Let me start off by saying that I find the latest updates to the iPhone/iPad application really great! They give me the flexibility to take almost all the lingQ functionaity I need “on the road” with me everyday (on the train while commuting to work and while travelling out-of-town).
Having said that, I do have some have some feedback (constructive criticism) which I feel would help to make the iPhone/iPad component even more useful.
Comment 1: When going through my daily flashcards (every day for the past 5-6 weeks), every day I am running into what appears to be a bug. When going through the flashcards, eventually the content of the flashcards becomes completely blank (except for the numerbing indicator on the top left corner). so that I can no longer use the application. The only way to get out of this situation is to restart the flashcards session (by going back and re-clicking on “Daily LingQs”). However, this is really inconvenient because then there is no easy way to pick off where I left off. Also it seems that the order of the cards is not guaranteed from one session to the next, which makes it even harder to try to go back to where I was before the problem occured. This means that I end up having to revisit the same cards several times (sometimes 5-6 times) before I am successful in going through the session correctly. I find this to be a major inconvenience and should be fixed. Since I am running into this problem daily, I am assuming that it should be fairly easy to reproduce and fix? Is anyone else running into this problem?
Comment 2: In my opinion, there are two key functionalities which would add a lot of additional value to the existing iPhone/Pad application: (i) The ability to add tags while editing the flashcards (ii) The ability to define new lingQs from within the editor. Are either of these functionalities being considered for a future version?
Finally, I have a question regarding the way in which the status values are updated from within the flashcards portion of the iPhone/iPad applications. Is the status updated on the server each time I click on the “Oops” or “Got It”, or are all the updates cumulated and sent to the server when the session is completed?
@pcolag - Thanks for your feedback on this. Regarding the first comment, is there any way you are consistently able to replicate this? Do you find it happening after a specific action?
Regarding the second comment, we do have some enhanced functionality planned for a future version, and would eventually like to add the ability to create LingQs from within the app. Stay tuned for future updates regarding this.
Lastly, the actions are saved locally and the server is only updated (1) when you manually adjust the status using the status bar or (2) when you tap “Got it” twice in a row in the same session. It doesn’t update cumulatively based on multiple sessions.
Regarding my first comment, I can tell you that it occurs every single time I go through my 200 daily flaschards (i.e., every day). It usually occurs during the second ‘pass’ through the cards. However, the problem does seem to be random and does not always occur after an exact number of cards. Also, I can’t say that it is occurring after a specific action. I just go through the cards, tap either “Got it” or “Oops”, and occasionally edit some of the hints (when I note an error or omission). Previously, I had only 25 daily lingQs and I was also seeing the problem, though not as often. I hope this provides enough information in order to be able to reproduce the problem.
As usual, I have a quick comment, and maybe pcolag could say if he finds the same thing. I rarely use the flashcards on the app, but when I do, usually I just flick through them without looking at both sides. The way to move between flashcards is to swipe horizontally from the right side of the screen to the left. I find that it is often difficult to do this since the swipe usually has to be very horizontal and slightly inaccurate swipes produce no result. Sometimes I have to swipe a few times before I am successful. Luckily I don’t do flashcards much, but this might be annoying for people who do.
If possible, I think it would be better to make it such that the swipes don’t have to be so accurate.
@ColinJohnstone: I haven’t found the swiping accuracy to be a problem for me. However, I do tend to use the “Know It” or “Oops” buttons to test the cards, and this makes it unnecessary to swipe in order to move through the cards.
@pcolag - Thanks for the additional information about this. We are doing some testing now and are trying to find out what may be causing this. In the meantime, we are continuing to work on updates to the app.
Last week I updated to the latest version of the application on both the iPhone and iPad. I must unfortunately report that the situation has gotten much worst. I am now getting frequent application crashes on both iPhone and iPad, which was not ocurring previuosly. Also, on iPhone after I do a full set of flashcards (200), the next time I start the application it starts loading data and then crashes on startup. The only workaround I have found is to delete and reinstall the application. Since i would need to do this every day, this pretty much makes the application unusable for me in this current state. Please let me know when an update is epected.
@pcolag - We should hopefully have a new version up in the next few days that will include some fixes for issues that were reported by other users. Keep an eye out and let us know if you’re still having issues in the new version!