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!

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Sereri posted:

Also: If someone wants to help but cannot code, I'd love proposals on a better way to arrange the settings menus.

I'll have this done tonight or tomorrow. Edit: This is a pretty bad rat's nest. I'll definitely have it by Friday, but probably won't get done tonight.

How open are you to using on/off toggle with the title leading to the options (like Wi-Fi is in AOSP settings, for instance)? I know you said it targeted too high of an API but it changes how you'd structure the settings so I need to know.

-----------------------------------------------

I just had an instance where going to the next page (of this thread, actually) caused the view to be at the end of the next page and then it marked all of it as having been read.

ClassActionFursuit fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Sep 25, 2013

# ¿ Sep 25, 2013 20:18

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 14:47

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Here's my settings menu structure.

For some reason Drive decided that items with notes attached need neither color nor text that's readable. Clicking on the cell shows the menu item and it should be obvious by the color coding what the original text was. All of the ones with notes are ones that I believe should have changes.

Salvador Dalvik posted:

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.

If the thread tags are going to be those horrible square ones I definitely don't want the option to disable them to go away. The new ones look absolutely terrible.

ClassActionFursuit fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Sep 25, 2013

# ¿ Sep 25, 2013 23:34

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

baka kaba posted:

I win! (I'd already started though)

I basically tried to group things logically and keep it to one submenu per section, so it's easier to find what you're looking for.

Forum Settings - was called Thread Settings, but since it really affects how the forum level looks I renamed it. Holds all the settings for how the thread lists are sorted and what gets displayed.

Thread Settings - I threw most of the stuff in here, it holds all the settings for how posts are displayed, highlighting, spoilers, links and videos. Image settings were a separate submenu but I think you could just have them as another section like here. I separated embedding and hardware acceleration as the former's more of a content preference, the other is more a performance tweak (it went in Look and Feel).

Theme Settings - no change here. Might be worth keeping separate, especially if it's going to be expanded? Maybe font type should be moved since font size is in the thread settings menu. I can see why it's part of the theme, so maybe font size should go in there with it, instead of in the thread settings.

Look and Feel - crap name, basically the overall app interface, navigation options and performance settings.

Account Settings - ...stuff about your account.

And the other doodads at the end. It's worth mentioning I'm on a phone, so I don't actually know what some settings do (like the layout options), so maybe they should go somewhere else. It's a starting point anyway!

e- also hopefully I didn't miss a submenu

I like a lot of this. A couple niggles:

Disable GIF animation should be in Thread settings > Image preferences as it directly relates to images.
Theme settings > Choose layout does nothing for me, leads to a radio button for simply "Default".
Can we get rid of "Show next page button at top"? Seems ridiculous.
What is Look and Feel > Thread layout? I can't find it unless it refers to Theme settings > Choose layout.
Scroll thread with volume keys needs to be renamed to "Scroll with volume keys" as it scrolls more than just the thread.
It seems that by definition Theme setttings should be under Look and Feel.

You're also right that Look and Feel is a terrible name.

ClassActionFursuit fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Sep 25, 2013

# ¿ Sep 25, 2013 23:51

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

baka kaba posted:

I picked Look and Feel so people would be inspired to think of a better one it's really more of an app UI and performance tweaks section. That's why I put the GIF settings in there too, since I think the main reason people turn them off is to save battery life. It would be nice to have an option in both places, but if I had to choose (which I did) I'd put them in the technical options bit, not in the general graphics section.

You and I know that disabling GIF animation is a battery saving option but I think the casual user would think that it's an image option.

baka kaba posted:

Same with me for the Theme settings > Choose Layout part - I don't know why it's there or what it does, so I left it. Same for that Look and Feel > Thread Layout option - it's in the main menu right now, below Hardware Acceleration, but it's greyed out for me because I ain't got a tablet. Maybe it needs to go somewhere else.

Gotcha. It should probably be renamed "Tablet layout" for clarity.

baka kaba posted:

Thanks for the feedback too, I looked through yours and I see we're generally grouping things the same way (sometimes implicitly, like I put the UCP options together at the end of their section). Really I just like the idea of trying to keep all the pure presentation options together, split into sections for each view since there's a lot of it, and treating the Theme menu as the section for the overall 'look'. If there's going to be more control over that in future it might make sense to keep it separate.

It seems natural the grouping we came to: Options for the app in general, the thread list/bookmark view, the post view, and then About/Support options.

baka kaba posted:

Then I threw everything else, performance tweaks and navigation controls, into their own bit. I like the idea of discoverability, so if people are (say) getting bad battery life they can look at the menu and instantly jump into the technical submenu and see options for disabling things with a note about how they help with battery and glitches. But so long as the whole thing's logical and people can look at a short list and understand where they need to go, that'll do.

I think it would be better to fix the performance problems instead of having a tweaks settings area that people can fiddle with although I get that we're all autists here though.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2013 00:27

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Sereri posted:

The thread items are 2 lines by default and can still be wrapped.
vs

I still just hate it. There's no reason the thread title, which is really the thing I care most about should be squished to the middle and thread icon (which is banner shaped already) can't be underneath with all the metadata about the thread itself. I don't like that it makes fewer threads visible at once and I don't like how much importance it gives to the thread icon which I don't really care about.

That said I know I'm in the minority but if it were to become the default I'd just disable the thread icons to have the additional title text room back.

On a different note, more than a few times now I've clicked Last Read instead of Quote when trying to quote someone. I kind of wish those were switched so that Quote is easier to click (admittedly that's a right-handed point of view).

# ¿ Sep 27, 2013 09:47

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Sereri posted:

Here's a look at where the icons come from

For what it's worth, this looks way worse than than Awful.apk in every way.

Tunga posted:

If the unread tags were to move down to the line with OP/LP/pages then there's basically the same amount of space for the title as there is on the current version. See baka kaba's mockup above.

For me, and again I might be the vocal minority, the point is that baka kaba is right when he says horizontal space is at a premium and currently horizontal space is devoted to the only two pieces of information I give a poo poo about: title and unread count. Why would I want to trade one of those for anything, particularly the piece of metadata that care least about (since I probably already know what the thread is about since, you know, I've read it)?

It's really heavy ornamentation on something that neither needs it nor does anything to improve readability or usage. Worse that that, I think it's ornamentation that also happens to be extremely ugly but I'll admit that's subjective.

The Dave posted:

Maybe our OSes just have us brainwashed out of what to expect in app design. When I see the Awful.apk shots I'm completely turned off by it visually and appreciate Awful.app more. However Awful.app is pretty standard iOS in design.

That's definitely true. iOS6 and older has always looked terrible to me even when they were new though I quite like iOS7's aesthetic.

ClassActionFursuit fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Sep 27, 2013

# ¿ Sep 27, 2013 16:22

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Thermopyle posted:

That's how I feel about iOS UI in general. The blues and whites feel childish and 2005 to me.

FWIW, I'm with LastInLine. I don't understand why you'd devote so much screen space to something as relatively unimportant as thread tags.

That being said, the only reason I said anything was so he didn't feel lonely, otherwise it's not important enough to me to have even brought it up.

Everyone gets lonely sometimes.

I agree it's not important and I could certainly live it but it just seems like such a bad change to make. If it always had the large thread tags it probably wouldn't bother me.

I definitely don't agree with Tunga (something I don't like to do since he's right most of the time) on the default theme though, I think it's pretty much perfect even on my AMOLED screen.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2013 17:41

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Isn't the plan to eventually use the left side pullout menu for the forums listing? Obviously that's probably a ways from being implemented but it would solve the problem.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2013 19:34

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Sereri posted:

The problem is that we have a 3 level hierarchy. Even if you put the forums into a sidebar, you still got the threads and the thread view in the viewpager. And the use is virtually identical so you can just leave it where it is.

Thread view card UI?

Giant thread tags in place of the avatar and the three dot menu for options, metadata where the post date is. Bam problem solved. :v:

e: I posted that as a joke and now rereading I think it sounds kind of cool. Android is poisoning my brain.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2013 19:43

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

It seems if I use a post's three dot menu to quote someone and post, the next time I try to access a different post's three dot menu it just won't register any touch on the icon. If I jiggle the screen after failing to open it, it suddenly works again.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2013 04:41

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

What I wish it could do was choose the theme based on what the ambient light sensor reports when you first open the app. I really like the default theme a lot but at night I'd prefer it to be something dark athough unfortunately I don't prefer it enough to actually change it.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2013 09:23

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Jedit posted:

Got an occasional recurring problem with the current version. Every now and again I become unable to open anything in the post header; clicking the main section doesn't reveal the custom text, clicking the button doesn't give the Quote/Last Read/More options. This persists until I exit the thread.

Same here. Sometimes the ⋮ simply does not work on posts. I can scroll but no post's ⋮ will bring up the bar. I've gotten it to work by waiting or turning the screen off and unlocking the phone again. I've never had to exit the thread to get it working.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2013 15:26

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Heresiarch posted:

This happens to me constantly, except it's the ball of my hand.

Me too but I can't think of a place to put the button where it would make sense, look good, and not have the same problem.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2013 23:57

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

A problem that I've mentioned before that seems to be getting worse is that sometimes the thread view just stops accepting touches. I can still scroll but expanding the three dot menu or clicking on a link in a post just doesn't do anything.

Turning the screen off and on generally solves the problem but it's getting frequent and it's definitely annoying.

Wizard of Smart posted:

Is there a plan in the works to bring about some kind of app related notification when a new PM is received? That would be nice. Not a priority really, but there ya go.

There's no real way of doing it that isn't as easy as just allowing the email that the forums send to be your alert.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2013 20:57

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

I'm not seeing the avatar or emoticon issue on 4.4. I didn't attempt to recreate the refresh issue, I just went ahead and disabled embedded YouTube.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2013 10:11

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Sereri posted:

It's definately some Javascript code in the youtube embeds that causes this. Just disable it for now.

As for stuff not showing up, everything is fine for me. Are you people in the Beta (please say no) ?

Sorry, I'm in the beta but I'm experiencing no problems except the refresh which it sounds like you've figured out.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2013 23:56

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

CrashCat posted:

So is it normal behavior now that your 'last seen' doesn't update on a page refresh? It made me think that it wasn't working at all, but if I use the manual mark last seen on a thread, back out to the thread list, refresh the thread list and then go back into the thread, I get the proper seen location. It seems to only change when the thread list is fetched.

That happens on the forums too. Mark a post last read then keep reading the thread (going to a future page). Return to the thread list and the thread will be marked unread at the point you marked. You have to return to the thread list for the last read marker to "take".

# ¿ Nov 6, 2013 18:24

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

SB35 posted:

Now I have another problem, I'm on an N5 with android 4.4 so maybe this is an early adopter problem but none of my emotes show up. They all show as a little box. They do show as their text substitute if I turn off emote support though.

You can't disable GIFs on the new Chromium WebView.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2013 14:10

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Hadlock posted:

I would prefer a better "dark" theme included (wider text column, etc) by default, rather than the ability to create threads.

I strongly disagree with "widening" the text, the card interface and whitespace makes things so much more readable than the old way. It would be nice if dark/light themes toggled by reading the ambient light sensor when the app launched though.

Hadlock posted:

Or a better PM interface,

The PM is quite nice now. It would be better if it respected the text size the user can specify in the Settings but other than that it's more than adequate. What do you feel needs to be done?

Hadlock posted:

or better emote selection (like a search function)

It has a search function now though? Opening the emotes crashes the app for me right now though, report sent. For Sereri: GIFs enabled, Nexus 5 on stock 4.4, Dalvik RT.

Hadlock posted:

or a hundred other things before I need the ability to create threads in what's primarily a reader app.

I agree with this sentiment.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2013 10:41

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Hadlock posted:

The screen on my Nexus S is the same size as a credit card. It doesn't need to be any more narrow. I'm sure the existing theme is great on a 4.5" screen or 5" screen.

Dark theme saves a ton of battery power on (S)AMOLED screens

The nexus S is three years old, dude. It was unusable a year ago (I know, I had to deal with one). Burn a subsidy or all that money you saved on a value plan to buy a modern device. The MotoG is faster than a SGS4 and $180 off contract come January and the Nexus 5 is $350, on contract there are plenty of free good devices.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2013 11:17

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Hadlock posted:

Ok I ordered a Nexus 5 16GB, it will be here on Tuesday. I will let you know how that goes.

Wow, that's the first time that's worked... I... didn't really have a plan for a next step at this point.

I think you'll like it though.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2013 08:06

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

This might just be me but since getting an N5 I'm constantly refreshing the page when I'm trying to scroll due to the position of the refresh button on the page indicator. It's a good thing I'm not left handed or I'd be constantly moving back a page.

Would it be possible to move the touch areas for these elements inward from the absolute edge of the page bar?

# ¿ Nov 28, 2013 11:42

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Jeoh posted:

Make the a . It's subtle and isn't affected by people using different themes.

I'm pretty sure that has to be the app icon.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2013 14:14

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Immersive mode is pretty sweet except it seems to exacerbate my problem where I hit the next page arrow with the base of my thumb when attempting to scroll. I think I'm the only one having this issue though.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2013 14:18

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Sereri posted:

I don't even get how this works, the buttons should not trigger during a swipe.

If I could figure out how I'm doing it I'd try to stop it. As it is now I'll be reading something then suddenly the page is reloading or I'm on to the next page. I'm pretty sure I'm just holding it wrong.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2013 21:42

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Sereri posted:

From the dev thread:

Probably not the worst idea. There was an app that just used a button for settings and and 0/1 button for off (logout) at the top but I forgot which one it was. Other than that just look at the youtube or gmail app. Like that.

On the one hand the current swipe navigation works so well that it'd be hard to give up. On the other though I'll admit it's really non-standard.

I wish I could say something other than I'd really need to try it for a while before I could give an informed opinion.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2014 00:33

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Sereri posted:

I've yet to write a single line of code towards this so yes, gotta see how it turns out. Theoretically though the swipe navigation would stay. Similar to how in the gmail app you can swipe to archive mails and pull up the menu when swiping from the left border of the screen.

In that case then it seems like a no-brainer incorporate the menu there.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2014 15:49

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Doctor rear end in a top hat posted:

How can you make all of these posts about Android and not know how "hamburger" menus work?

I know how hamburgers work but what I didn't know is if the swipe navigation precluded use of them. If the hamburger could only be pulled with the button in the upper left then no, it'd be a bad idea because most people can't reach that region one-handed holding the device with their right hand. If the hamburger could be pulled while retaining the swipe navigation then that's not an issue.

It doesn't help that Awful is the only app I've seen that uses full page swipes for UI navigation so I don't really know what's possible and what isn't when it's used.

Edit: Now that I think about it, the only app I've seen with a hamburger menu AND a full screen swipe user interface is ES File Explorer and you can't pull the hamburger from the edge, you have to hit the button in the upper left. That of course uses a nonstandard fake action bar so I'm not sure how applicable that would be to Awful's situation.

Edit: vvv Didn't think of the Play Store, thanks.

ClassActionFursuit fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Jan 9, 2014

# ¿ Jan 9, 2014 17:05

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

I know this was an issue they fixed in the beta (which the way you were using it would appear broken) but yeah you should be using Back or swiping back to do what you want.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2014 08:57

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Nth Doctor posted:

When I click a link in a post that goes to another thread, what's the way to get back to the post that contained the link?

The Back button doesn't do this?

# ¿ May 27, 2014 15:05

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Sega Saturn posted:

^^^ yeah those show up fine though

I just started having the black box problem today on my stock nexus 5. Tried the update, but still getting them.

Have you tried Something? It looks a lot better and works really well but there are some features not yet implemented. The most annoying thing to be missing is user highlighting.

Also some have reported bad battery drain with it but I haven't seen that. Maybe remember to swipe it away on your task switcher it it won't affect you.

ClassActionFursuit fucked around with this message at 09:14 on Jun 1, 2014

# ¿ Jun 1, 2014 08:27

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

CHiRAL posted:

I had ABP (and it was off, I also killed the process a few days ago) but uninstalling it didn't help

I thought ABP hadn't worked in years? Or did they move to host file blocking like AdAway?

CHiRAL posted:

I haven't tried using the other app since the page says it's no longer maintained. I use the apps for reading texty threads mostly so I don't need that many features. If all else fails I'll try using that one I guess.

LastInLine posted:

Have you tried Something? It looks a lot better and works really well but there are some features not yet implemented. The most annoying thing to be missing is user highlighting.

Also some have reported bad battery drain with it but I haven't seen that. Maybe remember to swipe it away on your task switcher it it won't affect you.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2014 14:03

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

anthonypants posted:

Allow the app to post threads, but force the attention/hot/banme thread tags.

Also don't inform the user.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2014 00:06

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Ema Nymton posted:

Strange, in the app I can see a little icon where the image would have been, but I don't see something like that on PC.

I see the broken link in Chrome on OS X.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2014 07:50

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Croisquessein posted:

I have a request, for sometime in the future. I'd like an option to skip or collapse a particular post so I don't have to scroll past it. This would be really useful in threads where somebody posts a huge image dump/John Galt speech and other people quote the whole thing again and again. If there's already an option like this I'd love to know about it.

Still totally digging it though, my most used app by far.

Unfortunately the button to do it would necessarily be at the top of the long post meaning you'd have to immediately scroll back up to hit the button.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2014 06:48

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Endless Mike posted:

Actually, Google now says it should always show up because ~~dedicated Menu buttons~~ Samsungs are a bad UI decision.

Fixed that to show what Google meant.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2014 15:03

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

It happens on Something as well, so I think it's Android. What Something does do that Awful used to not do is if you have a link on your clipboard and you select the URL tag, it automatically inserts it after the = and positions your cursor between the tag. What would be best is if this same black magic could be leveraged so that if you had a link on your clipboard and you select the IMG tag it would automatically insert it between the tags and put your cursor after it.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2014 14:32

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Shouldn't the side menu go over top of the action bar?

# ¿ Nov 11, 2014 02:26

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

Sereri posted:

As for the black boxes. Have you tried Something? It's also on the play store nowadays. I'd love to hear back for once if the black boxes occur there too.

I've never seen them on Something but if I'm remembering correctly it has to do with using older versions of Android so I guess I wouldn't.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2014 11:18

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 14:47

ClassActionFursuit: Mar 15, 2006

butt dickus posted:

Post the icons that need replaced here and I'm sure someone will do it. Maybe even me.

By the way, Something is also in need of a host of icons so it would be nice if we could get a whole list of things for which assets are needed.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2014 16:30

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