(New) App Feedback
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I’m probably about to merely echo something that has already been suggested by others. But since the 2020 release of the app, I’ve found myself increasingly doing more of my JNC prepub and catchup reading through your app than my web browser. One thing in particular that I’ve found that I miss from the web experience, though, is an indicator of when I’ve reached the final part for a volume.
Some viable ways that could be added to the app (in a non-technical sense) might include:
- Editing the displayed title of the part, when shown for users to select a part to read, to include the word “final”. Similar in nature to how it is currently being done in the release calendar on your web page, although the exact implementation could be different in its presentation. Just so long as it is mentioned somehow.
- Adding to the volume’s info panel in the app (that is, what is viewed under: “Series” > [particular series] > [particular volume] > “Info”) the total number of parts scheduled for the volume, allowing users to work out for themselves whether it is the final part of the volume from that information.
- Adding “ghost parts” to the volume’s entry in the app beneath the existing parts, placeholders that get replaced by each completed part as they become available for reading. That would allow users to work it out from context whether the part in question is the final part for that volume based on whether any “ghosts” still remained on the page. (Basically, similar in nature to what currently appears on the series page on the web for each volume.)
- Or perhaps on the blue end-of-part page that appears when you finish reading a part, an extra line could be added that only displays for the final part of the volume. For example, the page as a whole might display “End of [Volume Title] Part # / Back / This is the latest part! / End of [Volume Title]!”, with that last line being the new addition.
If one of these stands out to you as an easy and good option to implement (at some point, time and resources permitting), I’d really appreciate it. I’m not necessarily asking to implement all four possibilities, and if you went for something completely different that served the same purpose, that’d be fine, too. This is just in the vein of “if I could make one change to the app, this is what I would like most”, but ultimately it’s only a matter of some additional convenience in my usage. So no worries either way.
And I understand that some of these ideas might not be changes to the app, but to something else like the server that supplies the parts. Because it’s my usage of the app that motivated me to make the suggestion, I thought this thread might be the best place to make the request. My apologies if I’m mistaken and I should have posted elsewhere.
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Version 2.0.0 is now out on iOS as well
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@chocolatkey said in (New) App Feedback:
Version 2.0.0 is now out on iOS as well
Nice to see a couple of the smaller things I previously mentioned fixed.
One new issue I've found is that the gap between the first and second line of new paragraphs in paginated mode is now quite large, for all paragraphs except the first one on a page. I believe I did report something similar before, but back then it was much smaller and barely noticeable compared to what it is now.
It seems to occur for all fonts, font sizes and line spacing settings, but only in paginated mode. Currently using an iPad on iOS 16.3.1.
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I’ve installed iOS 2.0.1 on my iPhone, and found out that in this version clicking on the Forum menu option will launch a new window in Safari instead of opening a web view in the same app context.
Normally that is fine except that I default to Private browsing mode so all the login info is lost when opening the page in safari. Is there a way to force the app use a normal tab (not private browsing) so that I don’t have to relogin each time?
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The margin on the new app seems to be off. Now some of the text will end up below the bottom of the screen (iPhone 14 pro)
And can we PLEASE add a +/- button to the margin controls. The slider often moves just 1 or 2 pixels when you life your finger off the slider after you moved it.
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@anony-mouse99 said in (New) App Feedback:
I’ve installed iOS 2.0.1 on my iPhone, and found out that in this version clicking on the Forum menu option will launch a new window in Safari instead of opening a web view in the same app context.
Normally that is fine except that I default to Private browsing mode so all the login info is lost when opening the page in safari. Is there a way to force the app use a normal tab (not private browsing) so that I don’t have to relogin each time?
Interestingly this problem only arise when selecting forum from the main screen. If I select the forum from a specific book volume it will display the forum inside the app context, which remembers my login information.
From the main forum it will spawn a new browser page in Safari which defaults to private browsing (in my case) that does not remember the login info (as expected for private browsing)
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Hey all. Just found that there's an app for J-Novel Club. One piece of feedback that immediately comes to mind is some sort of "last read" tracker. Trying to go through one of the catch -up series, and I have to keep guess and checking which of the 25 volumes' parts I was last at...
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@iacondios said in (New) App Feedback:
Hey all. Just found that there's an app for J-Novel Club. One piece of feedback that immediately comes to mind is some sort of "last read" tracker. Trying to go through one of the catch -up series, and I have to keep guess and checking which of the 25 volumes' parts I was last at...
Isn't there a blue bar that goes across and turns green when you finish the part? Or do you mean you need something at the volume level to tell you which volumes you finished without having to open each one to look at the parts? Okay, yeah, I could see having a box in the corner that says "read" if you've already read every part in the volume when looking at the volume list being useful.
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@pcj I think we might consider a "continue where you left off" kind of shortcut somewhere which is probably what they are requesting.
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@daytona yes! Please! Just adding page control with volume keys would make it more comfortable. I would prefer to read/download the advanced release parts locally, but this would be a decent compromise.
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@pcj yes, more at the volume level. If you were not reading a recently released volume/chapter (eg with a catch up series) you have to go searching the backlog and there's no indicator until you get into the right volume.
Therefore @admin a "recently read" type shortcut would be ideal; perhaps showing the last volume + chapter information with a shortcut to the current chapter (if unfinished) or next chapter in the volume (if available) or next volume (if available) as a "continue reading" type shortcut.
Additionally having a "completed" badge of some type on volumes would be useful.
Another thing I can think of would be the ability to manually mark a chapter or volume as read, e.g. to get the tracker up-to-date if you had already read a part but it was not tracked in your reading history for whatever reason.
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@iacondios said in (New) App Feedback:
Additionally having a "completed" badge of some type on volumes would be useful.
I just looked at this topic to make my own suggestion, and saw this reply. I have to second the request for a completed tag/badge on the volume.
What I was wondering is if it was possible to add the ability to bookmark volumes and select them in the menu that has "only follows" and "only catch-ups" currently. An "only bookmarks" option. I have a little trouble with losing track of what series I'm catching up on when I read unexpired pre-release volumes.
There are a few series where it's hard to keep track of the characters unless you read the completed volumes... So I wait until it's finished streaming.
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(New subscriber very excited to have found a company that so obviously cares for its customers!)
It would be nice if the coin purchasing interface in the app was at parity with the web interface. The premium membership discount goes the "wrong way" in the app, letting me buy more coins for the same price rather than a normal coin count for a lower price. (I don't need to buy 804 coins..!) Likewise, it would be convenient to have the arbitrary-coin-amount widget available.
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@journcy Unfortunately, that simply isn't possible. The history is that we've done the "regular price is X, premium price is discounted" through our website for years before we were added in-app purchasing. However, Apple and Google app store policy is for all purchases to be in "packages" that end in 99 cents, for whatever reason. This means there's no way to cleanly have a set of coins cost one price for nonmembers, and the corresponding discounted price for members and premium members (except for maybe very specific exceptions that aren't valuable to the public at large). The "type in a number of coins/dollars" feature is completely out of the question. Sorry for the inconvenience!
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I have encountered a bug, where titles that are longer than 3 lines are cut off by the "days ago" text.
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Is there a way to view the release calendar from the app?
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The CSS in the app seems buggy. Sometimes, the app decides to center everything, which I assume is because
body{text-align: left;}isn't defined in the CSS. Normally this shouldn't be an issue, but I've seen EPUB readers do the same iftext-alignisn't set.Also there's random gaps between the first line of a paragraph and the second, which looks distracting. This doesn't seem to be an issue in the web viewer, so either there's an issue with the CSS in the app or the HTML renderer.
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@kah0922 Both of these issues stem from the fact that unlike the web reader, the app one isn't just rendering html, it's converting html into native app text elements in Flutter.
A long time ago, yes, I just ran an embedded web-browswer frame that rendered html, but it was extremely slow. This iteration of the app we have to essentially parse the html and create our own mini renderer (that's obviously very limited).
The alignment issues happen when the original HTML isn't perfectly parsed (often because it's somewhat ill formed), which browsers are happy to ignore, and the little extra space for example has to do with how we add the paragraph indenting, etc.
Upgrading all this in the reader of the app is on our roadmap, it's a non-trivial thing to do which also trying to keep it performant.
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This was reported already, but the large vertical gap between the indented first line of each paragraph and the second line is rather distracting. If it's hard to fix the indenting, would it be easier to add an option to disable the indent, or to remove the extra gap between paragraphs? I would rather sacrifice one of those features for the sake of good line spacing. Plus, printed books don't generally have extra space between paragraphs.
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@eggnog The plan to fix all of this stuff is to actually parse the html into a sort of meta format server-side which we can more easily convert on-device than generic XML/HTML. It's kind of next on the big things to do after a refresh of the manga image serving tech...
