At this early stage there are two primary developers of TextSecure iOS: @corbett and @FredericJacobs and as we move from the early stages to more advanced ones opportunities will abound to contribute to the core code base. We are particularly interested in support and contributions associated localization, code review, and automated testing, with any of the Open Issues or Milestones. It may help to open an issue or milestone if you plan to make a contribution so we can be sure to clarify questions, give an overview of architectural plans, and ensure we do not overlap work.
Apple requires contributors to iOS projects to relicense their code on submit. We'll have to have individual contributors sign something to enable this.
Our volunteer legal have put together a form you can sign electronically. So no scanning, faxing, or carrier pigeons involved. How modern: https://whispersystems.org/cla/
Please go ahead and sign, putting your github username in "Address line #2", so that we can accept your pull requests at our heart's delight.
We are trying to follow the GitHub code conventions for Objective-C and we appreciate that pull requests do conform with those conventions.
In addition to that, always add curly braces to your if conditionals, even if there is no else. Booleans should be declared according to their Objective-C definition, and hence take YES or NO as values.
One note, for programmers joining us from Java or similar language communities, note that exceptions are not commonly used for errors that may occur in normal use so familiarize yourself with NSError
###UI conventions We prefer to use Storyboards vs. building UI elements within the code itself. We are not at the stage to provide a .strings localizable file for translating, but the goal is to have translatable strings in a single entry point so that we can reach users in their native language wherever possible.
Some tips
- any PR that does not use segues or story board conventions (red flags:
[self.navigationController pushViewController:<#(UIViewController *)#> animated:<#(BOOL)#>]and/or manual creation of UI elements and/or orphaned ViewControllers in the storyboard) will need to be refactored prior to merge - the following are the storyboarder's best friends:
- (void)prepareForSegue:(UIStoryboardSegue *)segue sender:(id)sender;
[self performSegueWithIdentifier:<#(NSString *)#> sender:<#(id)#>];
It's the eternal debate. We chose to adopt spaces. Please set your default Xcode configuration to 4 spaces for tabs, and 4 spaces for indentation (it's Xcode's default setting).
If you don't agree with us, you can use the ClangFormat Xcode plugin to code with your favorite indentation style!
If you are thinking about a major change, to speed up the merge talk with the lead developers first. PRs will not be accepted which break the master branch, so make sure to try, in addition to your unit tests, a simple "regression" test: register, send some messages back and forth, view a thread and conversation and make sure every is just as functional as before your PR only more so.
Open Whisper Systems is currently experimenting with the funding privacy Free and Open Source software. Payments are opt-in for the TextSecure-iOS repo and can be enabled by adding MONEYMONEY in a commit message string. For example, this is the current Open WhisperSystems payout per commit, rendered dynamically as an image by the Open WhisperSystems BitHub instance:
We would like to particularly thank the following contributors:
- Dylan Bourgeois: Substantial UI/UX Improvements
- Christine Corbett: Lead Developer
- Alban Diquet: Substantial contributions to the storage infrastructure
- Frederic Jacobs: Lead Developer
- Claudiu-Vlad Ursache: UI contributions
TextSecure wouldn’t be possible without the many open-source projects we depend on. Big shoutout to the maintainers of all the pods we use!