I’ve been working on a project called Yoke. It’s a server application for enhancing mobile applications and it’s accompanied by an Android library that takes most of the effort out of using Yoke in Android applications.
I started working on Yoke because there were a number of features that I really wanted to add to my Android applications for which I lacked a good approach. My key problem was:
How to make user generated content shareable?
Mobile devices typically have spotty internet connections, so if you want to make the user generated content accessible in a reliable way it needs to be copied to a server. And unless you want to prevent users from editing their content after they have shared it, you need a way to update content that’s already been uploaded. And since it would be quite annoying for a user to request these updates manually, it needs to be done automatically on their behalf (without failing “annoyingly” if the network fails). And since users might use the application on more than one device it’s necessary to synchronize the user content between all devices and the server, in both directions. Using the application across multiple devices in this way further implies that each user needs some form of identity within the application.
Then there’s the actual user mechanics of sharing to consider. Although sharing within an application can be as simple as making content visible to all the other users, the reality is that, for even mildly popular applications, the volume of content generated requires indexing and sorting to make it navigable. And because user generated content naturally varies in quality you need a mechanism for surfacing the best content. Approaching this (as I have) by allowing users to ‘like’ or ‘favorite’ the content of other users involves many other considerations: how to cope with flurries of ‘likes’ on extremely popular content, how to provide a stable ordering for browsing by popularity when it is constantly fluctuating, how to accommodate content that isn’t public, etc.
Simple sounding problems can hide a lot of complexity. Yoke is my attempt to write a reusable platform that does only as much as I need to let users share content via my mobile applications. I just want to give them an easy way to:
in a way that doesn’t constrain the applications I can write.
I think I’m almost there now, Metaglow has been my testbed which I’m looking forward to releasing soon, after that I’m going to try and find time to write a few posts about what I learned by implementing Yoke.
