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Version 8.0.0

Release Date

January, 10th 2021

Compatibility

Android 5.1 (Lollipop), Android 6 (Marshmallow), Android 7 and 7.1 (Nougat), Android 8 and 8.1 (Oreo), Android 9.0 (Pie), Android 10.0, Android 11.0 (R)

This release is packed with many new features:

  • show the history of a given function (list of former club presidents, …);

  • share interesting news from sources you follow to your own club;

  • show member profile pages even quicker;

  • and more.

What’s New

Menu

Committee

When you show a club, zone, region committee, a district cabinet or the council of governors, you may now long tap a given function and access the list of other members having held the corresponding position; e.g., the list of former club presidents:

Accessing the history of a given club function

Press the action “Show list of…” to discover which members had that function in the history of the club, the zone, …

Hint

Trying to show the history of former Council Chairpersons redirects you to the list of former National Conventions instead, as that page conveys more information than a simple list of members.

Note

When you access the committee (or cabinet/council of governors) of a zone, region, district or multiple district, you may be presented with additional functions whose level is different. For example the committee of a zone shows both zone-related functions such as the Zone Chairperson or the 1st Vice Zone Chairperson, but club-related functions as well with the various Club Presidents.

In such case, the action to show the history of a given function is disabled for functions from other levels (in our example, the club presidents).

News

First of all, we have figured out that the list of news was not getting refreshed regularly. This is now fixed so that you will not miss interesting articles if you often keep the LionsBase mobile application stay in background.

From the dashboard, when you open a news article, the share icon top right now features an option to share that news article to your own club:

Sharing a news article to a club

Once shared, news can be managed as usual by the webmaster from within the LionsBase Backend. It is worth mentioning that for the time being, shared news are only visible in the mobile application but not on your club website.

Since it may not be obvious for everyone to understand the purpose of sharing a news to your fellow club members, let us describe the idea.

By default, a user will be automatically subscribed to news articles originating from their club, clubs in their zone and news articles from higher levels such as the district and the multiple district. It is very common for some users to subscribe to additional sources of news articles. In that context, you may have access to articles other members of your club are not seeing in their own feed. Sharing a news is thus two-fold: on one hand it lets you broaden your member’s view with other interesting articles and on the other hand it lets you create a tighten network between clubs.

Hint

In order to let you share a news article, LionsBase checks that you are a webmaster of the corresponding club.

If you are webmaster of different clubs, you will be able to share to any of them.

This may be extended any time, e.g., so that members with function “Club Communication Delegate” are granted access to sharing news article as well.

Note

This feature will be available to Austrian members after the migration to the newer version of TYPO3 has been completed; many thanks for your understanding.

Responsiveness

The application is now much more responsive when you tap a member to open their profile page.

This was made possible by removing a visual effect introduced in the Version 6.2.0. That visual effect became useless due to updates to underlying framework libraries. Moreover, in most cases, the profile information of the member you want to show is already locally available and as such there is no need to wait at all.

Social Activities

The icon for accessing the list of social activities has been changed (on the left side, the lifebuoy symbol used since version 5.3 and on the right the new circled star symbol):

Old and new icon for the social activities

Is it just a cosmetic change? Actually no! We took the opportunity to introduce icons based on the type/category of the social activity. This both better shows at a glance the distribution of your social activities and lets you quickly spot possible incorrect categorisation:

Icon used for social activities based on their category

Overview of the social activity icons

  • Childhood Cancer: Childhood Cancer

  • Diabetes: Diabetes

  • Environment/Sustainable Development: Environment/Sustainable Development

  • Hunger Relief: Hunger Relief

  • Vision: Vision

  • Family/City: Family/City

  • Children/Youth: Children/Youth

  • Disease/Research: Disease/Research

  • Culture: Culture

  • Sport: Sport

  • Generic social activity category: All other categories

Other Changes

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

  • similarly to any list showing committee members, you may now tap on a Council Chairperson in the list of conventions to open the member’s profile page;

  • the list of clubs is now better accessible for the visually impaired;

  • we changed the color of the text “registration is closed” in the list of upcoming events from red to a dark orange; rationale is that some members wrongly thought they were not attending the corresponding event while seeing something “red”; we naturally hope this will enhance their user experience while in the end not changing anything for the other users;

  • we successfully tested this application on Android 11.0 (API Level 30) and thus raised the compatibility;

  • we could not keep supporting Android 5.0 Lollipop (API Level 21) while raising the bar for Android 11.0 so the minimal targeted version is now Android 5.1 instead (API Level 22).

  • 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 5.1 - Lollipop dates back from March 2015 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 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.

Note

Using iOS? Please see corresponding release notes.

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Documentation created using Sphinx 4.3.2 and integrated in TYPO3 with restdoc.
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