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taz - News App for Android

For over a year now we have worked together with the German daily newspaper die tageszeitung (taz), creating a new Android app for reading the newspaper. With the upcoming release on 14.09.2020, we look back at the project.

According to today’s fast-paced spirit, the taz had set themselves the task to develop an app which foregrounds the digital medium. We are very happy that we could help them to do so. The new app is no longer based on the PDFs produced for creating the printed newspaper, but on a new section navigation logic implemented in native Android. This makes it easy to navigate between articles, adjust display options such as font size to your own needs and share articles or mark them for later reading. Issues are stored locally to allow offline reading and are only updated when changes occur.

The more complex tasks in this app included a favourable download scheduling, an integration of push notifications, the manual writing of database migrations and, last but not least, various UI challenges, including complex nesting of scroll containers, implementation of a date selection and a night mode.

The app had to also provide the new taz-ID and the possibility for users to convert their login.

The app communicates with the backend infrastructure of taz via a GraphQL interface. We also use a Sentry instance to reliably track errors.

Of course, we also followed our development best practices such as continuous integration and short release cycles for this project.

The taz neo app is available under a free license and the source code can be reviewed on github.

DIE LINKE.App

Over the last year, we have worked together with Die LINKE in the conception and implementation of their current election campaign app (Wahlkampf-App).

Aim of the project

Die LINKE needed an application to coordinate the planing and realisation of their election campaign activities such as door to door campaigning, distribution of flyers, hanging up of posters, etc. A diverse set of users had to be considered: There were state association coordinators responsible for the planing of events; locally active users who helped during single events; and people potentially interested in activities organised by Die Linke in their neighbourhoods in the near future. Later, functionality was added to support future campaign planning.

Technology used

Due to the tight schedule and the diversity of users, use cases, and devices, we decided to implement the project as a progressive web app (PWA). Again, we relied on our standard tech stack and implemented a Django based backend and a Vuejs frontend. For the PWA wrapping, we relied on the Quasar framework. Since the Wahlkapmf-App is map-centric, we used mapbox here. For the charts in the evaluation section, we chose the open source vue library Apexcharts, because it offers many useful functionalities like zooming, interactive legends, or data export in different formats.

Process

As already mentioned, our basic project management relied on an iterative scrum process for verifying the alignment between design assumptions and actual user needs. Another key feature of the process was the implementation of extensive integration tests in the backend of the Wahlkampf-App.

License

The Wahlkampf-App is licensed under a free license, the source code can be viewed on gitlab. Contributions are welcome.