My GSoC Journey in the MusicBlocks Community: Week 5 and Week 6 Highlights

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GSoC

Greetings, MusicBlocks community!

Are you ready to dive into another exciting chapter of the MusicBlocks Community’s GSoC journey? We’ve reached Week 5 and Week 6, and I’m very excited to share my progress on my GSoC project with the MusicBlocks community. This is my second blog, so I hope you’ve already perused my first one. Let’s dive in!

Overview of My Work on Week 5

In week 5, I made the following progress:

  • I made the record button feature an advanced feature. This means that users must now be in advanced mode to use it.
  • I exported the browser detection code to the util.js file, making it available for other uses. A bug was introduced in the browser detection code, which was not detecting Firefox. I finally fixed it.
  • By the end of the week, we merged the code . The process took several weeks, and I learned a great deal during this period.

My next task is to make the site mobile-responsive. After discussing with my mentors, we divided this task into three subparts:

  • Scrolling issues: Currently, the Music Blocks are not scrollable on touchscreen devices. This needs to be fixed in the upcoming weeks.
  • Sensors-related issues: Many functionalities in some blocks are not working on touchscreen devices. Separate touch events need to be implemented on them.
  • Designing issues: Currently, icons and other HTML elements are not implemented properly. These need to be fixed using CSS.

I’m excited to get started on these tasks and make MusicBlocks even better. I’m confident that I can make these fixes and make the site mobile-responsive

Overview of My Work on Week 6

This week, I continued work on the MusicBlocks touch-screen related issue. I tried to implement scrolling using touch events like touchstart and touchmove and initate a pull-request. Scrolling seems to be working, but it takes a whopping 15 seconds for the first scroll to register. We also found out that it’s not optimized for iOS devices. I tried to solve this using CSS, but the results were not good. In fact, they were positively abysmal.

Using touch events also introduced another issue: when we try to add new blocks, the app stops responding. This is a major problem that needs to be fixed in the upcoming weeks.

I’m not sure what’s causing these issues, but I’m determined to figure it out.

Goals for Week 7 and 8

Week 7 is going to be a big one for me. It’s the week of my mid-evaluation, and I have a target to make significant improvements in the scrolling issue. I’m also going to start working on the sensor-related issues, if time permits and probably able to complete it in the following week.

I hope that you have enjoyed reading about my progress so far. I will be back soon with more updates..

Thank you for reading!