uMobile 1.2 (Phase 3) Roadmap

uMobile Phase 3

uMobile's phase 3 will consist of additional portlet development, feature enhancement, and bug fixes resulting in a uMobile server and native app 1.2 release.

Architecture Updates

Application State Save and Restore

The application currently exits the app completely when the user closes the app or navigates to another app (like the native map). This was due to iOS memory issues causing the app UI to degrade after opening up other apps that require a lot of memory. The newer Titanium SDKs claim to have better memory management, so it may require little effort to implement. Otherwise, the app should save the state (what portlet is opened, and what data is being viewed) as the app is used, and restore to that state when the app is opened again.

Native App Framework

The uMobile project should re-evaluate Phonegap's capabilities. Phonegap could be used as a lightweight wrapper around the browser-based client to provide native apps for Blackberry and Windows phones. It may also be wise to re-evaluate Phonegap vs. Titanium Appcelerator.

UX Enhancements

When the device is oriented in landscape mode, the primary title bar and secondary nav bars take up a significant amount of screen real estate. We should evaluate strategies for handling landscape-mode navigation that are compatible with WebView-based portlets.

jQuery Mobile Upgrade

jQuery Mobile is now at a 1.1 RC1 release, with a number of improvements since the 1.0 beta version included in uMobile 1.1. The uMobile project should upgrade to the current version of jQM and explore features that may have improved since the initial release, such as AJAX navigation and responsive design.

Overall UX Review

The uMobile project should review the current browser-based skin for opportunities for improvement and refactoring. Such improvements might include cleaning up base classes, moving common portlet styles into the main skin, and examining the current use of Sass and the common stylesheet.

In addition to reviewing the base uMobile stylesheets, a number of uMobile portlets have not yet undergone a UX review. These portlets currently include:

Athletics
Dining
Announcements

Tablet Interfaces

The uMobile project should review the current tablet implementations of both browser-based and native modules. Native modules such as the directory and map may benefit from specialized tablet interfaces that make use of increased screen real estate. Browser-based modules currently render the desktop interface when accessed from tablet devices, but it may be more appropriate to offer the mobile version with added responsive design elements. While the desktop interface is appropriate to the screen real estate available on a tablet, these interfaces do not necessarily make use of touchscreen features and are less consistent with the smartphone styling.

Module Updates

Map

Multi-campus support
Allow user to center map to geolocation
Virtual reality display
Tablet-specific UI, particularly utilizing the iPad Split View to display results in list view and on map with one view.

Courses

Alternate merged announcement view

Discussion at the Sakai conference indicated that some institutions would prefer a merged view of synoptic information for announcements, etc. While the current by-course view is valuable, we might add an alternate view that merges information from multiple courses.

LMS integration implementations

As of uMobile 1.1, the courses module has a basic open-source connector for Sakai, with a Moodle connector in-progress. These integrations should be enhanced, preferably in collaboration with campuses currently using each LMS.

It would also be beneficial to implement the new uMobile search API in the courses portlet, allowing the portlet to report search results from implemented LMSs.

Multiple semesters

The current courses portlet is only capable of displaying a simple list of courses, which many schools would presumably restrict to the current semester. One enhancement would be to add a concept of semesters and semester current-ness to the courses DAO, allowing the user to view the current semester, but also navigate to past semesters (including official grades) and perhaps future semesters. The portlet's semester list should be restricted to only semesters for which the querying user has registration data. The portlet would need to have a flexible and extensible view of semesters to account for different academic calendar breakdowns (semester vs. quarter), as well as other scheduling factors.

Grade calculator

If historical grade data is already available to the courses portlet, it would be interesting and valuable to add a GPA calculator. This calculator would need to allow a flexible mapping between grade names and values, as well as flexible handling of incompletes and retaken courses. It might also be valuable to add an ability to input hypothetical grades for current courses to get a preview of what a student's GPA might be.

News

Media

RSS and Atom feeds support inclusion of media such as images, video, and audio. Some initial support is available for parsing simple feed thumbnail images and parsing mp4 video from Berkeley's Opencast implementation. The support is by no means complete, and adding additional support for more common video types and iTunes' podcasting format would be valuable.

Import/Export

The news portlet's import/export system is currently incomplete and will not support a full export and import of news feed sets.

Calendar and News Common Features

User Configuration

Users currently may turn on and off predefined calendar and news feeds for which they originally received default registration, but have no access to non-default feeds. Both portlets need more complete mobile user customization interfaces that allow selection of non-default feeds and allow users to add their own custom feeds.

Notifications Framework

The University of Manchester recently developed a new Notifications Portlet that provides a category-based notifications interface to end users. This portlet is distinct from the Announcements Portlet in that it offers user-specific information. The portlet currently has a DAO-type API that allows universities to write multiple custom implementations for retrieving notification items.

The uMobile project would like to add mobile interfaces for this portlet and include it in the default layout. Furthermore, a JSON REST service could be added to power notifications integration in the native app client. In order to better power emergency use cases, the data structure might be updated to include a concept of notification importance.

This notifications portlet could also be used as the basis for a more ambitious notifications service for the entire portal. By leveraging JSR-286 events in a similar manner as the uPortal search framework, the portlet could request notification data from other portlets. In this model, the notifications portlet could combine custom DAO results from external services with results from other portlets such as the announcements and courses portlets.

This work will require branching the project to allow for JSR-286 development.

uMobile