taking joy in fixing a badly broken LJ app
Mood: cheerful
Posted on 2011-12-29 17:10:00
Tags: lj for webos essay palmpre projects programming
Words: 211

After the latest LJ release, I got a few emails saying LJ for WebOS was badly broken, and lo and behold they were right.

I was not excited about fixing the app, since I knew the code for parsing posts, which is most of what broke, was pretty brittle and terrible. (c.f. "don't parse HTML pages with hand-written state machines") And I don't even use the app much anymore, and it's certainly not going to sell many more copies since it only works on webOS phones, which are not exactly flying off the shelves, and new ones might not exist. So I toyed with the idea of dropping support entirely, but that just felt wrong, even though I'd rather be working on new shiny apps for Windows Phone 7.

Last night I took the first serious stab at fixing things, and it turned out to be much more fun than I had hoped. The app was so nonfunctional it felt like writing a whole new one, and it turns out the new page format is a bit nicer to parse to boot. So I've fixed maybe 60% of the issues already, and hopefully I can fix the rest by next week sometime (pending New Year's festivities) and get back to WP7.

2 comments

Comment from andrewhime:
2011-12-30T00:51:30+00:00
Any chance of sizing it up for the TouchPad?

Comment from gregstoll:
2011-12-30T10:53:54+00:00
Sigh. It's something I would like to do eventually, but it would take a lot of work. I'm also not totally convinced that it's that much better than just using the TouchPad's web browser. (except for remembering username/password)

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