Version 6.1.0¶
- Release Date
September, 20th 2019
- Compatibility
iOS 9, iOS 10, iOS 11, iOS 12, iOS 13, iPadOS 13
This release is packed with many new features and brings support for Dark Mode in iOS 13.
Warning
Update 24.09.2019: The application is crashing on iPad 2 or iPad 3 running iOS 9.3 but is working fine on some iPhones running iOS 9.3. Problem is triggered from internal framework and libraries and actually not bound to iPad vs iPhone but to the use of a 32-bit device (iPhone 4, 4S, 5, 5C, iPad 2, 3, 4th generation). Such hardware was sold until mid-2013.
What’s New¶
Flyout Menu¶
The drawer or flyout menu introduced in version 3.1 and the quick link to your personal profile have been streamlined into a brand new flyout menu:
From a technical perspective, this brings many important enhancements under the hood but when it comes to user experience (UX), this evolution has two direct major benefits:
It is much more logical to see your photo and name in the central menu and just have to tap them to open your personal profile than to use a small action icon from the dashboard.
Smartphone screens are getting larger and larger and this makes accessing the various menu entries with your thumb more easily when those menu entries are pushed a bit more to the bottom of the screen.
Dark Mode¶
Since iOS 13.0, people can choose to adopt a dark system-wide appearance called Dark Mode. In Dark Mode, the system uses a darker color palette for all screens, views, menus, and controls, and it uses more vibrancy to make foreground content stand out against the darker backgrounds.
People can choose Dark Mode as their default interface style, and they can use Settings > Display & Brightness to make their devices automatically switch to Dark Mode when ambiant light is low:
This release of LionsBase mobile brings support for Dark Mode to streamline your user experience while using your device. This may sound something minor but was in fact an enormous refactoring job to support it properly.
Here are some side-by-side examples on how the application behaves in Light Mode and in Dark Mode:
Events¶
The design of an event has been streamlined with other detail views
The user experience for answering custom questions has been enhanced, and more especially the questions of type “Radio”:
Link to WhatsApp¶
WhatsApp is not the only chat application many members are regularly using in place of standard SMS but this is the most used alternative and it is used by most of the members.
When tapping a mobile phone number from a member’s profile page, you may now quickly start a WhatsApp chat with that person:
Note
Internally, we are taking advantage of the “click to chat” feature of WhatsApp (read more). A few members have reported that they really would like to be able to group-chat with their club members or the participants of a given event. Unfortunately, WhatsApp does not offer any programmatic way to create group dynamically or start a chat with a predefined set of telephone numbers.
Furthermore, there is currently no plan either to integrate a built-in chat application into LionsBase mobile. Rationale is that expectations in term of usability are actually too high and we prefer to wait for WhatsApp (or similar applications) to enable such features for 3rd-party applications rather than to embed a half-baked feature which will not be used in the end. Anyone tried the built-in chat of MyLion? Then you certainly get what we mean.
Other Changes¶
In addition, a few bugs have been squashed and minor enhancements integrated:
authenticating from the welcome screen (dashboard) is now much easier thanks to an action button,
sometimes the “My Club” zone in dashboard was rendered after the news, this is now fixed,
as part of supporting Dark Mode into this application, the whole theming has been thought again and some colors have been adjusted to better stand out, even when using the pre-iOS 13 standard “Light” mode,
performance has been boosted a bit by applying additional modern design pattern to the pages of the applications,
various internal libraries have been upgraded, this automatically brings a fade-in and fade-out effect when switching from one page to another, which is visually appealing.
Note
Using Android? Please see corresponding release notes.