I use LingQ on my iPad and have downloaded several books (text and audio) to study when I am on my boat where I often don’t have access to the Internet - sometimes for a week at a time.
I was surprised to discover that I don’t actually have access to these materials when I’m offline. I get an ‘error’ message that says “Only lessons previously opened on this device can be used offline. Go online to access new content.”
So what is the point of downloading things to your device, then? I don’t expect the app do do clever things like translate sentences or keep track of known words or LingQs (although that doesn’t sound very difficult to this experience App Developer), but I don’t see why it can’t at least display the downloaded text or play downloaded audio.
I love LingQ, but this seems like a real problem for me, potentially a deal killer. I wonder if there are any workarounds that people have discovered, or if the developers have any thoughts they would like to share with users like me who travel and need to be able to work offline occasionally?
Looking forward to hearing other views on this topic…
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Update to my last post…
Okay, so I tried following the instructions in the ‘error’ message and they seem to be correct: if you open each lesson (for example, each chapter in a book you want to read) while you are online, then the app will ‘cache’ these lessons and they will be available to read offline. The dictionary is available, so you can look up words, mark them as known or create LingQs.
This is actually pretty good, so definitely not a deal-killer for me.
However, this requirement to open a lesson before using it offline seems a bit odd to me if you have already downloaded the lesson to your device. If the lesson needs to be ‘activated’ in some way before offline use, why can’t the app just do this itself when the lesson is downloaded? In other words, why can’t the app pretend that the user opened the lesson just after downloading it? I can’t imagine this is more than setting a flag in a database somewhere.
Or, if the issue is a limit on ‘caching’ space (just surmising from the various pop ups I’ve seen testing this out), then what is that limit? Can I open up 100 lessons so all 100 lessons are available offline? Or is there a limit to how many lessons I can ‘activate’ for offline use? These are things I would rather not have to discover accidentally or by trial and error. If users need to do things to work around problems with the app, we should at least be given the info we need to do this efficiently.
Anyway, since offline use is important to me, I will continue to investigate and report back on my findings. An FAQ would be better.
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