What is happening to LWT?

[HugoFara]

With my 76th commit today I became the first contributor to LWT. As I brought import changes with explanations scattered across three releases, here is an official communication of my plans for LWT.

Motivations

I think that the idea behind LWT is good. It is an open-source language-learning app, meaning it is and will stay free. Reading in foreign languages is a good way to increase your language skills. LWT received good reviews. In spite of all this potential, LWT don't really take of, and after ten years of existence it has met its glass ceiling.

As I didn't want LWT to die, action was needed.

Strategy

The first step is to make LWT community-friendly. The main goals are summed up in project 1.

• Readability: LWT has an open yet obfuscated source. There were no comments, no types and files either wrote entirely in imperative style, or one big file containing all the functions.
• Decentralization: Hopefully enough, I could start developing from another GitHub Project, which makes contributions from third parties easy. The integration of composer is also a great plus, because it avoids to copy each dependency from raw code, and update them manually.
• KISS: or simple is beautiful. On desktop, LWT seems to run well, however, it often relies on very intricate methods (frames, style with jQuery, etc...) which in practice make the application unusable on other platform. Some functions got improved only by regressing to the standards.

Current state

For now I consider that I blew most dust away. There is still a lot to do, but it means I already achieved half of the community standards objectives. This also means I can start developing new features and fix bugs. In one word: code less, but better.

I tried to left the interface as unchanged as I could, code changed dramatically behind the curtain. Now, a new LWT may come on stage.

Future Developments

Once everything is refreshed, clean-up, and ready to use comes the main problem: where should LWT go?

Here I ask for the audience. I have personal objectives, but I wouldn't have created a public GitHub if I they were my only aims. The next step is gain in popularity, gather a community and see what people need. Roots of this fork received many issues, but couldn't address them because the code was too difficult to use. Here we turn the other way out: we had a hard time reviewing code, issues are now easy to solve.

As a mise-en-bouche, the next release should fix mobile compatibility once for all. Yes, you will be able to use LWT from your phone. It should come in 30 days.

Conclusion

Post issues, ask for enhancements, contribute and stay tuned! I'm an independent developer, so my only retribution is to know that enjoy what I do. And don't forget to give a star to this project if you want it to grow!

[HugoFara]

As of version 2.5.0-fork, I reached the stage 3 "Future Developments" as explained in #36 . Now things will start to be interesting...