What’s New¶

Whenever you create an event with a few “simple” questions, the LionsBase mobile application will automatically create clever sections to group the questions together.

A common case is that you start with a checkbox-based question “Participation” with a few authorized “answers” (e.g., “Preparation meeting”, “Visit”, “Dinner” and “Debriefing”):

and then a few other questions of any type (radio-based, single text, …):

The mobile application would show 2 sections for your questions, the first one grouping the YES/NO (checkbox-based) questions together and then all other type questions:

Note

At this point, you may still wonder what is the exact difference between checkbox-based questions and radio-based questions. From the screenshots above, it should be clear how a checkbox-based question is presented: the authorized “answers” are actually rendered as separate questions which allow you to answer with either “yes” or “no” to each of them.

A radio-based question on the other hand uses the various authorized answers as options to be chosen from; this means that you are presented with an option picker and need to choose one single answer that fits your needs:

Now, for larger events such as a national convention, it is common that the YES/NO (checkbox-based) questions are flagged as “meta-events”, which allow them to be considered a bit like “sub-events”. Those “meta-events” may have a dedicated price associated to them, possibly a restriction on the number of participants, or even targeted at some functions (e.g., district governors and 1st vice-governor), members of a given district (e.g., general assembly of district West) or only at external guests (e.g., city tour for the partners of the Lions members).

In that context, the organizer uses questions of type “Header” to visually separate the numerous meta-events:

The expected rendering is then to use those Headers to group the YES/NO questions together instead of using their “Question” part as title for the section.

It is precisely this grouping that was not working properly in the mobile application and is now corrected.

Other Changes¶

In addition, a few bugs have been squashed and minor enhancements integrated:

• the animation of the photo and background image when you scroll a person’s profile (or a club’s profile) is much more smooth and now features a parallax effect;

• we dropped the option to enlarge a member’s photo as most photos were actually smaller than displayed by default. If you want a higher resolution for your address book, then simply export the member’s card;

• events whose registration ends in the next 10 days are listed in the upcoming events on the dashboard but disappeared from that list on the last day of the registration; this is now fixed;

• skills and interests may now be edited similarly to your social networks from within your own profile page (read more);

• sometimes the last twinning club was partially hidden; we added some extra padding to be on the safe side;

• various internal libraries have been upgraded.

About the Large Compatibility with Versions of Android¶

As you see, we do our best to keep compatibility with rather old versions of Android (Android 5 - Lollipop dates back from November 2014 and this represents a gigantic jump in the past in the IT world).

If we keep such old compatibility (compared to Apple users), this is related to a very unfortunate fact that Android smartphones and tablets are usually maintained much less than Apple ones. In fact, manufacturers such as Samsung are selling their devices with (usually) the latest available version of Android at that time (but often with the previous one) and provide major updates of the system for something that we estimate for about 2 years in contrast to Apple which supports its devices for as long as 5 to 6 years. We understand that LionsBase application users do not see any need to get a new device every 2 to 3 years (which is totally legit) and as such, we strive to keep compatibility as long as we can.

As problems arise due to this compatibility and as the number of people still actively using older devices decreases, we may drop support for some older versions at any time.