App offline

bazzer
July 30, 2010, 06:26 PM posted in General Discussion

I downloaded the app and via that downloaded many lessons including dialogues and flashcards etc.. Ready for a long session in the plane however (without Internet connection) the app failed on me and when I tried to load a lesson or flashcards it told me I had to log in first, which obviously wasn't possible... So much for learning Chinese on the plane. Could you possibly change this setting or tell me how I Can review dialogues/lessons when I'm offline? Thanks a bunch, Bas

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xiao_liang
July 30, 2010, 06:47 PM

Oh, this happened to me too. It's very annoying just as you set out on a long journey to find out you can't do any learning like you'd planned to.

 

Hope you don't mind bazzer, but I've reposted your post to the "technical problems" group. 

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tvan
July 31, 2010, 02:34 AM

@bazzer and xiao_liang, obviously I'm not a staff member, but I use an iTouch (vs. an iPhone), so I live constantly with the "offline" issue. Obviously, iPhone-friendly apps are designed for "always on," whereas iTouch-friendly apps download content to the iTouch.

In my experience, as long as you download the lesson, the "Listen" (i.e. spoken dialogue) and "Dialogue" (i.e. written dialogue) buttons work fine; however, the "Vocabulary" and "Expansion" tabs don't work unless online.

Re: flashcards, these work fine if you go to the settings tab and press the "Sync flashcard data" button while still online. They then work offline, and you can review flashcards until your battery, patience, or (on trans-Pacific flights) endurance runs out.

Hope this helps. Obviously, I would root for a "download all" option. However, I've loaded 16G of music to my iTouch and am still trying to figure out what to do with the other 16G, so memory is not the issue for me that it might be for others. Hope this helps!

BTW, this partly stems from the attitude of Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, that the iTouch is only for playing games. Obviously he is paying attention to his marketing plan, not what users actually do!

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xiao_liang

Hi tvan, you misunderstand what's happened. I know all that about what works and doesn't, but the app sometimes spontaneously logs you out and you can't access any of the stuff you've downloaded unless you log in again, which you can't do obviously since you're offline.

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tvan

Got it.

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bazzer
August 01, 2010, 02:31 PM

Hi guys, 谢谢大家. I did the sync-ing and all that again and I had to verify my account online again. I think it was only a one-off since I'm a relatively new user, so now I don't think it will happen again... at least hope so.

Happy studying.