Awful.apk - I Can't Believe It's Not Beta! - The Something Awful Forums

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > Awful.apk - I Can't Believe It's Not Beta!

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

3.0!

It's great to finally see all that work in the beta reach a full release. I hope you all find it well worth the wait!

# ¿ Sep 25, 2013 00:10

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 13:44

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

Loucks posted:

I've used Awful for a longass time and really like it, but the upgrade screwed with the classic theme pretty badly:

I don't have an image, but the old version didn't have all that white (blue) space and the text spacing was better. Also the font itself was different as I recall. Maybe someone else has a screenshot, but the old version was a lot less ugly. This one just looks a hell of a lot more beta than it used to.

I dunno. It doesn't look fixable in settings, and I didn't think to export my settings because as far as I knew there was no reason to screw with the classic default.

Just out of curiosity, what do you think of the new default theme and what made you revert to the classic version?

# ¿ Sep 25, 2013 00:42

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

404notfound posted:

After pulling to refresh, the progress bar overlaps the usual loading bar, and it looks really weird (you can see a pixel-wide gap between the two at the top).

My thread subtext is set to last poster only, and it looks really weird. Unread threads show the OP instead of the last poster (is that intentional?), and the pipe divider is attached to the front even though it's the only setting I have enabled.

Enabling "author" doesn't change how it looks at all (presumably it would have both "OP" and "Last" in there).

Some threads have the subtext left-aligned, and some right-aligned. It appears that any threads that I've read are right-aligned, except for stickied threads where it's still left-aligned.

hey santa baby posted:

I also just noticed that, and wanted to say thanks. It's almost as if the app knows what information I want there. Spooky!

Oh, I knew I missed a detail. The change to make unread threads show OP instead of last poster was intentional. I forgot to double-back and revamp that setting, so it'll show up weird if you change it from default. I'll get that fix in the inevitable bugfix update in the next few days.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2013 01:39

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

404notfound posted:

To be fair, it seems to be the "official" way to do it on Android now. Gmail implements it the exact same way.

Yea, the pull-to-refresh library we used in the prior version was depreciated and the replacement is what you see now. It caused a few issues during the beta but Sereri worked out the bugs. Hopefully the library author will improve it a bit, it's still in active development.

swarthmeister posted:

Leaving my phone installation stagnant for a while with the last play store release because of this and the custom theme limits. I didn't specify, but the earlier post was about the update on a Nexus 10.

Nice bonus among the limited color options, the AmberPOS theme with "enable bookmark star colors" turned on is a good forums scheme for autumn.

While we look at the themes, I would really recommend upgrading even if it's a bit annoying. There are many behind-the-scenes bugs that were fixed I would rest much better knowing fewer people were exposed to them. I'm not sure what tweaks will be made the new default theme, but we can definitely improve the classic theme.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2013 04:25

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

Cuntpunch posted:

Looking great, but 2 bugs to report:

1. If you are not on the final page of a thread and pull down to go to the next page, the bar at the top still reads "Release to Refresh" rather than whatever it used to say about the next page

2. Using the icon to go back no longer remembers if you accessed the thread through your bookmarks rather than the forums, it always takes you to the thread's back to the thread's forum. However if you swipe back it does seem to remember whether you came via bookmarks

Also what is the code contribution process like - there are a few small things I would like to modify?

For #2, the top-left button is hierarchy up, per Google's design standards. It's supposed to take you one level up, in this case to the parent forum. Think of it like going one step back on the "The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > Awful Android app - I Can't Believe It's Not Beta!" link chain you see at the top of the thread. It's been this way for a while now, and the normal back button will take you back to the bookmark screen. Honestly, the top button is terribly unintuitive, but we're sticking to Google's guidelines in the hope that it becomes better understood over time.

If you want to contribute, you can fork the project on Github and submit a pull request with any changes. You can always post bug reports or feature requests under the Issues section, that's the best place for us to keep track of them.

zeekner fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Sep 25, 2013

# ¿ Sep 25, 2013 20:49

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

hey santa baby posted:

In Forum Settings, under THREAD DETAILS are the things that get displayed under the thread title in the forums view. Perhaps there could be a "Smart [ ]" option that has the current behavior where unread threads show the OP and read threads show "killed by." That way, the other options can be made rigid (since this seems to have confused some).

Honestly, I want to remove that whole section. With automatic switching between OP/last post, you might only need a toggle for thread tags. There isn't much of a reason to turn off thread tags either, they don't use much, if any, bandwidth and are a core feature of the normal forums.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2013 23:24

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

nexus6 posted:

Also, just now when I posted this it tried to load page 10/5 instead of taking me to my reply.

Can you click a quote-link that leads to a previous page and verify that works? I fixed this exact bug for quote links and I thought it was working for replies, so I'll look into this.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2013 01:45

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

Aleph Null posted:

In threads with long posts, even without images, just walls of text, sometimes links, spoilers, and the little three dots won't work. Nothing happens when I tap them. I have tried clearing my cache.
I am on a Motorola Xoom tablet running stock Android 4.1.2.

Can you link a page that does this reliably? I should be able to replicate it on one of my older test tablets.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2013 06:15

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

Sereri posted:

I know exactly what you mean and what line is causing it, I just don't know if that line is important for something which is why I always let it be. If SD is reading this, it's the Loader in the ForumIndexFragment's onPageVisible().

Hmm, we can remove that if we add a ContentObserver to monitor the index data and trigger a refresh if anything changes. That line is there to cover a really rare case when the user is browsing a forum and discovers a new subforum. Normally restarting the loader isn't that big of a performance hit, since the cursor is created in a background thread. However, the index uses a tree listview library that is somewhat inefficient, so it's probably better to not restart that unless we really need to.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2013 18:55

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

Khisanth Magus posted:

I did a good amount of browsing on my galaxy nexus tonight on WiFi, so the image problem I have seems to be limited to non-wifi, and seems to be most common when I'm on a 3g signal.

Can you turn of the GIF-disable option and let me know how it acts?

# ¿ Sep 28, 2013 08:32

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

Tadhg posted:

This. Love what you guys are doing with the app, but I already miss my dark nighttime reading theme.

I'm sure it'll be back soon (or something functionally similar). For now try YOSPOS green or amberpos; refined themes for discerning posters.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2013 08:35

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

Sereri posted:

While I still haven't been able to recreate this, SD fixed this bug yesterday. It'll be in the next patch that'll be out very soon. Unless the Android fragment/activity lifecycle makes me want to kill myself first that is.

Uh, the bug I fixed was rotation on 7" tablets messing things up. I don't think the CSS problem is related.

# ¿ Sep 30, 2013 19:52

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

Nth Doctor posted:

I just had an interesting experience on the market version of the app:

I caught up on the last 4 or so pages of a fast moving thread. When I got to the end of the last page, I pulled to refresh to check for more posts. For whatever reason, the app kept sending me to the middle of the page's old posts, but they were still colored as though unread. The posts at the top were properly colored as read.

Eventually I scrolled to the last post and manually marked it as last read, and hopped back over to my bookmarks. When that loaded, I saw that the thread I was just in had -20 unread posts. When the bookmarks page reloaded, everything was fine again.

Geirskogul posted:

This happens to me ALL OF THE TIME. I'll go to the next page of a thread and it drops me somewhere in the middle or at the end of the page. Even happens on my bookmarks page, or in any forum's page. On both my Epic 4G and Note 10.1 8013

Do either of you have posts-per-page set to anything other than 40 on either app or forums?

# ¿ Oct 3, 2013 04:36

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

Geirskogul posted:

For the first time, then I set it to "always open links." But every now and again I don't want to open it, I want to copy it. Having to go into the app settings on the device and reset it every time is a PITA.

Yea, I would prefer to have long-press for that menu. I looked into implementing long-press, but at the time it required a really nasty hack. That was a long while ago, so I'll take another look.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2013 05:35

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

pokeyman posted:

Seriously?

Best solution I found was to enable and override the browser's built in context menu function, do a hit-test then sort through and figure it out based on what was selected.

Honestly, it seemed more intimidating at the time, but now I'm looking through someone else's implementation it really isn't so bad.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2013 06:39

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

MediumWellDone posted:

I've been using the app for the better part of this year and I really like the improvements in that time.
I have a bit if a problem though. I clicked a link to a post in the the hidden TERROR DOME forum and now it spears at the top of forums list. How can I remove it from the forum list? On a nexus 4 if that matters.

It'll clear itself after a few days or if you manually clear the data. I'm investigating a forum-parsing method that would be more robust, but for now this is the best we have.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2013 17:25

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

Hey everyone, I've been working on a rewrite of Awful called Something.apk.

I've been working on it privately for a little while now, so it's already come a long way. I've started a development thread in project.log where you can follow the development and post suggestions or bug reports. The current stable build is actually really stable, so give it a shot.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2014 03:09

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

chocolateTHUNDER posted:

So, this is like an alternate version? Or it'll eventually replace Awful app as we know it?

Awful will stick around, this app drops support for 2.x so keeping Awful around will help those guys. Awful is already pretty much in a stable maintenance stage.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2014 03:19

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

OBAMA BIN LIFTIN posted:

When you mean starting over, do you mean it's not a fork with some outdated code dismembered and replaced, but rather a clone? I'm just interested in knowing whether knowledge of Awful.apk codebase will be useful here.

It's a fresh start, the only things that were copied over are the HTML templates, CSS, and some of the javascript. Everything else is new code. Knowledge of the old codebase won't hurt, but it's not needed. I really hope it's a lot easier to jump into this codebase then it was to get into Awful.

Retrofitting Awful to bring it to the condition Something is in would have taken a lot longer. There's no more provider bullshit, network requests are simpler, and it's much easier to add new functionality.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2014 16:53

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

Eikre posted:

Can use some work catching up aesthetically with Awful

What do you mean, exactly? There's still some placeholder graphics and colors, but overall it's already looking better than awful. Is there some specific part where Awful looks better?

# ¿ Mar 14, 2014 18:16

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

Vykk.Draygo posted:

So we've got two competing SA apps going now?

Sereri started work on the update while Something was in early development. It's not even really competing, Something is still in development and even beyond that Awful is still required to fit specific needs, especially for anyone on 2.x devices.

# ¿ Mar 22, 2014 19:02

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

TraderStav posted:

I must be missing something. I'm using something, not awful. Looks like limited preferences.

The something development thread is here, and that feature is on the list of things to re-implement.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2014 02:09

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

TRIPLE-POST

How did that happen exactly? With the long page delays we're seeing the posting process might be timing out, but the forums already have the post. That's kind of difficult to work around, since we don't know for sure if a post was accepted at that point.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2014 20:06

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

Sereri posted:

It's been a while since I implemented that but if I remember right you can only freeze it at the first frame. Or whenever the browser feels like while loading. It's one of those I forgot which. Point is, I can't tell it what frame to get; even if it would be different for all gifs.

Smilies also work like all gifs and will murder your battery life just as badly as the big gifs, harder probably because they're on every loving page.

To add to this: Emotes are some of the worst gifs. A few of them use very short delays that force the system to refresh at the highest rate. :siren:

for example relies on the system-minimum delay. Slow-action gifs (>500ms delays) are actually pretty soft on battery, but we can't really tell how a gif will act without intercepting them.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2014 01:15

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

FYI: The app doesn't store the password, it logs in and stores the sessionid from the cookie. That way we don't have to worry about the password leaking, your password is forgotten as soon as you finish the login activity. All forum sessionids are cleared when you change your password, so if you need to remotely kill that session just change your password.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2014 05:24

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

A hardware issue:
#1 exacerbated by high CPU usage in webview when multiple gifs are present
#2 with a questionable ROM, which likely doesn't account for the N4's thermal issues and fails to throttle CPU sufficiently
#3 and an aftermarket battery, which might not be reporting battery temperature properly, see #2

# ¿ Jan 24, 2015 18:20

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 13:44

zeekner: Jul 14, 2007

I didn't realize it was stock, I thought you were running a third-party rom, sorry. Anyways, Android Webkit has had a long standing issue with high CPU usage when animated images are on the page (even if scrolled offscreen). That high cpu use may have been a contributing factor, but I used an N4 as my primary development device for quite a while and I never encountered that kind of overheating.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2015 21:28

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