(Unofficial) Android/Win10 Rokujouma Reader. Nice Things status: can not be had.
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@smashman42 Reading progress is stored as a number between 0 and 1 everywhere, but interpretation is different. In my app it corresponds to top paragraph (first character of first visible paragraph divided by total chars) while web reader and official app is something like page number divided by total pages (even in scrolling mode). Latter is obviously less precise and it also depends on page layout meaning your position will drift if you change font, reader's size or screen orientation.
Unrelated to precision, the feature is totally broken in the official android app right now. -
I see there's a newer Android build on the Google Drive folders than the one I started using.
Is there a changelog at all?
Is all bug squashing Windows only so the Android ports just get any new features if any?
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@smashman42 I silently uploaded 0.1.8 and listed most of changes in the first post. Android one had a bit more updates in the UI and Windows one got some fixes for actual crashes and memory leaks (the side effect was broken text alignment and I still haven't done anything about that so it never got uploaded anywhere).
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Sorry, I didn't see the changelog at the end of the post. Thanks a million for making this thing!
0.1.8 on Android is pretty nice, I especially like the browsing for parts of a volume page - for any volume over about 10 parts I used to have to switch to landscape to see all the part numbers & make sure I was choosing the right part, now it is much easier on the eyes to see what is what.
The actual reader part having a "next part" button at the bottom is fantastic, especially for binging on catch up months. No more jump back "crap, what part was I reading again?" then jumping in and out to check.
Got around to loading the Windows version on my laptop, but primarily use the phone to read so haven't done more than log in & jump around the UI to check it. Now I have a "dark mode" PC reader, I might find myself using it for the new parts as they come out & keep the phone for Rokujouma & catch up titles.
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Already posted to the "Report App Bugs Here!" section but I figured I would also put something here since it is relevant to the unofficial app.
First I want to say that I have been super happy with this app. Having a "Night mode" is amazing and is something that is sadly missing from the official app. I really appreciate that this app was made and am excited to see some more development on it.
Unfortunately, the unofficial app stopped updating with the latest parts that I noticed had already released on the official app. I hit the "wipe cache" option hoping that would reset any corrupted data and fix the issue. Now it won't load anything at all. I just get a "Loading... Please Wait." prompt just above the setting section. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling as well and I see the same thing. I can post a screenshot if necessary.
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@commandojones It's been broken for a while. API slightly changed and app can't handle that well. New version can still break because of most minor changes and that's one of the reasons it's not 0.2 yet.
Just uploaded fresh 0.1.9 version. In addition to API stuff it got options for full-screen, TTS and 90%+ -> 100% completion update (to compensate for old official app bug).
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Was the Windows version different to the Android version? Because it kept working & I never noticed it break like the Android version did. (I suppose it could have updated itself via that Windows store?)
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@smashman42 It's still at 0.1.2 because 0.1.8 was more about android stuff and it kinda broke text alignment on Windows. I uploaded 0.1.9 to google drive but I probably won't update the package in the store until 0.2.
0.1.2 still works because it's making simpler (and ~40% slower) requests to API.
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@_08 Thank you very much for uploading 0.1.9! It is working for now but if anything breaks in the future I'll roll back to the slower but stable 0.1.2.I always appreciate how quickly you guys respond!
I am also really happy with all of the updates to this app. Pretty much the only thing I see that's missing is an indicator of which parts you've already read on the volume/part selection screen. Thanks again!
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+1, its working great again.
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New subscriber here. First, I would like to thank you for creating this unofficial Android app. It works much better than the official app, at least in "vertical scrolling reader" mode.
There are two problems in "Horizontal single-paged reader" mode, though:
- Reading progress isn't tracked, and the progress bar at the bottom doesn't advance. However, an existing reading progress from vertical mode is restored also in Horizontal mode.
- The NEXT PART button is missing in vertical mode.
I'm using the latest version 0.1.9 on Android 6.0 and 4.4 (old phone used as dedicated book reader), and the problems occur on both, with multiple books.
For now I'm using vertical mode. As a frequent user of the Kindle app, I prefer Horizontal single-paged mode, though.
Thanks!
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The next part button worked for me in vertical mode in 0.1.9 on Android 7.1.1 - was with the most recent monthly Rokujouma volume I remember using it for sure.
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@chrisg said in (Unofficial) Windows Phone/Win10/Android Rokujouma Reader. Now in the faraway corner of Windows Store.:
There are two problems in "Horizontal single-paged reader" mode, though:
- Reading progress isn't tracked, and the progress bar at the bottom doesn't advance. However, an existing reading progress from vertical mode is restored also in Horizontal mode.
I don't use that mode so it may not get be updated that frequently.
Apparently I "temporarily" commented out that part when I was updating some things and then forgot to uncomment and or rewrite it. Unfortunately the overall code for horizontal-flipping reader is a big mess (both big and mess, it's like 3 times more code than a vertical one and I made it in earlier days) and I gave up after an hour of trying to make it work - new pages won't render properly, partially because of the bugs in the new versions of framework. Update isn't coming at least for a few weeks.@smashman42 they meant the horizontal one. It simply doesn't have that button.
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A simple alternative to horizontal page mode would be scrolling one page (minus one line) down in vertical screen mode when you tap on the lower half of the screen. This would also mimic the page turning in a book, and would make reading more comfortable.
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version 0.1.10 aka yup, they sure aren't decimal
Mostly just bugs getting fixed:- Horizontal paged reader should work again (although loading indication is still bad and switching between single-paged and dual paged may require a restart)
- Prevented bad things from happening if you log in with a second account. Do NOT log in with a different account without resetting progress if you're still using an older version
- Series page has new and unfinished layout
- Clicking series starting with "Infinite" will no longer do a thing it's not supposed to do
- Some internal stuff
I'll make some longer post in a week or two.
@chrisg Thanks for suggestions. I pretty much never considered that because I just scroll continuously. I'll add flipping with volume buttons soon-ish but adding touch-screen control may be tricky.
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First, a little update because everyone does that nowadays.
version 0.1.11- You can log in with your username now
- Volume's page got ebook options back. Now with premium epubs (just sends volume's page link to browser, or a download link if you own it)
- Data storage is reworked a bit. Things may've got a bit faster and app data shouldn't inflate that much (it still does)
- Couple of minor bugs fixed
As for a long post, now that there are more users than you can count on one hand and a have a bit of free time, I decided to post a to-do list, so you can point out if I'm missing something in the roadmap.
Feel free to mention even super-small things — those tend to be both easy to implement and easy to miss/forget about.
Note: below "page" mostly refers to application screens, not a book's page.TODO:
- Properly test to get rid of random crashes
- The ever-growing list of series should be on a separate page and with thumbnails (preferably with optional grid view, but that may be a pain to add)
- Filtering/sorting options for lists of series or volumes (There's a ton of potentially useful options I can come up with: show all, show series unread preview, show favorites, show owned series, hide series with expired unread parts i.e. things you can't read anyway, ...). An option to show list of parts for series.
- Various changes to the navigation between pages.
- Maybe actually describe offline-reading part and/or add explicit "'save' for offline" button. (Right now it's just a three-bird-killer cache for faster loading, less network usage and offline usage in case network isn't accessible)
- Pop-up tools on the reader page: more detailed status (network, progress), text settings, TTS, bookmarking, seeking. Also better network/sync status indications in general.
- Keyboard controls
- Marks on the progress% bar: Images, Headings, max read progress etc
Switch to Realm Database (new and sexy mobile-oriented RDBMS) for caching: less wasted storage, faster startup and web updating, no WinPhone or armeabi support though and there are quirks with threads.Sticking with SQLite- Transitions between parts in the paged reader
- Less bad image zooming in android
- Add something to the android's splash (startup) screen. I actually have a .txt with a bunch of quotes from prepubs for that but I doubt it's a good idea to use them when it stays on screen for two seconds.
Pie in the sky:
- Push notifications
- Rewriting UI to platform specifics instead of Xamarin.Forms (faster loading, better performance, more capabilities)
Now excuse me while I go drown in all those new prepubs.
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There seems to be an issue with the latest when doing TTS: it just zips through the entire part until it hits the end without doing any TTS.
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@fozzedout Fixed. Not sure why the old version worked but not the new one. Next time try to mention the platform (Android/UWP) because things may be different on those, either thanks to my code or framework's.
version 0.1.12
- Fixed android's TTS not starting up properly, and some other minor TTS bugs.
- Fixed crash when volume preorders are viewed without logging in.
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Unfortunately, 0.1.10 and newer all crash when started, both on my current phone with Android 6.0, and my old phone with Android 4.4.4. They only work on my tablet with Android 8, but that's a bit too big for reading novels. 0.1.9 runs OK on all devices.
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@chrisg A somewhat late reply because apparently I was too busy reading new rokujouma to notice your post.
First, it's probably not that much about android version because it works on 5.0 and 6.0.
I think I added most of dangerous things in 0.1.11, not 0.1.10, so that's a bit weird. You can try a new version because I did fix a couple of potential crashes (though they only happened occasionally, not always) and removed some things added in .1.11. If it works, check the logs by clicking "Log" on the about page, I wrapped the code for background color detection (that I added in 0.1.10) into a try-catch statement and the error starting with "Error while getting display info" will appear in the logs if it occurs. Take a screenshot if you get that (and maybe check if the default theme or background color is different on non-working devices). Other relatively big thing I added in .0.10 was a library for pop-ups so I made a package without that in the google folder 0.1.13/test/ and you can try that as well if normal build doesn't work. Before all that you should try clearing app data with android's tools, but you probably already did while reinstalling and all.
If all above fails and you have adb with drivers you can get error logs by runningadb logcat > log.txt, searching log.txt forRokujoumaReaderand searching forE AndroidRuntime:somewhere nearby.version 0.1.13
- Data storage is reworked again. It shouldn't unreasonably grow in size anymore. I recommend clearing data with OS tools or reinstalling app to get rid of old data because I'm not entirely sure the app will manage to clear it all by itself. Some things will be a bit slower until I optimize some more.
- Everything in horizontal reader is faster and hopefully more stable.
Edit: I guess caching in the latest version deadlocks a lot, gonna fix that soon.
