More reader feedback/feature requests

[lookslikerain]

As I keep using reader, a few more feature requests:

1. Currently the bottom tab bar state (hidden or shown) is not remembered when the app relaunches. I'd love to have the state remembered instead of defaulting to hidden. My ideal would actually be slider + tab bar both shown in paginate mode (with a separate setting for “hide tab bar," like in continuous scroll mode), but I think I asked before and you said it wouldn't work.

2. Have a toggle to “keep document settings in sync with profile” which would auto save any changes to the document profile and, when opening the document, auto load any settings from the profile. Maybe on by default for new documents (or a setting to make it on by default).

3. I think this was discussed before as a possible feature you were working on, but in reader, an option to not allow fallback dictionaries to determine parsing. Use case: when reading classical Chinese, have a modern dict available as fallback for single characters that aren’t in my classical dictionaries, but don’t let them determine parsing because then a lot of modern binomials get parsed by default.

4. For custom dictionary order, ability to drag dictionaries from fallback to main not just within main or within fallback

5. Popup reader: option to have continuous scroll that scrolls through the dictionaries like in normal dictionary view instead of tapping to switch, or maybe at least scrolls through all the entries for the character from a single dictionary (I'm not sure how actually useful this would be, just throwing it out there)

One bug report: When reader is locked to bottom, tap side to move doesn’t work. (If there’s a reason it can’t work, maybe “tap side to move” for the reader would make sense to be in the document profile settings, because then it could disappear when lock to bottom is enabled.)

 

[mikelove]

1) Will think about this. The reason stacking them doesn't work is that then we have to either re-flow the entire document whenever you open/close the tab bar (so you'd lose your place and the page wouldn't line up) or permanently leave a big gap at the bottom to account for the possibility that you might open the tab bar.

Would you maybe be happier if we had an option to permanently show the tab bar + slider (just without the ability to toggle the tab bar closed)?

2) Do you find yourself adjusting this a lot? What sorts of adjustments do you make?

3) Yeah, it should already be ignoring those now, will check why it's not.

4) This might be one of those cases where a small improvement takes a ton of UI work but will check.

5) To be honest I think at that point you're better off tapping the expand arrow button to view the definitions full screen, rather than scroll through them in a tiny bubble.

For 'tap to move': this is a fussy UI thing. Basically, in 'lock to bottom' mode the reader is not modal - you can do other stuff while you're using it. We can obviously detect that you're tapping on a button or whatever and not trigger the reader then, but the trickier part is drag scrolling; it's impossible for us to tell that you're *not* going to drag your finger to scroll to the next page until you lift your finger up from the screen having not done anything resembling a drag, so the 'tap to move' would not be able to trigger until then, but in general that's a gesture that works better when we trigger it as soon as you touch the screen (because otherwise it's not obvious that anything is going to happen).

So basically, if we wanted to support tap to move with the reader locked to bottom, it would be subtly different from how it works everywhere else - nothing happens until you lift your finger, and it's not obvious anything is going to happen, and if you absent-mindedly tap because you're about to scroll to a new page and then change your mind it still counts - and feel annoying and slow and broken. It only works well in the document reader normally because when the reader bubble is visible it's not possible to scroll to a new page. (if we supported 'lock to bottom' in the definition screen there'd be the same conflict with page scrolling there)

In theory I guess we could either a) do it that way anyway and let people who want both of those options deal with it acting weird or b) add an option to turn it on, but I'd need to see a lot more interest in it first because it would take a good bit of work to implement reliably.