really dissapointed with new iPod app update
peri7
November 27, 2010 at 06:56 PM posted in ChinesePod Mobile AppsI have been using my app for iPhone with great pleasure.. until today!
The new update is like going backwards two steps, this is totally a big downgrade
Whith this version:
-Impossible to listen to individual words and sentences
-Using mini-characters, I need a magnifier now!
-Cannot toggle btw. English & Chinese
-Glossary of sentences from a particular word? non exisitng anymore!
-Cannot touch the screen to move the sentences, listen to audios, etc
-The 'play' button ... what is this???
-'Options' button.. my only option on the screen is "logout" !!!
-Flashcards... better not to mention
I can continue the list with more more points...
please HOW CAN I DOWNLOAD AGAIN PREVIOUS VERSION, ANYONE CAN TELL ME?
thanks!
chrysegle
November 29, 2010 at 07:18 PM
My two cents for what I liked about my dear departed old app is:
- The traditional characters - less a 'like' than an absolutely essential
- The large fonts - the tiny fonts rather cripple the app for me. I've got excellent vision but squinting to see the tiny characters induces a headache. Why not in the new app provide some settings for a range of font sizes, including some over-sized settings for those with poorer eyesight?
- As root says above, the sentence by sentence breakdown of the dialogue and its audio and being able to easily navigate through it by sweeping my finger
- How the vocab was linked so that we could get example sentences pulled from any lesson with its audio - for me, this makes a good learning app a great learning app as it helps one to make connections between different uses of vocab.
root
November 29, 2010 at 02:30 PM
great to hear the team is paying attention to the feedback... But not the flashcards, please fix the sentence audio first, this is not the review app, this is the lesson app! There are a gazillion flash card apps out there, the chinesepod was special because it had access to full sentences built in!
I use iphone app as the main chinesepod access, and having the sentence by sentence audio (different from main dialog) was a major part of my daily lesson plan. Please please please pretty please bring that back, along with sentence audio for vocab and extended!!!
peri7
November 29, 2010 at 12:55 PM
Catherinem,
thank you for your answer, however,
we SHOULD have the option to download BOTH versions, so that we cannot interrupt our lessons (I am mostly using Iphone!), many of us joined chinesepod because of this app that is not useful anymore.
can you please give us the possiblitity to download the old version in iTunes, and this way you can continue to develop the new one, you can also post both options in iTunes
thanks
catherinem
November 29, 2010 at 08:56 AM
First of all, thanks to all of your for your feedback. We recognize there are some issues with the most recent version of the app, and I'd like to address them here. Normally John B. would do this, but he's out of the office for a few days, so I'll try and explain a bit and then when he comes back he can give you more specific details.
There were a lot of features in the old app that weren't implemented in this update. This is not because we didn't think they were important or useful. We instead hoped to establish a solid foundation on which we could build in the future - the old one just wasn't maintainable in the long-term.
Flashcards are one of the biggest issues and we plan to aggressively publish updates over the next few weeks to improve their functionality (especially traditional character support, etc.).
We realize that this is an inconvenience for many of you, but we've tackled the update in this way so that we can more effectively implement improvements in the future.
HongKongNik
November 30, 2010 at 05:44 PM
I'm glad to read that you're planning to improve the app in a fast pace. I really need to rely on the app as I'm traveling much of my time.
It would have been great, though, if you would have published a blog post some time before pushing the update, explaining your plans and timeline. That would have prevented much of the frustration many CPoddies went through during this past weekend (see several other discussions regarding this update).
Anyways, looking forward to & waiting with bated breath for all the new functionalities! :)
johnb
November 30, 2010 at 12:25 PM
Thanks for the feedback xiao_liang and chrysegle. That is indeed a straight up "broken" issue, and it will be fixed in the 2.0.1 release that we'll push to Apple on Friday (and will then be released when Apple approves it). The goal is to push a point release every week (or as quickly as they get approved, if more than a week) to cover all of these issues, and to add new functionality that having a much better base application will allow us to add.
Thanks for your patience and your feedback (this time I am the one that is responsible for the issue and fixing it, so I appreciate it even more!).
chrysegle
November 29, 2010 at 05:45 PM
johnb - Yes, it looks like the new app uses a numerical system to represent the tone marks internally (E.g. hao3 instead of hǎo) and the old flashcards were showing up with what looked like HTML escape characters. As I only had 40 or so FCs, I decided to delete all my old flashcards and create new ones which were then represented numerically and this seems to have given me correct pinyin. However, for those who have been using the FC system for sometime and rely on this data, I'm guessing you'll have to do some work on the database data converting to the new representation (if that's whats happened).
xiao_liang
November 29, 2010 at 01:31 PM
By broken, I mean the pinyin characters aren't displaying. Instead, it's displaying the html code for the tone marks. So if you don't already know what they say, you can't read them.
The lessons display is also not functioning correctly - it's displaying a selection of lessons, including those already marked studied, which isn't much use.
Sorry for the moan, but this on top of the progress chart mess-ups in a single day made me a bit grumpy this morning.
johnb
November 29, 2010 at 12:56 PM
Hey xiao_liang, quick question: are the flashcards broken as in they don't work (ie, they're not syncing correctly, etc), or that they are missing features that they used to have, or work in a different way. Please know that I'm not making light of your problem, I just want to make sure I know what it is. Actual brokenness will get fixed ASAP, whereas features will come more gradually (though flashcards will be the first to get this attention).
I'm not the tech lead, though, if you were referring to me. I just handle a tiny aspect of it, and mostly do marketing. I actually thought I'd be back long before Apple released the new version, given the review times we've been seeing, but alas...
xiao_liang
November 29, 2010 at 10:05 AM
yea, flashcards are totally broken :-(
I can't help feeling that publishing two major tech updates on the week your tech lead goes on holiday was a bit... yea
martijn819
November 29, 2010 at 09:06 AM
Catherinem, thank you for the feedback.
The problem with this kind of "revolution" is that it really sets back or holds the studies for those who rely on the Chinesepod app for their studies for all the weeks that it takes to get the next version out.
This is really frustrating.
A better approach is to stop development on the old application, but keep it in the Apple store. The new "improved" app would just get a new name ("ChinesePod NG, ChinesePod 3.0). (The same as happened with the previous incarnation of the app, which only provided a dictionary & flashcards)
This way we can test the features of the new application, give you feedback on our experiences and switch over when it reaches maturity.
At the same time we can keep up with our studies uninterrupted and listen to our daily shot of Jenny & John and zip through the flashcards.
cesky
November 28, 2010 at 04:57 PM
With the old version, I could categorize the lesson "studied". With new one, I can't find how to do this. Anyone finds out?
xiao_liang
November 29, 2010 at 12:20 PM
You can't. You have to do it via the website. I've also noticed it's not even showing the correct set of lessons from my website dashboard...
podster
November 28, 2010 at 04:11 PM
re: "-Glossary of sentences from a particular word? non exisitng anymore!"
One of the coolest features before was that there was an endless ability to follow links and trace back through definitions / sample sentences. So organic and intuitive! CPod really leveraged off its database. The new version looks like the rather mundane offerings of competitors.
chrysegle
November 28, 2010 at 04:26 AM
Yeah, I'm in the same boat. Presumably with Android or a jailbroken iPhone, something could be done but it looks like I'll have to wait and see if the Chinese Pod team concur (I mean, some of them probably use their own apps and updated too and might see where we're coming from, I hope) and then either wait for the fix or the old app to be restored and I'm guessing that might take a couple of weeks if it has to be submitted for Apple's approval.
peri7
November 27, 2010 at 09:42 PM
too late for me.. my Itunes has also the updated version, I can't go back.
any idea about how to download and reinstall the previous version?
thanks!
martijn819
November 27, 2010 at 08:41 PM
Just hope you have a backup of your iPhone in Itunes containing the old version and re-install your iPhone.
That is what saved me.
suxiaoya
November 30, 2010 at 11:16 PMThank you all for this feedback. So that we may centralise these discussions, please add any further comments or feedback to the post linked to below. You'll find all updates from the team there, going forward:
http://chinesepod.com/community/conversations/post/10906