Hello! We’re thrilled to introduce a brand new blog series – "Our Anthology". We’ve relaunched the Anthology app with the goal to uphold the integrity of the photography industry in this rapidly changing online world and we're excited to have you join us on this journey.
Here, we'll keep you informed about the latest bugs, planned improvements, and the impact of your feedback. We believe in being transparent and accessible, and this blog is a step towards that. So, let's get started!
Bug Discovery and Fixes
The launch of the app hit a few small road bumps, but overall, the build was stable enough to be released. The plan moving forward is to implement smaller timely fixes and improvements every other week if not sooner.
On launch day, here's a list of what we currently know about:
- There is a current bug with User Authentication when signing up with a new account. If a user uses certain special characters in the password field, the backend is not recognizing these characters and the user will see a Network Error message when trying to use the application. (The workaround for this for the time being is for the user to force close the application and on the Sign In screen, use the Forgot Password option to set a new password without any characters)
- On the Explore screen, there two issues that we're working on:
- Fixing the refresh rate of pins and icon loading - as it stands now, some Points of Interest are not appearing or will quickly jump in and out of view depending on your zoom level on the map.
- Fixing the image feeds of each location - there is an app crashing bug existing right now when trying to load into a Point of Interest feed
- There is an issue involving Flash Challenges where the current challenge is not automatically closing at the end of the day when it should be. This is a backend / server issue, meaning that our team will be able to resolve this matter without requiring an update to the app. We will update this page accordingly when it is resolved.
- On your Flash Challenge Stats page, there is a bug existing if you have previous data carried over from the beta version of the app. when scrolling, you may come across a white screen. The resolution for the time being is to force close the app and reopen. This is being worked on
- There is an occasional bug that exists on the Search screen. Some users have reported a black screen when they were attempting to use the Search Bar. The resolution for the time being is to force close the app and reopen.
There was also an issue with Flash Challenges on launch day due to an error in the admin panel we are using to create and set dates for each topic. This should be resolved at the time of this writing.
Are you experiencing other bugs that are not labeled here? You could help us out a ton by submitting them to the support team here!
Future Improvements
Our biggest concern for the next update will be for the bugs listed above, however, we are also looking to implement the following improvements:
- Improvements to image quality appearing on the images in the Social Feed. We testing different engineering solutions for optimizing visual quality on mobile while limiting the impact to user experience. In a perfect world, we would like to not use image compression, but as we continue to work on this area, there may be some standards and practices that we have to implement
- Bringing the flipping animation back to Portfolios
- Improving data and the Discovery on Search algorithm - using a randomized algorithm for the Search Discovery screen was good for efficiency in getting the app back to market, however, we will look to implement a better end user experience of promoting new users, portfolios and images on the Discovery page
