Jira’s UI on the iPhone (or any mobile device for that matter) leaves a lot to be desired. It’s slow, shows too much information and is difficult to navigate on a screen that only supports a resolution of 320×480 pixels. There’s already some native iPhone apps for Jira available like iJira, Jira Mate and Jira Touch, however they require developers to go through app store approval first and users to install the apps manually on their iPhones.
With my last ShipIt Day project, I created the Jira iPhone Webclient as a proof of concept showing that it’s possible to develop a web-interface for the iPhone that looks and feels almost like a native iPhone app.
I recently spend some 20% time taking this concept further to produce the Jira iPhone Web Interface Plugin. The entire iPhone web-interface can now be installed as a plugins 2 plugin in your Jira 4.0 instance, immediately benefiting all of your users. Users will automatically be redirected to the iPhone interface when accessing a Jira instance with an iPhone. They can however choose to return to the regular Jira interface for the duration of their session if the iPhone client doesn’t offer the functionality they require just yet.
The plugin is currently in beta (not officially supported by Atlassian, please use at your own risk) and it’s functionality is limited to the following options currently:
- View a single issue
- Run your favourite filters
- View unresolved issues assigned to you
- View unresolved issues reported by you
- Run a JQL query
- Add comments to an issue
Here’s a few screenshots:
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Currently the plugin is only available in English and only displays a very limited view of an issue (only certain system fields and no custom fields). The view issue screen also does not respect any custom field or screen schemes at the moment.
Over the coming months I hope to spend some more 20% time to significantly improve the view issue screen to show more fields as well as allowing users to carry out issue operations, workflow transitions and edit issues.
The plugin was developed mainly using Dashcode, to create a UI to fit on the iPhone. This UI was then hooked up to a number of REST endpoints part of the plugin to fetch issues as well as favourite filters for a particular user. After having developed in this environment for a while now, I’d probably recommend to not use Dashcode as much as I currently have due to the fact that it generates fairly messy CSS and HTML and quite a few of the UI components it provides are fairly buggy to use. Over the coming months I will spent quite a bit of time as well cleaning up the client side code generated by dashcode.
If you find any bugs or would like certain features implemented, please feel free to raise issues in the plugin’s Jira project on labs.atlassian.com. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!