Anybody updated the app to 1.4?
podster
May 16, 2013 at 11:48 AM posted in ChinesePod Mobile AppsWondering what "bug fixes" there are (hopefully the one that keeps erasing my lessons is fixed). Also whether any new bugs have been found in this version yet.
podster
May 23, 2013 at 11:41 AM
Justin, I think customers should be made aware that (unless I am mistaken) your proposed fix of re-installing the app will wipe out all of their previously downloaded content. Its not a very elegant solution. I appreciate your explanation but I'm not sure Apple is to blame if the product was not adequately de-bugged in the first place. Also you don't have the bug fixed yet, so if you could have pushed version 1.4 out faster I'm not sure what difference it would have made. I think miskat's workaround is probably a good idea. I should learn how to manage iTunes or Apple's podcasting app better.
miskat
May 22, 2013 at 08:40 AM
Thanks for the comments Justin. I will keep my eyes open for the future update (in the App Store). Meanwhile I will download enough lesson PDFs and mp3s to my iPad to cover next few months, let my subscription expire and subscribe again when the new version of the app is available.
Justin.O
May 22, 2013 at 06:52 AM
Thank you again for the feedback, and sorry for the bad timing with the update to 1.4. Unfortunately, with Apple things take a while longer because we have to go through this "app approval" business, which can take up to 2 weeks. With Android updates can be pushed out a lot faster (within a matter of hours).
Therefore, we encountered this re-occurrence of the iOS offline bug shortly after we already sent the update of v1.4 to Apple. As podster mentioned, our iOS developer has been and will be looking into all bugs regarding the iOS app, including this offline issue.
From what we have seen on our end, errors most often occur when connection is either weak or interrupted. It also best just to leave a downloading lesson alone until it has been fully downloaded. Pressing other buttons and/or leaving the lesson page prematurely seems to only worsen the downloading/caching problem. In addition, in the meantime a hotfix can be made by restarting and/or re-downloading the app.
Hope that was of some help. I have made a request that we focus on bug-fixing for the next release, as I realize this can be quite frustrating.
podster
May 22, 2013 at 03:50 AM
I am experiencing some bugs with 1.4 iOS mobile app with lesson and review only partially downloading and halting during replay.
podster
May 22, 2013 at 03:49 AM
I think Justin made some comments about the offline capability having been fixed but then breaking down again. They were supposed to be looking into it but no further comment and suddenly the 1.4 version comes out, which you note still does not solve the problem. So I can't say I blame you. At least with the very first version of the app the core function of being able to listen to a podcast worked reliably. Now we have lots more bells and whistles, but you are likely to get locked out of all your own content (stored on your own device) if you wander out of Internet range)
podster
May 17, 2013 at 08:46 PM
Thanks Rich. I have not made the leap yet, but now I see the older version that I am using is returning a previously unseen error message and refusing to download content. This being Friday I suppose I won't be seeing any CPod response for a few days.
I checked the blog but did not see any mention of the new versions, either Android or iOS.
rich
May 17, 2013 at 03:53 PM
Good question podster. As I'm at home now, late Friday night, and not at the office, can't check. Since I'm the developer of the Android app, but we do try to keep the minor version number, the 4 in this case, the same in features added (for some reason we use the major number in the Android version to go with the minimum Android OS version we support)....the 4 for v3.4 of Android added Discussions and Messages support (to reply back and forth with a teacher or someone who sent you a mesages from the web). I am not sure what bugs were fixed though... but I finally fixed a lot of file downloading problems with the Android version 3.5 (which also included offline vocabulary adding to flashcards and all-file-download for lessons), but I guess that info won't help you. :)
miskat
May 22, 2013 at 01:45 AMI just updated the 1.4 to my iPad.
Seems to have some new features, but the offline mode is still not working. I really do not understand the way you develop your apps, for the love of god, stop adding new features before fixing the old ones that are broken.
Unless of course it is a deliberate business decision to remove the offline support. Actually based on the comments (or actually lack of them) I am starting to believe that this might be the case.
I will not renew my subscription at the end of this month. When the offline feature comes back, so will I. Thanks.