I hope I didn’t offend you as you are doing all this hard work. Now I was sincere in my opinion.
Sometimes it’s hard to use a webpage on a mobile phone like for DGS in which case a specific application seems appropriate for me. But for OGS they did a great job and if you reach to do better for specific use that would be nice of course.
Just said for me looks difficult to do better.
We appreciate the sentiment, it is after all what we were going for :), but having a dedicated app undeniably offers several possibilities that our website cannot (for example reliable notifications of pending moves, which is a great feature for many.) it can often simply be more convenient and clean, and we are very happy (and grateful) to have the options of an app as well.
This topic was created for the purpouse of discussing the app, so let’s please try to stay on that topic 
But thanks for the kind words. It is always appreciated.
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Ok I did spend some time to read the topic now and besides putting less options I don’t see that many specific new features so I m curious.
Notification is a plus for sure I still kept the application because of this only! But I don’t use it, I go play my move in the browser. Is there other things I did miss?
I read discussions about zooming or not, tree or not… I think OGS did smart choices already on all these. Confirm button is best for me, same for chat, analysis of the game… All fit well in a mobile.
Look, I’m not saying it’s for everybody. Obviousely since we’re on the forum of the website people here are biased towards the website. It’s like going on the Ford forums and asking why are Volkswagens better.
As for why I personally think an app is useful:
- reliable native notifications (on that note I would even implement push notifications if Anoek could be convinced to send them from the backend)
- Layout better suited for mobile screens. You can see everyhing you need without scrolling.
- Faster to load (data is cached and loads immediately)
- available offline (yet so far I haven’t implemented the feature of being able to play the moves offline and synchronize when internet becomes available, maybe in the future)
- Easier to navigate to. For me it’s far more convenient to have an app that I click and see my moves than to have (yet another) browser tab that I need to navigate to.
Bottom line is if you don’t think it’s useful, don’t use it. The website will always be here and I don’t think anybody is really considering replacing it with the app.
Another thing to consider is that the new generation does not use websites anymore. They want apps. If you want to introduce the game to a new generation of players you must create an app and you must streamline the experience so that they can start playing with a few seconds, as the expectation now is.
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I feel you are a bit upset, I am sorry if so. I use apps too I don’t feel to be biased at all. And I hope you have more ambition as satisfaying some trends in the youth.
Now it’s a bit more clear what you could offer more I appreciate the list you did take time to write.
I think I will not be the only one to appreciate it too!
I think it would be really hard to make better besides technical side as the website if you try to keep all. Alerts are especially important for long time games, sometimes a editor is useful to study the variation in this kind of game but sometimes you know what you will play and I could just use your app in that case.
Once again, no offense and by the way let’s keep it smart, no need to explain me what I have to do if I don’t want it.
Good luck in your project!
I don’t know if it’s possible technically but a nice feature would be that after having been alerted by the app and after having played my move, if the alert could just vanish by itself?
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New version is out, alpha_b153. New features:
- all new login system which now allows you to sign in through Google or Facebook.
- ability to log out
Still don’t know why you’d want to, but people asked for it and it was useful when testing the login system.
Thanks for the bug report, this used to be the case, but I guess I introduced a bug at some point. I will have to iterate on those notifications soon enough to make them nicer and I will fix it at that time.
I could not reproduce it, but I think I can do you one better: Facebook and Google sign-ins are now supported
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in moments like that I regain my faith in humanity. Man, that was an awesome move 
Sorry for the second update in the same day, but I had to issue a hotfix (lovingly named alpha_b155) since I realized that people that were logged in with the old system will experience random (silent) failures until they log out. Hence, this new update logs everybody out (that did not log in with version 153).
@Jokes_Aside glad you like it man. At least you’ll do since you realize there is no way (yet) to challenge your favourite bot
PS: Nice S9 you got there btw. Gotta love them samsungs…
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Can I still use the pre-153 (b75) for a while?
(No access to the Google store yet)
A small note: when I am in the “going to play” window, changing the label “their turn” on the red marker to “my turn”
You can use it, the only problem is if you upgrade to 153 (and only 153) without logging out. You’re OK if you upgrade to 155 or newer. But I would say that b75 is very old, expect it to miss lots of features (chat for example) and be very buggy (it didn’t have a database back then I think).
If you know how to sideload an APK you can get v155 from here https://app.bitrise.io/artifact/9202610/p/d96735145daeacef43f8e9df95bb810e
Out of curiosity, how come you don’t have access to google play?
PS: the “my turn” thing has been fixed a while ago
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I am in China…
If the link above works for you I and you want me to I can add you to the testers list so that you receive an email with a similar link for all future versions.
O nice but it’s ok I can follow the thread here and give you some of my reaction. Now I will wait a bit to get the last update next time I have access to Google store
Thanks
Hi, I have not read through the entire thread here but I am a developer and I am now installing the Google play version.
I don’t know where you guys landed on language but I know Java. I will read back and see where things are at but if there is a github link I could check out, reply to this and I’ll take a look there too.
Hope I can help in some way!
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Hey trizz, thanks for offering. Help would definitely be appreciated, however I have never done the “open source thing” before so I don’t know how that would work. I’d like to retain control over what and how it gets done, simply because sooner or later I will end-up having to maintain it all. And the project is already more than 10.000 lines…
That being said the repo is https://github.com/acristescu/OnlineGo The language is Kotlin (plus a sprinkle of C++ for the score estimator I shamelessly stole from Anoek). It used to be Java way back when I first started this project, but I since switched and converted everything to Kotlin because it’s the up-and-coming thing and I really needed to learn it to keep my CV relevant.
Good thing is if you know Java at a professional level, you can learn Kotlin very quickly. IMHO Kotlin is like Java++, although many people will simply disagree with that.
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MrAlex, the main control that you’ll have over your code base is via pull requests. It lets people propose code to be merged in, giving you a chance to review it, making sure their unit tests pass, making sure that your own unit tests haven’t been broken, etc.
There’s definitely an overhead involved in allowing others to work on code with you, but if you find the right people the benefits outweigh the cost.
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Nice, thanks a lot for adding the new login methods!
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Awesome! Thanks for getting back to me MrAlex.
New knowledge (Kotlin is new to me) is always a welcome thing. I see you’re using guthub issues so I’ll look at those, fork the code, and if I feel like I can contribute, I’ll follow whatever guidelines you lay down as far as process, but Bray is right, the best way to maintain control is pull requests. Therefore if I do have some changes I think could help, I’ll open a PR for you to review and accept, request changes on, or reject. That way you’ll have full control over what gets merged.
I’m extremely well versed in open source processes, git forks, branches, merging, PR’s etc, so if you ever have any questions about that, feel free to ask.
Not sure where you are geographically but I’m east coast time zone and do a 9-5 which actually translates to 6am - 6:30 or 7pm so I’m usually on between 8 and 10 (or 11 or later) pm loosing at Go, hacking, or playing silly old school 90’s PC games on steam.
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