Engage 0.3b release tasks

[Colin Clark]

Hi all,

We're in the home stretch for the first Engage 0.3 beta release. Our QA cycle on Friday turned up a few issues we wanted to resolve. Most of them have been fixed, but there are a few remaining ones we're working on:

1. ENGAGE-424: Add alt text to images that currently lack it
2. ENGAGE-351: Users should be shown a "loading..." screen when pages take time to load
3. ENGAGE-380: In Voice Over, the Object Code Entry buttons are being read simply as "Button" [Fixed, needs review]

The plan is wrap these bugs up tomorrow morning and start a short round of QA testing at about noon EST. After that is done, we'll cut a release and deploy it to:

http://fluidengage.org/engage/home/home.html

There are still a handful of performance-related blockers listed on bug parade. We've done quite a bit of profiling and learned a lot of techniques for minimizing load times. We've managed to reduce the size of Infusion even more, so it's looking really trim and fast. Interestingly, we've found jQuery is actually the biggest bottleneck to load times on slow mobile processors.

In order to address this, we're going to introduce a new unobtrusive "all in one page" style of navigation for Engage. This will allow us to load shared dependencies such as jQuery only once, rather than on each page transition. Similarly, page-specific dependencies will be loaded lazily only when they are needed. This is pretty much just common sense, and will provide a very responsive experience for users.

It'll take us most of the week to get this new faster version ready, and it will require a new full QA cycle, but I think it's a worthy investment of our time in preparation for McCord's pilot. Exciting stuff.

Colin

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Colin Clark
Technical Lead, Fluid Project
http://fluidproject.org