Comments on the iOS app

I have been enjoying the great updates to the app that have recently been made, especially the fact that it now fits the iPad screen really well. The app is improving massively, and I think if it gets any better, you guys should consider whether it is worth charging a few bucks for it. I have written a few comments below in order of importance.

  1. This has been really annoying me recently. I have found that when I open lessons to read on the app, initially it works fine, but often after I have looked at the first few LingQs, I stop being able to get the hints for the LingQs. Instead, when I press a LingQ, the box appears, but nothing is written on it. Here are a couple of examples

Imgur

When this happens, it is the same for every LingQ on the page, and I have to reload the lesson to get the LingQs back. Normally I have to do this for each lesson several times before I can read it properly which is a real pain. Has anybody else had this problem?

  1. It is great that we are now able to edit LingQs with the app. I downloaded the newest update with this feature on it last night and did a bit of reading. I have found that I keep accidentally bringing up the edit hint window when I try to hit the X to get rid of the LingQ box. This was happening last night a lot and was a real pain. It happens because tapping anywhere in the top yellow bit of the LingQ box outside of the Google TTS box and the X brings up the edit LingQ box. I suggest either making it such that one has to hit the word to bring up the edit LingQ box, or making the X bigger since there is a lot of superfluous space around it anyway, or doing both of these things.

  2. I find that the app is bad at keeping lessons on it. This is normally no problem for me because I am usually online when I try to read on the app so the lessons just get downloaded again, but the other day, I tried to read while on a flight, and when I loaded up the app, the language was set to English for some reason, and when I switched it to German to read some preprepared lessons, they were no longer on the app even though I loaded them on before turning the iPad off. It would be great if the app was more reliable in this respect.

  3. I think I reported this before. There is a problem with the highlighting of phrases in the app when the phrase also contains a LingQed word. In such cases, the highlighting only goes from the beginning of the phrase to the beginning of the first LingQed word. It looks really bad. I don’t know how difficult this is to fix, but if it is difficult, I suggest just turning off the highlighting of phrases in the app altogether. Highlighting of phrases are not that important and no highlighting is better than bad highlighting I think.

@cpj - thanks for the feedback. We’ll pass it along to our developers.

Thanks. I have been trying to work out what is setting off the first problem, but I have not been able to reproduce the problem intentionally and even though it is happening a lot, I have not noticed anything that seems to set it off. It might just be for the one book that I am reading right now. I wonder if it happens to anybody else.

Thanks @ColinJohnstone for the report. I’m also having these issues!

I want to add another one to the list - Whenever I play an audio clip and (accidentally) go to the edit-lingq page, I have to navigate back to the lesson’s page, but then the audio seems to have been reset to the very beginning. Is it possible to not reset the audio in this case, or, display the edit page as a pop-up or something like that, so the original lesson page is un-touched?

@ColinJohnstone: Thanks for the excellent summary! I have also been experiencing issue no. 1 quite regularly. I am also experiencing a ‘variant’ of no. 1, which is that the instead of just seeing the hint on side 1 of the flashcard, after a while I start seeing the ‘phrase’ and the term (i.e., the same as on side 2). When I exit that list of flashcards and then go back in, things usuallly clear up. Sometimes I have to actually restart the lingQ application in order for things to start working correctly again.

With regards to issue no. 3, I have noticed that there seems to be a limited number of lessons which I can hold on the iOS device at any given time. As I start adding new lessons, the older lessons start getting ‘flushed’ and are no longer available on the iOS device. For now, my workaround is to create playlists for everything. With playlists, I can just reopen the playlist to force the lessons to get downloaded again to the device. However, it would be nice to have some predictability and let the users decide which lessons they want to keep on the device and which lessons they want to remove! In the settings, I do see a label stating “Mp3 Cache - 94/100MB”. So I’m assuming that there is a fixed limit of 100MB for storing lessons on the device? @alex is there any way of changing that setting to increase the size of the local cache so that we can store more lessons at one time?

Thanks for the added comments. We are looking at all of these issues.

@pcolag - It is not possible to increase the cache size at this time. The number of lessons is currently limited to 30, as more lessons caused performance issues in the app. We will, however, continue to look at ways to improve the app and appreciate your feedback in this.

Thanks for looking into these issues. I tried to work out what was setting off problem 1 from my original post, but I could not find anything. It just happens and it appears to be at random.

Hi Colin, I’m the developer for the iPhone app.

Could you give me some more information about the third issue you’re having? I haven’t been able to duplicate your problem yet. So far, I’ve tried both opening the lessons and adding them to a playlist without actually opening them. Also, various combinations of exiting, force closing the app, and changing languages.

Has this been a problem for a while, or did it start recently?

For some reason I’m having a hard time duplicating your first problem as well, though it looks like a number of people are having the issue. Please let me know if you find something that causes it!

Hi, thanks for developing this great app. I will look into the first and third problem again and try to come up with some more information. The first problem is the most serious, but I can’t work out what causes it. It happens a lot, but I don’t know why. Will try to find out.