OBSOLETE - Six to Eight: An iPhone client

Question

Six to Eight no longer functions, and has been discontinued.

This is due to the shutdown of the v1 SE API. Given that SE has now developed their own iOS client, I don't see myself updating Six to Eight as an iOS app in the future.

The rest of this page remains for historical interest

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Six to Eight (sixtoeightapp.com), an iOS Stack Exchange client.

Why not download now? It's entirely free, and recently updated to v1.2!

Version 1.2 has just been released, with crash fixes on iOS 6 and iPhone 5 support. Look out for a much improved version in the new year!

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A pocket sized client, for you to track your activity and get answers to those niggly, "need an answer right now" problems. Full browsing, searching, statistics and user tracking.

Bug reports: I hope you're not having any problems, but if you are, please see the bug reporting answer to this question. You can also see my bug analysis and advice to other app authors.

Screenshots:

License & download.

Available now from the iTunes App Store for the princely sum of $0.00. In GBP, that's £0.00, and in Mauritanian Ouguiya, it's أوقية‎0.00!

Platform

iOS 4.3 devices.

Contact

I'd love feedback here, or by email (my site is http://www.archgrove.co.uk, email adamw@).

Code

Objective-C, using my own API wrapper (focused on easy UI concurrency and state caching/update). As of 2010-07-23, you can get big chunks of code from the open source page. I'm also writing a few blog posts that new API users might find useful.

Answer 1

Pre-Release Public Distribution Review

Don't let this list scare you. Most of the items are minor annoyances or suggestions for improvement. I believe I found just 1 bug. Overall, the app feels polished. It is easy to use. The UI and general flow of the app makes sense. Nice work!

_{I've separated items by view in hopes of some form of organization.}

• Setup site

  • Track user: Perhaps it could default to filling in the last user searched.
  • Consider allowing multiple sites to be selected at once and use associated accounts to add the same user on the associated sites.
    • adamw : Good idea on these two. I'll certainly add the first, which should make the experience a lot better for little effort. In general, I think I need a better "Site add" UI in general for people with the same user on multiple sites.
  • Currently the user search is done first and it always searches on SO. Maybe the UI could be reworked so that the site is selected first and then the user is searched so that the gravatar and rep are shown for the correct search in the site. (Not sure how this would play well with adding multiple sites at once.)
    • adamw : Adding new sites does default to SOF, but you can pick a new site first then search for a user. I'll change the UI so that when you toggle sites, previous user searches are invalidated.

• Your sites

  • Consider allowing sites to be reordered.
    • adamw : Absolutely. Not sure why I didn't do this first off, frankly.
  • Going from a site to Your Sites and then back into the site loses the active tab. If I'm in SO viewing Questions, click Your Sites, then enter SO again, it is back on the User tab. Suggested behavior is that it would load the Questions tab again.
    • adamw : This is a nice idea. I'll implement some kind of tab persistence for this.
  • Going from a site to Your Sites and then back into the site loses the active sort for Questions/Favorites. This could be a related symptom to the above. Suggestion behavior is that if I was on Newest Questions before I go back to Your Sites, that's what I should see when I go back into the site.
    • adamw : Again, a nice idea. I'll add this when I add the above.

• User

  • New comment: consider going directly to the "Viewing post" view.
  • Post revision: consider going directly to the "Viewing post" view.
    • adamw : Hmm, both of these should already happen. I'll file this as "bug" and look into it
  • Question activity: consider saying "Asked" or "Answered". (I only have answers in my recent activity so I'm not sure if a question I asked would be labelled as "Question Activity".)
    • adamw : Good idea :)
  • Reputation: Selecting an item under the reputation graph takes you to the wrong post. The title listed on the User view is correct. The post it takes you to is the incorrect piece. This affects all reputation items I have listed, not just one. This also affects other users.
    • adamw : This is a bug due entirely to my stupidity, and breaking of my cardinal rules. I fixed another bug very late in development, involving reordering those posts. I then failed to take this in to account in the UI selection routine. I'll have this fixed in the next release.
  • Mentions: consider going directly to the "Viewing post" view.
    • adamw : I'll certainly change to this, yes.
  • Consider priority of sections. When I look at my User page, I know what actions I've taken on the site. What I want to see first are things I didn't do, reputation probably moreso than mentions.
    • adamw : Probably true. I suspect the best way to fix this is to allow people to reorder the user page for their tracked user to whatever pleases them.
  • Badges: Able to select/highlight a badge, but it doesn't navigate anywhere. The highlight response to tapping it seems to indicate an action as a response (perhaps what post the badge was awarded for?).
    • adamw : The selection ability is a bug - currently, there's no "Badge viewing" in the app. I will be adding this in the next release, so it will make more sense then.
  • Site statistics seems out of place at the bottom of the User view.
    • adamw : Yes, I suppose it does. I rather ran out of places to put that. I'll ponder on a better place for that.
  • If I view another user by tapping on their name on a post, and then go in a view their activity, clicking the User button in the upper left takes me back to my User page, not the user I was on. (This doesn't happen every time. It only manages to happen when I'm not paying attention and taking notes on my exact path. I'll work on getting you details.)
    • adamw : This is very odd, and shouldn't be possible. The views are maintained as a stack, and going "back" just pops the top of it. You shouldn't be able to go back to anything other than the view you left from, so I'd love repro steps for this.

• Viewing Post

  • Consider adding an indication of whether an answer is accepted.
    • adamw : This should also already happen. The top bar of the post view should say "Accepted answer" and be in green.
  • I've got a comment showing it is from 0 hours ago but it is from 13 hours ago. A day later, it shows "an hour ago". I've found a few other comments that are not timestamped properly, but most of them are.
    • adamw : Hmm, this is strange. It may be bad data from the API, or a bug. I'll investigate.

• Question

  • Consider adding ability to select tag to do a tag search.
    • adamw : Coming in version 1.1 :)

• Posts

  • Their questions/answers: Consider adding ability to sort like the web ui: recent, views, newest, votes.
    • adamw : Will do
  • Their answers: Consider adding the title of the question. This view could desperately use the identifying information of the title otherwise you're not sure what you're looking at.
    • adamw : Yes, this is not good. I'll find some way of wangling that in there for 1.1

• Questions

  • What is the red icon underneath the number of votes?
    • adamw : The number of answers the question has.
  • Consider indicating whether the question has an accepted answer.
    • adamw : I'd like do this, but it's a case of working out the best way of fitting it into the UI. I shall ponder on it
  • Consider adding indication of important/ignored tags on the list of questions
    • adamw : This will come in v1.1 with better tag integration

• Favorites

  • Consider indicating whether the question has an accepted answer.
    • adamw As above, I'll do this once I find a nice UI track to reveal it.

• Search

  • Inputting a tag with [] does not do a tag search.
  • Consider providing a UI to search/autocomplete tags.
  • Consider providing a UI to add the other search parameters besides accepted answer.
    • adamw : All coming in v1.1. I've been writing the new tag filtering UI. It has shiny Core Animation effects :)
  • Consider adding the ability to save searches.
    • adamw : Good idea, I shall do this.
  • Taking saved searches a step further, this could be a good opportunity for watch lists, push/badge functionality. (For instance, an easy way to view questions tagged c# with 0 upvoted answers.)
    • adamw : Push notification is coming in a future version (probably not 1.1, but 1.2). I've not quite decided the best form for it - ensuring it's useful (i.e. tells you when you something is new), without being annoying (i.e. you just read it on your desktop).

• Landscape View

  • Setup site is only a portrait screen.
    • adamw : Yes. I'm not sure what value having this in landscape would provide, other than consistency. I might add that, but it's low priority.
  • Rotating back to portrait (at least in Viewing Post) does not resize the display correctly, so the font is still bigger and I can't pinch to zoom it down to fit. (Pinch to zoom could be useful across the app. One post I looked at had an image in it that I could not see and was unable to zoom.)
    • adamw : This seems to be a bug in the UIWebView webkit embedding. It only seems to happen in some situations regarding the size of the original content, so I've only replicated it occasionally. I shall investigate and find a solution.
  • Question view: The "Question" button takes up a lot of precious screen real estate leaving very little room to show answers. Only 1 row is visible at a time, and only the answers grid can be scrolled such that you can only ever see 1 answer listed at a time. Being able to scroll isn't as important in portrait mode, but would be very helpful in landscape mode.
  • adamw : Agreed. I'll find a fix for this.

• Consider adding a Tags item to the TabStrip bar (and the appropriate functionality of course :p)

  • adamw : This is a priority v1.1 feature.

• Thoughts on any push or badge functionality? (Rep changes, new mentions, new items in saved searches, etc)

  • adamw : Oh yes. I've experimented with several concepts. but want to get this right first time. It has a high potential to be very annoying if done wrong. I'll probably write a blog post about it.

Regarding 'consider going directly to the "Viewing post" view.': Without this, one might be unsure whether the comment was on the question or one of the answers. You have to go select the various items to look for the comment.

Answer 2

Thanks for letting me try out the pre-release! Here is my feedback:

• Overall design could be improved - I guess you already know that, though. What especially annoys me is the icon.
  • adamw : Oh, I know - especially about the icon. But damnit Jim, I'm a programmer, not an artist. And despite the plethora of open source code for people who can't/don't have the time, there's very limited decent "open source" art. I also don't have any budget to pay for someone to make a nice icon.
  • eWolf : I almost assumed that. Just wanted to give all possible feedback.
• Instead of showing an alert when opening the app the first time, why not direct the user to the view to setup a site immediately?
  • adamw : Hmm, I could do this. I erred on the side of an explanation - a big UI popup with no context can be scary. I shall consider this.
• Why not allow users to choose multiple sites at once to setup?
  • adamw : This is a good idea, and I'm looking into it. Alas, it makes life complicated with respect to the "user tracking" feature. If you select a site then track a user, it would have to whittle this list down to just the sites that can be tracked. If you've already selected more than one site, what happens to the UI if the user is found on one but not the other? I need to ponder on the best way of doing it.
  • eWolf : You're right. I'm just criticising and you gotta take care of the details, haha :-P
• Questions/answers per minute shows 0.0 on Stack Apps. Is there really so little going on here or is this a bug?
  • adamw : Not a bug, it's just that quiet around here. We get less than a half dozen posts a day, in my experience, which the API is rounding down to 0.
• Why not show the question text when tapping the question title, instead of wasting space with a big button?
  • adamw : Good idea. I shall be improving the initial "Question view" in 1.1 to give more context about the question itself.
• It's not really obvious to me that hitting the blue arrow opens the author's profile. Maybe you could just split the list item and create a second one for the author, which open his page when being tapped regularly?
  • adamw : I thought this was a pretty standard iPhone convention for detail disclosure in list items? I'll ponder :)
  • eWolf : It is. What I don't find clear is that the opened view refers to the author, and not the question which is represented by the list item. I just noticed that you placed the blue arrow on the height of the author name - but still, I don't like it :-/
• On the answer page, the author's profile is opened by tapping on the author's name. This is inconsistent.
  • adamw : Agreed, but this is a deliberate choice, for space expediency. To make it UI consistent, I'd have to fence off a lot more UI space there to be consistent with the detail disclosure button. There's a redesign of the entire header section of the post view coming soon though, which might help me do this.
• When you scroll through a user's badges or a question's answers, only part of the view can be scrolled. It would be nice to see the whole page moving, so one can use the maximum space for viewing the content one wants to, when the list is long enough.
  • adamw : I actually prefer it the way it is. Seeing the user name and question title persistently is, in my opinion, more useful.

I hope my feedback helps you. Oh, and asides from the flaws listed in my answer, your app is pretty awesome! ;-) - adamw : All feedback is great, and thanks for taking the time to give it :)

Answer 3

Just downloaded it. It looks pretty cool, EXCEPT it crashed within about 10 seconds of me using it. I just emailed you the crash log. Even though I'm running 4.1, it looks as if it's not a problem with the OS

Answer 4

Official bug reports

In this post, I'll agreegate known bugs in the v1.0 of the app. For education and entertainment, I'll also explain those that I can - what caused them, and why. If you need to report a bug, please either add a comment here or send me an e-mail (adamw at archgrove dot co.uk).

Bugs in v1.1

Selecting "Their favorites" in a user view produces a "Site response error"

Not sure how this one occurred, since the code is the same since version 1.0. Either the API response has subtlety changed (unlikely), or when fixing another bug in CoreStack, I accidentally set the wrong response parsing system code for user favourites. It's fixed in my private version already, and will be in the next release.

Old bugs from version 1.0 (fixed in v1.1)

Tapping a row in the reputation changes section of a user generally shows the wrong post

This is because I violated my cardinal rule - don't change functionality in the hour or two before release. At the last minute, I finally realised I hated the way I was ordering the reputation update lists. I changed the sort ordering for display, but failed to account for it in the UI selection code.

It slipped through my tests because the user I checked against had a very small number of recent rep changes, and didn't trigger the bug. I was also probably not comparing what I tapped too closely against what appeared due to the last minute nature of the change (hence my cardinal rule).

API Advice - don't just test against one or two users, test against several with distinctive user patterns (i.e. include rare/retired users, and Jon Skeet level users - not just your own!).

Posts changed between 1 hour and 3 days ago will claim to be changed "an a hour ago"

This is a flaw in the date calculation code, which I've uploaded to http://sixtoeightapp.com/code/DateExtensions.m for the amusement of all. The inequality for the "an hour ago" conditional has been accidentally set as 60 * 60 * 90, and should be 60 * 90. A simple copy/paste error (still a bit embarrassing, though). Interestingly, this is a fantastic example of the need for better static code analysis. The later inequality (23 * 60 * 60) can never fire, and this should be flagged by the compiler.

API Advice - The reason this snuck through both my tests, and virtually all beta testers and public release testers is that most people use Stack Overflow, which updates faster than than a sysadmin installing Windows XP from an original disc. As such, it's quite plausible that everything you're looking at was updated an hour ago, so noone noticed that the 2 hours -> 3 days date range was simply missing. I advise testing against some quieter sites (meta.superuser.com has a sedate but active update rate, as does here).

The app sometimes crashes when viewing a post (unconfirmed)

I have one report of this bug, but not with repeatable steps. I can't replicate it earlier, but I'm sure it happened to the user. I'm still investigating this one.

The visit support alert doesn't take you to support

Indeed not. No excuse for this one except bone headedness, I'm afraid.

Answer 5

I thought it might be interesting to discuss a few development and design experiences from writing Six to Eight. I've so far written up two as blog posts over on my personal site:

The development of Six to Eight: Gives an overview of my design goals and challenges.

Getting the simple things right: Discusses the "Site subscription" feature - both why it turned out to be quite complex, and how it interacts with the Stack Exchange API.

If people have something they'd like more information on, just leave a comment or send me a mail, and I'll find the time to write some thoughts.

Answer 6

:( now it requires 4.1. I can barely catch up ;) does the update use a feature specific to 4.1 or could you lower the base OS to 4.0 again. If you can just do it on the next update? at least I finally have it on my phone :)

Answer 7

I finally got around to upgrading to iOS 4 and can now use Six to Eight. But I type in Jonathan to the user tracker, and I can't find myself. As the Jonathan with lowest rep has about 700, I've just added a bounty to a question and now have only 400 rep. I can find myself on Stack Apps however, so it would be nice if either I could just type on my user I'd or the app used stackauth to find my other accounts.

Answer 8

Hi Adam. Great work with releasing CoreStack. I'm giving it a whirl in an iPad app I am creating. It might be worth pointing, in the readme, which apple frameworks are required to be linked into your application. It took me a good while to work out that I needed to add SystemConfiguration.framework. Anyway, keep up the good work! Jon

Answer 9

There is an encoding problem on User page in Mentions of -section. It seems that non ASCII characters are stripped.

I am seeing something like this:

Mentioned by EJP
@Juha Syrjl:...

Correct would be:

Mentioned by EJP
@Juha Syrjälä:...

The very same comment is correctly displayed elsewhere in app.

I am using iPad and whatever version of SixToEight was available in AppStore yesterday. I was looking at my user information from stackoverflow.

Answer 10

Sorry if this has already been mentioned (there are soo many answers!), but I think that I found another bug in Six to Eight. When you tap refresh, the TextView containing the Q&A Site info, expands downwards. Here's what I mean:

Regular StackOverflow Site View:

After tapping "Refresh" a few times:

After tapping "Refresh" a bunch of times:

I also have one other bug: When I try to track my profile at AskDifferent (Apple StackExchange), my profile gets refreshed, but then I get an error that says to make sure the site still exists (which it does). Thanks! Love the app! Keep up the great work!

Answer 11

I really want to be able to track myself with this app but I won't show up under the user search. I did a search on the website and compared it to the search in the app, and only a very small number of members show up in the app compared to the website. Is there a way to fix this or do I need to wait for an update?

Answer 12

It looks like a great app, however I'm having a problem accessing my user page. If I set up to track myself, the app:

1. Shows the user page with the infomation loaded correctly for a moment

2. Throws the error:

   Site response error
   The site is not responding. If this error persists, ensure this Stack Exchange site is still operating

3. Shows a largely blank screen with

   No user loaded
   Tap reload to try again

If I browse the questions I can access other people's user pages without error. But if I browse to a question of mine, and follow the link to my user page I get the above error.

It clearly doesn't like me!

Answer 13

I (also) experience a consistent app crash like so under iOS 6 (did not occur under iOS 5.x) on both iPad 2 and iPhone 3GS:

• 1) open site (e.g. Mathematics)
• 2) open question
• 3) return to questions using "Questions" button
• 4) return to sites using "Your sites" button
• 5) crashes 100% at this point

I love the app but this is highly annoying (has made me switch back to the browser for now).

Thanks for your attention & possible bug fix.

Answer 14

I experience a consistent app crash like so:

• searching for issues tagged backbone.js
• viewing an issue (at random)
• going back to the issue list

Here the app crashes with no displayed message or anything to indicate what went wrong.

Answer 15

I am unable to track a user

• I go to Your Sites
• Click the plus icon
• Toggle Track a user
• It shows "none selected", and I click the > arrow
• A search comes up. I've tried entering my display name, my login name, even the numeric ID for the user.
• Absolutely nothing happens when i click search

I only have Stack Overflow checkmarked for the sites.