Since Windows is on a “yearly” update cycle now, on average Branda gets feature updates more frequently than Windows. Yay?
Welcome back to campus for another exciting semester! Let’s make it a good one!
Written by Ian Hasegawa & James Kong
💼We’re Hiring!
If you want to join the Branda team, you can join us on Presence and email us for more info:
- Join on Presence: https://brandeis.presence.io/organization/branda
- Email: brandaapp1 AT gmail dot com
🆕What’s New
✨A New Look
We changed UI frameworks from Native Base to React Native Paper. This makes the app easier to work with thanks to more modern components, and it looks much better. Material Design fans will be particularly pleased.
Unlike most redesigns, we did not take the opportunity to remove any functionality. In fact, some pages will work better after the style upgrade.
🦊Profile Page
- Moved settings into their own page.
📰News Page
- Updated the look of the news page to a vertical scrolling list
- Say hello to Deisbot! Upon opening the app, you will notice a new chat button on the bottom right corner that takes you to the chat page
🤖DeisBot
- Your personal chatbot that can give you some quick and easy information including safety/health related issues, things to do, FAQ, and a mini trivia game!
- There are some easter eggs as well if you ask Deisbot some questions, let us know if you find any :)
⏲️Hours Page
- Updated links and names where necessary to reflect the new dining vendor.
🚍Shuttles Page
- Shuttle schedules are now more specific and include information about the operator. For each shuttle service, there is a link to its webpage and schedule.
- Shuttle Map now features a dark mode appearance like in native Google Maps
- Shuttle stops and some schedules are now stored on our server.
🔧Facilities Page
- Since we lack an automated way to submit facility requests, the Facilities page now loads the Brandeis webpage where you can directly submit a request.
🗺️Map Page
- Improved the search experience.
- Added dark mode appearance like in native Google Maps
⚙️Settings Page
- New settings page that has a bunch of experimental features and app information (version, website link)
❗️ Feedback Page
- Cleaned up look of feedback page
- Utilized react-native-keyboard-aware-scroll-view for your reading convenience while typing (previously when you tapped the text box, it would not scroll down for you to see what you were typing)
Other Changes
These changes are minor or not visible to the user. We include them for your information.
- Upgraded how the app uses Google login.
- Upgraded to Expo SDK 45.
- Upgraded to React Navigation 6.
- Transitioned to Expo EAS builds, which should reduce bundle size.
- Removed outdated and unused dependencies.
- Improved the consistency of the interface colors and style, especially in dark mode.
