Awful iPhone/iPad App

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > Awful iPhone/iPad App

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Javid: Oct 21, 2004

I hope you mean 'make it adjustable' and not 'permanent giant text'. If anything I'd like to be able to shrink it.

# ? Oct 5, 2012 23:33

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# ? Apr 23, 2024 22:58

xzzy: Mar 5, 2009

Just don't do that thing where the font steps up in size when I switch to horizontal because that poo poo drives me nuts.

# ? Oct 5, 2012 23:47

radge: Jan 21, 2005

Some feature requests:

Generally better aesthetics
Replace the tab bar with a sliding menu (e.g facebook)
Option to disable the ugly icons on the left
Auto loading when scrolling to bottom of a page
Sort out the weird way the navigation buttons on the navigation bar are a different blue from from the background
Replace the "actions" icon

# ? Oct 6, 2012 22:57

jojoinnit: Dec 13, 2010; Strength and speed, that's why you're a special agent.

Here's a couple that used to be in that I'd like back:

If you go out of a thread to the forums list it keeps your place in the thread open until you click on a new thread. Sometimes I forget to mark read, or accidentally click out of a thread. It used to work like that in a previous version, but now when that happens I have to reopen the thread, go back a page, which brings me to:

Scroll to bottom button. Sometimes I'm looking for a post on a page and some threads can involve a lot of scrolling to get there.

jojoinnit fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Oct 6, 2012

# ? Oct 6, 2012 23:09

Liar Lyre: Jun 3, 2011; Here to deliver
~Bad Opinions~

I don't have much to add, but I want to say thank you to everyone that worked on these apps. They are just so incredible and really make Safari nearly useless to me.

Edit: You know, there is one thing that bothers me and I know it's being worked on. Thread icons. They're really nice looking, but it bugs me when there's a blank one. I'd love to help with it, but I don't have any software.

Liar Lyre fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Oct 7, 2012

# ? Oct 7, 2012 00:52

Fayez Butts: Aug 24, 2006

Just to mention, I don't have any coding skills or anything but I designed the icon for S II Maxx. If you want me to make you something even sweeter just holler!

edit: i'm pretty busy these days but I would totally help out with other ui stuff too.

Fayez Butts fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Oct 7, 2012

# ? Oct 7, 2012 01:54

withak: Jan 15, 2003; Fun Shoe

jojoinnit posted:

:
Scroll to bottom button. Sometimes I'm looking for a post on a page and some threads can involve a lot of scrolling to get there.

This this this.

Also make links open directly in Safari. We have multitasking these days so there is no need to use your own web page viewer.

Edit: Or add the "reader" button to the in-app web page viewer.

# ? Oct 7, 2012 02:14

Diabolik900: Mar 28, 2007

Liar Lyre posted:

Edit: You know, there is one thing that bothers me and I know it's being worked on. Thread icons. They're really nice looking, but it bugs me when there's a blank one. I'd love to help with it, but I don't have any software.

I hear ya, there's just a lot of icons and limited time to do them. The next release is gonna have at least a few more. If anyone wants to help out making some, get in touch with me or The Dave.

# ? Oct 7, 2012 02:29

myron cope: Apr 21, 2009

Agree with scroll to bottom. Thought I was the only one who used it.

# ? Oct 7, 2012 03:12

The Dave: Sep 9, 2003

Yeah Scroll to Bottom would be really nice especially when a thread fails to load to the last post. Funny it was brought up today I worked it into a mock-up 2 days ago.

# ? Oct 7, 2012 03:30

LUBE UP YOUR BUTT: Jun 30, 2008

Is there a way to disable the adjusting of the screen position after images load? On a computer and web browser it's useful because the previous read posts are loaded as well, but in awful usually it's only 1 or 2 read posts that are loaded with a thread (set to 0 for me), so it's not hard to scroll down and readjust manually if images have caused to view to adjust to a read post. And because of how slow 3G can be sometimes, what happens is I find myself reading like 10, 15 posts in before all the images have loaded and Awful readjusts to the first post again and I have to slowly scroll down to find the post I was at.

At the very least turn the feature off once the user has started to scroll (and presumably start reading the thread).

# ? Oct 7, 2012 08:34

Javid: Oct 21, 2004

I had a weird glitch happen today. Reading over Edge on t-mobile, and threads loaded fine EXCEPT for threads in TFR. First page, last page, whatever. Everywhere else worked, TFR threads were "title not found" and page -1 of -1. Three separate threads did this. Amusingly enough this happened while I was at a shooting range. I don't know if it's a thing or what, but there it is.

# ? Oct 8, 2012 04:16

pokeyman: Nov 26, 2006; That elephant ate my entire platoon.

Ignore me, just testing.

pokeyman fucked around with this message at 06:35 on Oct 8, 2012

# ? Oct 8, 2012 04:23

Diabolik900: Mar 28, 2007

Edit: Just testing something

# ? Oct 8, 2012 13:23

Disappointing Pie: Feb 7, 2006; Words cannot describe what a disaster the pie was.

I'd love to be able to enter fullscreen mode on the iPad. It would make reading long threads and LP's much much better, the empty avatar space drives me nuts.

# ? Oct 9, 2012 05:28

pokeyman: Nov 26, 2006; That elephant ate my entire platoon.

Empty avatar space?

# ? Oct 9, 2012 06:21

Disappointing Pie: Feb 7, 2006; Words cannot describe what a disaster the pie was.

pokeyman posted:

Empty avatar space?

When you're reading very long threads like a let's play after the initial avatar all the space to the left is just unused. If you could go to full-screen hide that would be great.

# ? Oct 9, 2012 12:57

pokeyman: Nov 26, 2006; That elephant ate my entire platoon.

We're looking at fixing that, full screen or not.

And I should really browse more often with avatars turned on, I assume most people do.

# ? Oct 9, 2012 14:08

myron cope: Apr 21, 2009

I had an idea at like 2 in the morning so maybe it's crazy. But how about a...wheel selector thing (I don't know what it's called) in the posting screen that has the bbcode? It could be like the jump to page thing, and come from a button where the [ ] / = : are now. It would be even cooler if it could have like three separate selectors, so you could put just the opening tag, just the closing tag, or both. I don't know if something like that is possible, or if it would be a usability nightmare or something. But even just one that has bold, italic, quote, strike though. I don't know. I don't like manually typing out bbcode.

# ? Oct 9, 2012 14:15

The Dave: Sep 9, 2003

Is that idea for iPad or both platforms? I just don't see it being that great on the phone.

For the iPad layout, something that might work is making the post information (Username, Avatar, Date) be a floated block to the left of the post block. On shorter posts it would look normal but on longer posts the post would eventually fill up the whole block.

Just need to tweak it so you don't get any weird looking situations where like only one sentence does under the post information. I would then on the bottom right float the thread options button.

# ? Oct 9, 2012 14:40

supersteve: Jan 16, 2007; Atari Bigby - UNIVERSITY OF JAH RASTAFARI

It would be really nice if, while in fullscreen mode, there could be a transparent back button that takes you either back to the forums list or bookmarks tab (depending on which was last used - kinda like the way alienblue handles it).

I'd use fullscreen a lot more if I didn't have to go in and out of it all the time to browse between threads.

Example pic:

# ? Oct 9, 2012 16:34

myron cope: Apr 21, 2009

The Dave posted:

Is that idea for iPad or both platforms? I just don't see it being that great on the phone.

Well the idea was for my phone so I guess both. Maybe the three selectors would only work on the iPad. I'd even take just one (that inserted both tags) on the phone though.

# ? Oct 9, 2012 16:43

TACD: Oct 27, 2000

myron cope posted:

I had an idea at like 2 in the morning so maybe it's crazy. But how about a...wheel selector thing (I don't know what it's called) in the posting screen that has the bbcode? It could be like the jump to page thing, and come from a button where the [ ] / = : are now. It would be even cooler if it could have like three separate selectors, so you could put just the opening tag, just the closing tag, or both. I don't know if something like that is possible, or if it would be a usability nightmare or something. But even just one that has bold, italic, quote, strike though. I don't know. I don't like manually typing out bbcode.

Is there any reason the text input area couldn't be a WYSIWYG field? Type in some text, select it and just have buttons for bold/italic/strikethrough like in a word processor. Can't be that hard to program (he said)

Would still want to have the brackets as an option for less-used tags like code or whatever but it might be nice

# ? Oct 10, 2012 16:56

pokeyman: Nov 26, 2006; That elephant ate my entire platoon.

TACD posted:

Is there any reason the text input area couldn't be a WYSIWYG field? Type in some text, select it and just have buttons for bold/italic/strikethrough like in a word processor. Can't be that hard to program (he said)

It's definitely on the todo list.

The hard part is you have to make the whole thing WYSIWYG, you can't do it halfway and leave some of the less common tags as markup. It's basically useless until every tag is supported.

The other hard part is rich text editing on iOS (far as I know) either doesn't work very well or is a gigantic pain to implement.

# ? Oct 10, 2012 17:31

myron cope: Apr 21, 2009

TACD posted:

Is there any reason the text input area couldn't be a WYSIWYG field? Type in some text, select it and just have buttons for bold/italic/strikethrough like in a word processor. Can't be that hard to program (he said)

Would still want to have the brackets as an option for less-used tags like code or whatever but it might be nice

I was thinking it is bothersome to try to select words (or especially sentences/paragraphs) and would crowd the popup menu, but anything is better than manually typing bbcode with a fake keyboard.

# ? Oct 10, 2012 21:47

jojoinnit: Dec 13, 2010; Strength and speed, that's why you're a special agent.

Here's a weird bug, from the latest release of vanilla Awful:

In case it's not obvious, threads are repeating themselves in the forums list. It wasn't till I noticed the vilerat fundraiser thread was in the middle of the list that I noticed. I don't venture outside my bookmarks very often so maybe it's a known thing?

# ? Oct 10, 2012 23:40

astr0man: Feb 21, 2007; hollyeo deuroga

I'm not sure about stickied threads, but if you refresh for a "new page" worth of threads, if one of the previously shown threads has moved down the page list it will show up again (since something else might have gotten bumped to page 1).

# ? Oct 11, 2012 00:21

Ganguro King: Jul 26, 2007

Since we've got a new thread, I'm going to repeat my suggestion for the way the app controls should work:

- When a user scrolls to the very top or very bottom of a page, the controls should automatically appear
- Anywhere else in the page, the controls automatically get out of the way
- You can manually toggle the visibility of controls by tapping or using some other gesture

In my experience, 90% of the time I am using the controls to change pages or post a reply, it is at the top or bottom of a page. If you need a concrete example of how this would work, check out the New York Times app.

Ganguro King fucked around with this message at 02:08 on Oct 11, 2012

# ? Oct 11, 2012 02:01

Diabolik900: Mar 28, 2007

I never thought of that before, but I would love it. Instapaper is another app that works similarly.

Edit: Also, getting thread lists to automatically refresh again would make me very, very happy.

Diabolik900 fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Oct 11, 2012

# ? Oct 11, 2012 02:10

The Dave: Sep 9, 2003

Diabolik900 posted:

Instapaper is another app that works similarly.

It does? Honestly I never use it but have it and I just took it for a spin and the UI elements were static the whole time.

I'd like to start with having the page stuff be actually on the bottom, but keeping the title bar static, I don't know why. Maybe I just need baby steps.

# ? Oct 11, 2012 02:42

Diabolik900: Mar 28, 2007

The Dave posted:

It does? Honestly I never use it but have it and I just took it for a spin and the UI elements were static the whole time.

I'd like to start with having the page stuff be actually on the bottom, but keeping the title bar static, I don't know why. Maybe I just need baby steps.

I think that you should have the option of seeing the controls from anywhere on the page, but it makes sense to hide them by default when you're in the middle of a page. I like the idea that they're there when you load the page, disappear when you start scrolling, and reappear when either you tap on screen or reach the bottom of the page.

# ? Oct 11, 2012 02:51

The Dave: Sep 9, 2003

Ohhhh I see now, yeah that's slick. That's has to happen.

# ? Oct 11, 2012 03:05

Peteyfoot: Nov 24, 2007

I'd love the ability to change my bookmarked thread colors.

# ? Oct 11, 2012 04:47

pokeyman: Nov 26, 2006; That elephant ate my entire platoon.

Just so everyone knows, I'm writing down all the suggestions and such as they come. And I went through the last ten pages of the old thread and wrote those suggestions down. If I don't respond it just means I'm on it and have nothing to add until you see it in the app.

Also by all means repeat and echo suggestions. The more something comes up the sooner I'll get on it.

# ? Oct 11, 2012 04:47

supersteve: Jan 16, 2007; Atari Bigby - UNIVERSITY OF JAH RASTAFARI

Pull to refresh/next page is still something I'd love.

I also really like the suggestion of hiding the UI while in the middle of a thread.

# ? Oct 11, 2012 04:50

Fayez Butts: Aug 24, 2006

Adding in swiping from the left and right ala Awful Betamax on Android would be great. Basically anything to keep me from having to hunt for and tap the correct tiny button.

# ? Oct 11, 2012 05:34

Referee: Aug 25, 2004; "Winning is great, sure, but if you are really going to do something in life, the secret is learning how to lose. Nobody goes undefeated all the time. If you can pick up after a crushing defeat, and go on to win again, you are going to be a champion someday."
(Wilma Rudolph)

Diabolik900 posted:

I think that you should have the option of seeing the controls from anywhere on the page, but it makes sense to hide them by default when you're in the middle of a page. I like the idea that they're there when you load the page, disappear when you start scrolling, and reappear when either you tap on screen or reach the bottom of the page.

This would be great.

# ? Oct 11, 2012 05:40