Adam’s Comments (group member since Aug 10, 2010)

Adam’s comments from the Goodreads Developers group.

Thanks for the notice of these changes, Keegan!

Mackenzie wrote: "On the YAGRAC app where is the bar scanner?"

Click the 'Find Books' button. On this screen, click the menu button on your phone and you will get the option to scan / batch scan

The app kicks you into the browser to oauth authenticate. I can't force the browser to close, so you need to close it to get back to the app. I pop a toast with that instruction, but it is easy to miss.

Nice Job!

Good work MICHAEL! I went through my list of books with known encoding issues and all appear to be coming up roses in my app. Thanks so much for looking into and addressing this issue!

Good call! I did not have either of those on my request. I added them in and the signed request began to work.

"format=xml" -- is this an undocumented option on all requests? If so, it would be fairly simple for me to add it to all of my calls.

Version 1.4 of YAGRAC is now available both from the project site and the market.

Changes in 1.4:
- Added 'Events' screen which displays upcoming events near you.
- Able to view comments on a review
- Bulk scan mode which allows scanning a collection of books to selected shelves all at one go.
- Lots of UI tweaks, fixes, and changes to improve usability and performance

No problem, and thanks for the clarification! So when I make a request using my application key, but not signing the request, the user must have the 'allow partners of Goodreads to display my reviews' option checked for the reviews to appear. If I do sign the request, then all reviews will appear.

Based on that, I do think there is a bug on the book.show request when signed from a mobile device. When I leave my book.show request unsigned, I get back xml. When I sign the book.show request I receive the HTML for the mobile version of that book's web page.

I see, my understanding of how privacy works may be a littled skewed then.

Let's say we have three users: Aaron, Beatrice, and Clyde.

Aaron is friends with Beatrice and Clyde. Aaron has set his profile to public.
Beatrice is friends with Aaron, but not Clyde. Beatrice has set her profile to private.
Clyde is friends with Aaron, but not Beatrice. Clyde has a public profile.

When Aaron signs in, he can see the books that both Beatrice and Clyde have put on their shelves, as well as reviews for those books.
When Beatrice signs in, she can see the books that both Aaron and Clyde have put on their shelves, as well as reviews for those books.
When Clyde signs in, he can see the books that Aaron has put on his shelves, as well as the reviews for those books. He is not able to view the books on Beatrice's shelves (they are not friends) nor is he able to see the reviews she has written for those books.

That was my assumption. Based on your comment, I take it that all reviews, regardless of your profile settings, are public. So in that case, while Clyde could not request the list of books on Beatrice's shelves, if he were to view book reviews for a book that Beatrice has reviewed, he might see her review.

Following up: this is still an issue, but only when the request is signed. The book.show request does not require being signed, so if I don't sign it I get results back. I was signing this request in the hope that, if it were signed, the returned reviews would include reviews that are private to the signed user.

Looks like it is fixed now.

My calls to the book.show (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/[[... )

method from a mobile device are getting redirected to the mobile page for the book rather than returning the expected xml. Requests to the same URL from a desktop machine receive XML as expected.

I'd love to meet you guys IRL, but it is a long drive from Indiana to California.

This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For wrote: "If you can't control the background color, can you control the text color? In the minimal Android coding I've done, one of the few things that was often easy to control (often...not always, unfortu..."

I took your advice and set all the tabs to a white background with black text. This makes the text visible, but it is difficult to tell which tab is selected. The theme is ignored in later version of Android. I also squished down the tab button height. If you would like to give it a try the APK is available from the project site: http://code.google.com/p/yagrac/downl...

I have a couple of other features and bugs I would like to address before I push this to the market, which should be in a week or so.

@Lazyknight that is totally bizarre! I would say it is an issue with your carrier, but the fact that Casper's app works on both seems to indicate that there is some setting I have missed that will get it working for you on both.

I suppose the good news is that you can use the app on wifi. I will keep investigating to see if there is something I can do to get it working on GPRS.

@Lazyknight - that pretty well seals it that I have a code issue in some way. I will take a look tonight to see if I can figure out what it is.

@Lazyknight - I'm in the US on Verizon with a Moto DROID (v1) running 2.2. I went through the oauth process again and everything worked. I then tried the same in my 1.6 emulator that I setup when working with @This_Is_Not_The_Michael_You're_Looking_For and it worked as well. This leads me to believe that the source of the issue is something I can't emulate locally. It could be that I have a bug in my code that only manifests on your phone model, phone setup, or carrier. Do you get the same results if your phone is connected via WiFi rather than mobile data? When you visit your account details on Goodreads, do you have any apps authorized? Does @Casper's Gready-Android app succeed where mine fails?

Thanks for your help in getting this debugged!

@Lazyknight - http://www.goodreads.com/oauth/reques... is the URL that YAGRAC needs to be able to access in order to get permission to perform actions on your behalf. If you enter that URL into your mobile browser, do you get a response that says "Invalid OAuth Request", or does it instead say that the page is unreachable?

Are you behind some sort of firewall or proxy that would prevent you from accessing the Goodreads site?

When just adding a book to a shelf it isn't a big deal, but when submitting a new or updated review it would be nice.

Thanks Louise!