Just reposting Tiago’s last post from the previous Beta thread to start a new thread for the new version to make sure we are getting fresh feedback and make this thread easier to navigate!
Version 5.2.10 is now available through the App Tester app. Here are the release notes which can also be consulted in the app or the notification email. We tried to fix as many issues as possible for this version as well as further implement more features. Please let us know of any issues we might have not included in this version and of new ones that arise. For the next version we are planning on adding Review and further fix any remaining issues. We hope you enjoy this version and sorry for keeping you waiting.
Release notes:
Status bar setting. Users can now enable showing the status bar in the small word popup;
Selecting a status now closes the popup immediately;
Languages like Arabic, Turkish or Hebrew now have consistent and correct word highlighting;
Xiaomi users can now select text and try to create a phrase. The UI and UX is not the best because the Select All and Copy popups still show up, but nothing we can do for the moment. But it should work well for users to create phrases while selecting text and we hope it works well. Please give us feedback on it and if there are any issues;
Romaji, Hiragana and Pinyin now show in the popups even if its disabled in the settings;
Better popup position to help when selecting phrases;
Text-to-speech better implementation in sentences;
Translate button now works correctly when the lesson has sentence translations;
Better navigation, the user can now click on the bottom menu button to reset to the primary screen (for example, going to search, then course overview and so on and then clicking on the Library button to go back to the main library);
Importing from News feed;
Importing from the browser now works correctly with much better UX;
Fix to adding and removing tags;
Stats updates when finishing a lesson or an audio;
Going to the Dictionary doesn’t reset the theme anymore;
Switching between full text and sentence mode, or going to the lesson settings doesn’t reset the page anymore;
Listening mode in some lessons now doesn’t jump around when a sentence is clicked;
Speed playback, repeat, shuffle, next and previous options in the player;
Add words directly in Vocabulary and improvements to data consistency;
Search by word meaning in the Vocabulary;
Lesson level and sorting options in the Library search;
Improvements to the Library like keeping the previously selected tab and overall better performance and more consistent results;
Selecting a lesson in a course now doesn’t mess with the lesson’s order;
Playlist with numerous improvements to selecting tracks, changing playlists and ordering and deletion of tracks;
Editing and deleting Playlists;
Better background playback in the playlist, with clicking on the notification outside the app going to the playlist;
The lesson audio track now continues to play when the app is put in the background and the user can return to the lesson by clicking on the notification;
Changing UI language works correctly;
Several crashes and bug fixes as well numerous improvements to UI and UX all over the app.
I like this update a lot! Love the easier selection of phrases, being able to see current status, and also instant closing of the popup after selecting a new status.
There still seems to be an issue, if you do a lot of phrase selecting as I do, where words/screen become “unselectable” or even can’t swipe to next page. I believe what’s happening is the pop up screen is somehow “still there”, and even though it’s not visible, it’s preventing you from selecting any other words or changing pages. Even going in and out of the lesson doesn’t fix it. You have to exit and close the app and restart.
I don’t know of any exact keystrokes to get the issue to show up, but if you try selecting phrases enough (probably multi-line is more apt to present the issue), it will eventually show up.
I also have noticed in this new update that certain words I’ve marked known, will “flash” yellow when either moving to a new page or selecting another word… Again, not sure of a way to make this happen. I only saw it on one word, but that word appeared several times in the lesson. I had just selected “known” for it. Other “known” words were not flashing in this manner.
If I go to lesson info from within the lesson and click the thumbs up button, I don’t seem to be able to add to the “likes”. I tried click both “hearts” and the “+” button (not sure what this does) and that didn’t seem to do anything. You may have mentioned on the earlier version that this wasn’t hooked up yet.
Initial feedback:
Nice all-around! I like not having to +1 read everything.
Is there a way to ignore words without first linqing them now? I like that it’s returned to be more similar to 4.0 without having to open a second menu.
Something is still odd with the dictionary list. When I first opened after installing the update there was literally none, then when I added a dictionary (Swedish) the only option in the list is now TL > Swedish. Before it was TL > English. This seems to persist with adding and removing dictionaries.
In dark mode, new words and LingQs are a little hard to see. To be honest I kind of like that they blend in more so it’s not a complaint per se, but level 3 is almost indistinguishable from a known word. It’s also a little odd to me that level 2 appears brighter than level 1.
One other thing I noticed is rarely when ignoring a LingQ the word remains gold. When clicking back into the word it’ll look there is a LingQ but the text will be blank and the speech bubble looks odd. While in the lesson, the word remains gold, but once done the LingQ was successfully forgotten. I’ll grab a screenshot if it happens again and try to figure out what the steps are to reproduce.
Thank you for the feedback! We will look into all of this. You should be able to ignore words without LingQing them first but I see that when ignoring it creates a LingQ and ignores it. Its a bug, will be fixed for the next version.
You are right, its a mix of both the popup still being there even though its invisible but also some other issue. We will look into these issues for a hotfix version coming soon.
As a future enhancement suggestion (say 5.1+), I’d like the ability to customize word colors by level. This way I can keep them the way they are currently in dark mode after they get enhanced away :).
We will add multiple customization options soon, including several light and dark modes for the reader. We want to give as many customization options for the reader as possible so we will see about selecting specific colors in the future. Thank you for the suggestion.
Hello, I’m using Xiaomi phone (redmi note 6).
Pros:
The design is very beautiful. Accessing dictionaries is easy and simple. Very impressive.
Cons:
-I still can not select phrases . Maybe I’m doing something wrong. Would appreciate help.
-In version 4 the app itself offers phrases that others users have marked. In the new version (this Beta 5) this does not happen. I can not even choose the phrases of other users, so the app is impossible to use.
-All the review buttons at the bottom of the page (Review, Review Due, Review Page, Vocabulary) are still not working. It is very difficult to use the app with this bug.
-I can’t see the apple, the challenges and the achievements.
I would imagine you are trying to long press on the text and that doesn’t work. Please double click, its the only way to select text and then the popup to create the phrase should show up.
Phrases that were created by others are accessible from the expanded popup. When you click on a word you can expand the popup and related phrases should show near the bottom bellow popular meanings. If there is any issue with this please let us know.
Review is not yet implemented, it will be in one of the next versions.
To see your statistics, press the button at the top of the Library. Challenges and achievements are not yet implemented.
I am really impressed with the progress on the version. I find that playlists are way more robust, and changes of order, limits, lost additions to playlists are all a thing of the past (well at least I haven’t been able to break it to date). I am using a galaxy note for reference.
2 Suggestions:
In the course overview, one of the thing you will do a lot of is add a lesson to a playlist. I think that adding a button directly on the lesson list (something like the picture below) would make it a lot easier than the current way of navigating via the three dots to the add to playlist option. A button next to the heart that adds this to a playlist would be super useful. Often, I found I missed the three dots and went into the lesson which was frustrating when I was trying to make a playlist
Second suggestion, in playlists I like the new download percentage and download icons that let you figure out if this is available for offline. I would however suggest that the functions I would use a lot are (i) course info (V) download and (=) move. If instead of the dots these options were available directly in the playlist this would speed up navigation. I would suggest that going into the lesson can be dropped (click on the lesson if you want to) and these functions could replace the three dots menu with 3 icons like in the picture below. I’d suggest that download changes to a cross once downloaded, as it would be really useful to manage downloads simple by clicking either download or x for remove.
I’ve also noticed that listen counts are now working well and consistently and the playlists work well 20 lessons (I haven’t tested more) - so this playlist section, which to me is the prime reason I use the app most of the time, is now “good enough” for launch. So kudos to the team. Also for what it’s worth I like the stats screen a lot - I think this is going to help see what was done for the week in a concise and easily accessible manner, which in turn is motivating.
Thank you for the feedback. We are very happy that this update has improved your experience. Just a note, clicking on the lesson is for selecting the track to start playing, so going to the lesson wouldn’t work, so we need the menu option. In general our goal is try to not have too much clutter so having a menu helps with that and allow for more actions. We will take into account your suggestions.
Great new update! Often having courses with quite a few lessons I have a feature request (for both the website but especially the app). Can we have a button/option/gesture that takes us to the latest finished lesson? I know that not everybody does lessons in order, but for me, I often have courses with hundreds of lessons and at some point it takes me 10+ seconds just to scroll down every time.
This new version is much better, I love it already. In the last beta, I had to revert back to the old LingQ app because bugs and the lack of ability to play audio in the background. Now that those issues are fixed, I think I’ll be using the beta app from now on.
Anyways, a few minor bugs I noticed:
When playing a lesson from the playlist, if you’ve already played part of the lesson, when you open the player, the progress bar shows as being at the beginning of the lesson. The actual audio and the timestamp are correct, it’s just the green scroll bar for scrubbing that’s incorrect. However, it updates to the correct position once you click the play button and the audio starts playing.
When I listen in the background, tapping the notification to re-enter the app makes the audio jump back 1-2 seconds rather than playing seamlessly throughout the transition of re-entering the app.
For reference, I am on a Google Pixel 5 running Android 11. So far, I haven’t encountered any major bugs, so I’m really enjoying this new version!
As with many other people I am really liking this new version and it feels a lot nicer in general to use and closer to a release build. There are only a few minor bugs I have noticed so far:
The UI for selecting a different language on my device still gets cut off at the bottom, I am using a Samsung A20e phone - screenshot (Microsoft OneDrive)
When I was listening to some lessons in the playlist (loving being able to listen in the background again) the listening time wasn’t being increased so I had to go into each lesson manually to increase it.
The only things then which are a few suggestions - maybe already on your list but I’ll mention them anyway:
It would be nice to have a notification of some sort when you reach you daily lingq target as in 4.0
Also from 4.0, showing your total known words, activity apple and total daily lingqs would be nice to see on the main screen.
Finally, thanks for the great communication with users and I’ll mention if I find any more issues.
-Yes, that’s true. If I double-click a word, I can really select phrases. Great that it has been fixed !!!
-Also the words in the Persian language are highlighted correctly!
-Please fix the problem with the review buttons in the next version of Beta app. The review buttons at the bottom of the page are very important and necessary, in my opinion, for effective learning.
-If I expand the window, I really can see phrases that other users have marked. Thanks. But I have not yet seen suggestions for phrases like that. There may not have been such suggestions in those words. I’ll keep checking it.
There is another problem that also exists in the web version. My native language is Hebrew, not English. In the Beta 5 app (also in the previous version, version 4) when I select a dictionary and enter a Hebrew translation, it appears under the English language. In the web version I have to change the translation language from English to Hebrew for every word (!). I would be happy for help on how this can be resolved.
Thank you!!!
I like the new version a lot more than the original and I think the dark mode is a really nice and pretty touch. I have just found two or three things that bothered me :
Bug : Groups of words not being highlighted in yellow when a LingQ is created
Suggestions : Something that has always bothered me with the android version as opposed to the browser version is that I can’t put multiple translations, I can’t choose the language I want, it automatically pick French for me. I’d like to be able to add multiple translations from multiple languages. I sometimes add a French and an English translation when I’m on browser.
Also with the browser version, it shows me which language the translation has been added to with a little flag and there is no flag or indication on the current android beta version.
EDIT : Also the language flags for each dictionnaries don’t appear at first, when clicking on a word but they do afterwards when we’re on a dictionary : https://imgur.com/a/Ouk5hA5
. Maybe I’m doing something wrong. Would appreciate help.
