Android client: if only I could unread the sdk

[sancho1234]

Hi Fox!

I found two bugs (or request?) in the Android version of ttrss app.

1.) The processing/refreshing animation line lost in material design from the top of the app while waiting for the loading articles from my server. The page is blank, and I don't know that is it waiting for interaction for start of refreshing, or no more articles in my feeds, or it has other problem.

2.) I always use the All articles menu. The app sorting of articles by feed groups, not by date. I would like to read articles by absolutely date sorting. How?

Thank you for your works!

[fox]

Fox - for tablet layout and viewing an article, is the hamburger menu supposed to close the article? on the phone layout, the hamburger is an arrow that closes the article so you can get back to categories, but on the tablet you get the three lines that just toggle article titles - with no way out except hitting the back button. What's weird is on tablet mode you can close the article with the back button while looking at the hamburger titles list, but all that does is bring you back to the non-hamburger titles list (that you have to reopen a hamburger menu to get out of). I guess the difference is just that the tablet mode has the floating hamburger menu for articles in a category (but only after opening an article) and the phone mode doesn't? (running 1.62.)

There's so many hamburgers in your post it's making me hungry irl.

The difference there is that phone ui doesn't have the drawer thing when reading because i think it's kind of too much for the average phone screen to handle. So there's the <- instead of the hamburger and it takes you back to the previous activity same as back button. I can probably kill it in the tablet ui too so that you'll get articles list next to content in landscape and it work the same as phones on portrait. I'm sure it will generate more hatemail which I eagerly expect.

That said, I don't think actionbar back button is supposed to ever take you back if you have a drawer, you use back button to get to the previous activity and you just toggle the drawer with the burger thing. Combining those two functions could cause a lot of unintuitive shit.

Anyway, the gist of my post is that android is a really shit os with completely horrible design, I don't really understand how its supposed to work and I rather doubt people at google do either.

[fox]

i mean the whole back stack thing is a fucking crime against humanity right there

e:

on the phone layout, the hamburger is an arrow that closes the article so you can get back to categories, but on the tablet you get the three lines that just toggle article titles - with no way out except hitting the back button.

the important difference to understand here, young padawan, is that the hamburger doesn't close an article, it opens a drawer with categories instead. when you understand why is it different everything will click into place and you'll realize that android ui paradigms are horrible unsalvageable shit.

full disclosure: having to explain this crap makes me feel irl sad.

[fox]

Hi Fox!
1.) The processing/refreshing animation line lost in material design from the top of the app while waiting for the loading articles from my server. The page is blank, and I don't know that is it waiting for interaction for start of refreshing, or no more articles in my feeds, or it has other problem.

They killed support for it. There was this really smug post from some pissant google dev who said something along the lines of "well it's a ViewGroup you fucks just go and implement it yourselves" and the reasoning for this was, I shit you not, "our new toolbar is a Focused Widget". Hell if I know what that means. I guess the old toolbar wasn't focused what with having actual features I could use.

I'm waiting for some poor soul to write an implementation for it I could easily snatch and integrate.

2.) I always use the All articles menu. The app sorting of articles by feed groups, not by date. I would like to read articles by absolutely date sorting. How?

Next version which may or may not be live on android market atm is going to have exact same 4 variants of sorting as tt-rss proper:



Not really sure if it helps or not.

[fox]

btw I hope some sperg is currently raging because of different spacing between horizontal lines in the hamburger and sort icons.

(both icons are from google, of course)

[jah]

There's so many hamburgers in your post it's making me hungry irl.

I despise that term, fwiw.

The difference there is that phone ui doesn't have the drawer thing when reading because i think it's kind of too much for the average phone screen to handle. So there's the <- instead of the hamburger and it takes you back to the previous activity same as back button. I can probably kill it in the tablet ui too so that you'll get articles list next to content in landscape and it work the same as phones on portrait. I'm sure it will generate more hatemail which I eagerly expect.

That said, I don't think actionbar back button is supposed to ever take you back if you have a drawer, you use back button to get to the previous activity and you just toggle the drawer with the burger thing. Combining those two functions could cause a lot of unintuitive shit.

Anyway, the gist of my post is that android is a really shit os with completely horrible design, I don't really understand how its supposed to work and I rather doubt people at google do either.

I think I almost figured it out as I was typing that. If you cared about my opinion, I'd get rid of it in the tablet ui, too, just because it's more confusing than it is helpful. Anyway, thanks, Fox.

[hubersan]

(if this isn't the right area, please let me know)

Android client 1.62 - I dig the new interface, but it loses the functions that I've used the most.. (so I'm asking if there's something in the preferences that can maybe help me out) -

1: I have feeds organized by category, but occasionally I'll browse the individual feeds under a category (e.g. I may want to mark an entire feed read for some reason). I used to click on the 3 lines next to the category, which would give me the option to browse the feeds in that category. Is there a way to do that now?

2: In the article view, the most used button (by me) was the 'mark as unread' button - it's now gone! I know it's in the menu, but it's right next to the "mark above read" option, and I've been screwed more than once by hitting that by accident. Is there a way to get that back?

Thanks for humoring my questions.. it's a great product, so don't mistake this for gripes...

[tagno25]

Posting just to say that I like most of the new layout. But I prefer the way the back button was used before (go up a level and exit on top level) and having a mark as unread button. If the reason you removed the mark as unread button was because you added the <-, then I think the share button would be better moved to the dot menu.

But that is just my personal opinion.

[fox]

(if this isn't the right area, please let me know)

1: I have feeds organized by category, but occasionally I'll browse the individual feeds under a category (e.g. I may want to mark an entire feed read for some reason). I used to click on the 3 lines next to the category, which would give me the option to browse the feeds in that category. Is there a way to do that now?

You can longtap on feeds just as you always could. It's just the : icon that is no longer there because it looked dumb.

e: if you have ideas on how to make this function more discoverable without placing that dumb : thing on the feedlist, I'm all ears.

2: In the article view, the most used button (by me) was the 'mark as unread' button - it's now gone! I know it's in the menu, but it's right next to the "mark above read" option, and I've been screwed more than once by hitting that by accident. Is there a way to get that back?

Thanks for humoring my questions.. it's a great product, so don't mistake this for gripes...

http://tt-rss.org/redmine/issues/817#note-3

[fox]

Posting just to say that I like most of the new layout. But I prefer the way the back button was used before (go up a level and exit on top level)

There are multiple issues with this:

1. I couldn't figure out how to fit this in the drawer and make the navigation not look dumb/bad. Enabling back button to revert the nested category/feed backstack leads to unintuitive crap where you press on it and nothing happens because the backstack got popped but the drawer was invisible behind the screen, then you press it one more time and the app suddenly quits. It's all really platonic in a way that the abstraction does technically function correctly but it's really confusing.

2. The seemingly obvious thing is do what I did in the first place and pop the drawer on back press. It kinda works but no other android apps really work like this and there are multiple technical problems with using the drawer in this way, i.e. in some situations the drawer can get stuck opening and closing when you press back, which is also kinda dumb (@pherret, thanks your whining caused me to effortpost like never before).

3. So, as you see, the current approach is a compromise of sorts. I figured well might as well force back to go to previous context activity-wide since it is at least consistent with the rest of the app and other android apps, and use the drawer (open parent, etc) to interact with the feedlist exclusively. it's not ideal but it's kinda the best I could do atm considering.

tldr I'm dumb and android really sucks a lot. Also, don't mark stuff as unread (see above post why).

[crimsoncor]

I notice that in the latest android app version, the behavior of the back button has changed. It used to be when you were on a list of articles in a feed, the back button would take you back to the list of feeds and a second press back to the list of categories. Now a press of the back button from the list of articles causes TinyTinyRSS to quit. So as far as I can tell, the only way to access the list of feeds when you're in the article list is through the menu in the upper-left corner (if there is another way that I'm missing, then please ignore the rest of this).

The upper-left corner is the least ergonomic place to put a frequently accessed menu item, since it is basically impossible to reach on any decently-sized smart phone that is being used one-handed. Having the back button perform all the navigation in TinyTinyRSS was convenient because it meant you did not have to distort your hand position when switching between feeds. I was wondering if you would consider having the behavior of the back button be an option, so that those of us who prefer to have it take us back the list of feeds/categories can still have that behavior.

thank you.

[fox]

pls read dedicated android app thread

[crimsoncor]

Thanks for the pointer to this thread. Sorry for posting in the other forum; I missed this was here. Might be worth having a link to this thread from the Android app wiki page so that people like me who actually read the wiki end up in the right place.

I understand the problems in 2) and why the solution in 3) is the most consistent with the android ui.

Is it necessary to have the feed and category lists in a drawer? I'm not sure if this is different on a tablet, but on the phone version I do not see an advantage to the drawer. When I'm reading an article, I've got the back arrow in the upper-left, so I can't get to the drawer. When I'm back in the list of articles, I get the menu icon, so I can get to the drawer, but popping up the drawer blocks all the interaction with the article list, so it might as well not be there. It seems like having the list of feeds and categories be full-windowed lists like the list of articles would avoid any of this messiness with the drawer at all and lead to consistent back-button semantics. I seem to remember this being the case in an older version of the app. I assume it changed for some reason to do with google?


cheers

[fox]

(sorry this topic was locked for a bit, I fucked up with phpbb buttons)

[fox]

Anyway, to actually answer the above, I think that new drawer is an overall improvement. It looks better and it works better if you aren't going deep diving in the sublevels which really wasn't all that great previously either. If I regularly needed to go 5 levels down to read some feed, I'd place a shortcut for it or something, idk.

Stretched to the whole huge-ass modern android screen fullscreen feed list just looked dumb imo.

Also, the whole point about usability and stuff should probably be better directed to mountain view, as far as I could figure from their shit instructions that's how things are actually supposed to generally work. They don't do multilevel navigation but other than that...

Also you don't need to use the button just swipe from the left.