a server API for M.b). It has a local cache of usernames but then hits the server if it can't find anything.
@manton Makes sense. And it is a moving target. If you have opinions, especially since you have a working internal API definitely happy to accept input 🙂 standards come from actual implementations rather than someone’s good idea, so I’m always interested more in what people get working than what people think is a “good idea”
@cheesemaker A couple of last iOS 10/iPhone 5S bugs for you in an otherwise great release: the autocomplete is fantastic, when it isn’t instantly crashing. I can’t type more than one letter following an @, or scroll beyond the initial view of 2.5 suggestions, without it crashing instantly. (Similarly, deleting an @-mention crashes when you try to do it character-by-character.)
Fortunately, there are work-arounds: type a username and than add the @ at the front (or, if the autocomplete guesses well enough from a single char, @+first char and then select), and select the whole username to delete that way rather than trying to delete characterwise.
I assume I’m the last iOS 10/iPhone 5S user left in the wild, and I’m about to go extinct, but in case I’m not, I wanted to let you and @manton know about this crasher…
It seems otherwise to be a great 1.4 release, so thanks for all the cool stuff :-)
@smokey Hmm. I can see a couple crashes that must be you in our crash reporter, but I'm not able to reproduce the issue even on a 5S. Would you mind deleting and re-installing and see if you still get the crashes? I'm sort of at a loss on what you're seeing.
@cheesemaker Alas, same thing after I delete and reinstall. I can see the keypress for the second letter “stick” for a fraction of a second after I tap it, and then the app fades to black.
There’s a new
mp-photo-altparameter when posting.
Is there any way you can populate _wp_attachment_image_alt with the alt text when uploading the image to WP blogs? (Or are you sending the alt text along with the image upload in any way, so that I could intercept it with a filter on my end? Or does the alt text only go as part of the final post HTML when using XML-RPC?)
Right now I’m using one of @chrisreed’s functions to populate placeholder text for various image metadata fields on XML-RPC upload of images, and it would be nice if I could auto-populate WP’s alt field with the actual alt text I entered—but I have no idea how complicated that might be on the M.b end (and whether it might break compat with other, non-WP, MetaWeblog XML-RPC services).
@smokey Because we send the img tag to WordPress anyway, we just fill in the alt attribute for you on the post. Adding it to the WordPress upload seems doable too.