MyDeck Release v0.11.0

[NateEaton]

Added

• Highlights & annotations: view, create, and edit Readeck highlights directly in the reading view
• Image gallery lightbox: tap any article image to open a full-screen viewer with swipe navigation, pinch-to-zoom, and a thumbnail strip
• Long-press context menus for images and links (copy, download, share, open in browser)
• Fullscreen reading mode: hides the top bar while reading; swipe up to reveal controls
• Typography and Find in Page now available for Video and Picture bookmark types
• "Keep screen on while reading" toggle in Settings → User Interface
• About screen with collapsible app and server info cards
• 15-minute option added to auto-sync schedule

Changed

• Favorite and Archive actions moved to overflow menu and inline buttons at the end of article content
• "View original" renamed to "View web page" throughout
• Bookmark deletion card stays visible but greyed-out until the snackbar is dismissed or undo is pressed
• Delta sync re-enabled for Readeck 0.22+; deleted bookmarks detected immediately on pull-to-refresh
• Menu items and filter labels now use sentence case

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This discussion was created from the release MyDeck Release v0.11.0.

[NateEaton]

@Alanon202,

Please review and comment at your convenience. In particular, feedback welcome on (in addition to items we have discussed):

• typography changes (granularity, etc.)
• theme changes (paper, sepia, dark, black)
• keep screen on while reading
• fav/archive buttons at bottom of content
• revised bookmark delete/undo
• behavior in general against your self-hosted Readeck
• full-screen viewing of videos
• metadata edit (see pencil icon on Detail dialog)

Thanks,
Nate

[NateEaton]

Also, I missed one in release notes: ability to control whether "share" shares just URL or title and URL.

[Alanon202]

Hi @NateEaton!

Great work! Here are some thoughts below.

Sorry for the wall of text, hopefully I was able to cover everything we discussed previously that is pertinent to this release, as well as all the points you mentioned here.

With the pace of your development, it is getting more and more difficult to keep track of what we were discussing in an issue vs. release discussion vs. general feature discussion and where we left things in each of those instances.

1. I can once again confirm that an optimised release build is almost jitter-free unlike the debug builds. The performance in general is very quick, I can’t really see how it could be faster. I’ve never seen an image load late, and I’ve only seen an article loading circle once in my testing, on a clear outlier case (an enormous article with over 250 minutes reading time). For all intents and purposes I think the app is as fast as my Readeck instance, and my instance is really snappy. There are still occasional stutters but I can’t make heads nor tails why or when they appear.
2. Great thinking about link sharing, that’s a useful feature. Both work nicely!
3. My screen stays on while reading, as it should.
4. The buttons on the bottom of articles work and are a logical use-case that most other apps implement in the same way.
5. I’m not sure I know what the previous iteration of the bookmark delete/undo looked like to be frank, but I explicitly tried it for this occasion, and I see nothing wrong with the flow. The only real question I have is, should the toast frame follow the currently set theme? As-is it’s always black text on white background and a blue/purple-ish undo label.
6. I tried several articles with embedded YouTube videos but they aren’t playable within Readeck? All I get is a video thumbnail and a YT link below it. I presume the use-case here is for a more deeply embedded video? Do you have a link I can save and try it out?
7. I rarely if ever have the need to edit article data after saving, and I really like the Details interface. I can’t help but feel like users might miss it though? I can’t really see a better place for it, except maybe adding yet another button on the article list interface...
8. The sidebar, which was much improved since last we mentioned it in one of the discussions, has once again become fixed in place (not swipable, no tap on the side to close) in this release?
9. As for theming, the backgrounds work wonderfully! However, there are two issues:
   • The button etc. accent changed to a spectrum of blue colours and looks to be hard-coded, as there's no way to change it? I presume this is a bug since until now it picked up the phone's accent colours.
   • There’s some inconsistency with how links and text in general is rendered in light vs. dark themes overall. In Sepia the text is nice and the links clearly distinguishable, the colour reminds me of one of my theme accents so it could be retrieved from that. In Paper however they are potentially pulling the same light blue colour from the accent? In Dark Black links are rendered exactly like the rest of the text and are indistinguishable. In Dark Dark the text itself is gray, but the links are rendered in white, which IMHO isn’t contrasting enough... If you ask me, the links should probably take their colouring cues from one of the theme accent colours in keeping with Material You. This ought to ensure that they’re always different enough from the text body as to be easily identifiable.
10. With regards to typography in general, I am happy with the granularity and range of controls, I was able to find my size and line spacing sweet-spot across all available fonts fairly easily. The one exception I’d say is the margin control, I feel like the smallest margin setting could be a smidge narrower even, for example. Also, changing margin size also impacts font sizing, which was unexpected. It’s like the font size is somehow also relative to the margin size? I think the granularity of controls doesn’t really make this an issue but I’m not sure this is how it should be because it sort of confuses the scaling? Again this is all very personal preference stuff, it might be best to create a - + box for the margins as well, rather than tailor it to my own? If this is something you’d rather not mess with any further, I could live with these options.
11. Sometimes when cycling through the font sizes, the text doesn't reflow properly (I guess), it gets cut off at some random point and simply disappears. It happens rarely and seemingly only in some articles under special conditions like certain font sizes... I've attached some screenshots below under the spoiler. This isn’t a strictly new development as I believe I saw it even back when there were only three size toggles for font size, but having more toggles probably makes it easier to reproduce.
12. I’ll stick this at the end because it’s one of those realisations you come to after using something for a bit. It concerns the labels interface when adding a new article to the library. I think it would be better to clear the user input after picking a label from the list, refocusing the input field and allowing the user to type something else. This is actually the way most apps do it, because the only use case for retaining the text after having picked a tag is if you actually have several similar tags you want to pick from the same list. In every other instance, you will probably want to look for different tags, and this eliminates a step.
13. BTW, doesn't this number of new features usually warrant a larger bump than a point release? :)

Spoiler

[Alanon202]

@NateEaton Looks to be resolved!

[NateEaton]

@Alanon202 great to great!

BTW, as long as it's ok with you, I plan to include a reference to all your functionality feedback and testing support in the README and app About acknowledge sections.

Regards,
Nate

[Alanon202]

@NateEaton Hi Nate, thanks, that’s very kind of you! 😊

[NateEaton]

@Alanon202, one more question: any concern if v0.12.0 is a "breaking change" in terms of backwards compatibility for the data stored locally by the app (the content, not metadata)? To changes to leverage newer Readeck API features to have both text and image content downloaded for offline reading, it will simplify the the migration if I don't focus on backward compatibility. Since all the data really lives on the server and has to be loaded again anyway if the app is uninstalled and reinstalled with a new release, I'm assuming this won't be a problem for you but wanted to confirm.

[Alanon202]

@NateEaton No problem whatsoever, I've been wiping everything on every version test just in csse, to start with a clean base.

[NateEaton]

See build #665 and PR #116 for changes intended for v0.11.1.

Getting down to the end of a free month of ChatGPT Plus so I'm making the most of the resource while it is available. :-)

[Alanon202]

Hi @NateEaton,

I just noticed two bugs of sorts as I’m using Readeck more and more due to the app being so good. I thought it best to report them here, as it seems this mammoth discussion is where we put most of the focus in. If you’d like me to do proper issues in the future, with a stricter 1 issue per 1 problem sort of distribution, please let me know.

1. With articles where there are embedded Youtube videos or links it seems that it’s possible that a link somehow expands the article box, making horizontal scrolling possible? Here are two screenshots demonstrating this one demonstrating the link being cut off, and the other demonstrating what happens when I reveal the full URL:

Link issue

2. It seems that if I am selecting text to highlight directly below media (or a YT link) the selection gets wonky somehow. Basically the first words never get selected, and it continuously shifts. I can get it to work, but it requires finagling, like doing it multiple times, and I’m not even sure myself what I did to make it work. Again, here are some screenshots:

Highlight issue

The first two examples are me selecting just the first word of a paragraph, and the selection goes wonky. If I don’t intend to highlight anything but the first word, it doesn’t matter and it will save what was selected. But if you want to select an entire paragraph then you get what I get on the third screenshot, where the first couple of lines actually get skipped and you have to manually go back re-highlight them. When you do, the selectors will show like they’re not highlighted, but they are, and will save properly. I think I’ve described the issue properly, but as I said, I’m not completely sure I grasped the issue.

Interestingly, this doesn’t happen on all articles with images, only some. I suppose it depends on how the text directly below is processed by Readeck? In any case, both the URL and highlighting examples can be found on this article.

[NateEaton]

For the link issue, could you send me one or several YT links for ones that you are seeing this behavior?

For the highlight issue, I suspect you are right... it may be something about how Readeck extracted the content.

I'll look into both of these.

[Alanon202]

@NateEaton I tried to find some other articles in my library that behave similarly, no success. So far the one above seems to be the only example. I don’t have that many articles that embed YT videos to begin with, but the few I saved to try to find another example usually centre the content properly.

[Alanon202]

@NateEaton The missing text rears it’s ugly head once again!

This is the link, I’m able to consistently get it to break at these settings: Wide body, Literata font, 105% font size, 90% spacing; With these settings turning the hyphenation on or off makes the text disappear completely.

Even with hyphenation off, I can still make the text disappear by quickly switching through font sizes, only it seems to become visible when I begin scrolling. With hyphenation on it always disappears no matter what.

I’d guess that this is an extension of the root issue with general text reflowing, rather than a new occurence.

[NateEaton]

@NateEaton Ok so I still seem to be able to reproduce it using Literata specifically, albeit in a different way than before I think? It’s still the same article, the settings are all the same, only this time there is a bunch of text and it only seems to break halfway down the article:

Give snapshot build #84 a try. Hopefully that works, but if not I may be going back to the drawing board since I haven't been able to reproduce the problem on the latest builds.

[Alanon202]

@NateEaton This behaves identically, it breaks the text under the same conditions and on the same spot.

The issue also seems to be more pervasive than I initially thought. I was able to reproduce it on System default 110% 90%, Noto Serif 105% 90%, Source Serif 105% 90%...

The only thing I've noticed is that it often triggers on a single step in the opposite direction. So I first move a few steps up from 100%, say to 115%, then drop back to 100%, and the next single step to 105% triggers it.

Hope this helps.

[NateEaton]

@Alanon202,

Although I hadn't been able to reproduce the issue on this build, after your note I tried combinations with other fonts and was able to reproduce it again. I have continued researching possible fixes and have a new build for you to test again. In addition to applying a new fix, this build has logging related to the content composition and display so if you can reproduce the issue, please download the log and share here.

Snapshot build #91

Fingers crossed.

Regards,
Nate

[Alanon202]

@NateEaton Looks like that did it!

I'm usually able to get the bug to reproduce in seconds, now I haven't been able to. I went through all fonts and various sizes on the most offending article, and some random ones too.

[NateEaton]

Finally! Glad we got this one out of the way.