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Interesting idea, Stefan. Kind of like the gallery feature in Blogger... I use that a lot. http://wind-n-sky.blogspot.com/2025/04/2024-total-solar-eclipse-anniversary.html I'll research alternatives. Could you share a couple of links, both ones with just articles and ones with articles that are hyperlinks? BTW, I started pushing signed APK releases last week, starting with 0.9.0, lots of new features. Pushed 0.10.0 today with user guide. I appreciate any feedback, particularly on things like the typography controls, labels with auto-complete, filter with full text search, tablet layout, right-click on card to share and more. I appreciate any feedback you have. |
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Hi @NateEaton! Glad to see this app progressing so quickly. I think it’s very close to becoming one of the best apps in its category. Here’s another of my too-long-posts. It’s been a while since I last did mobile app design/useability testing Sure, here’s a link, and another one. Here’s an example that doesn’t have this issue. From what I’ve seen the most frequent offender is Substack, there are others probably. This is also an issue with Readeck itself, that’s how I understood the problem in the first place. Basically some Substacks seem to hyperlink their images to direct Substack CDN links, and clicking an image amounts to clicking an external link, so a browser is opened with the full image loaded. Which is OK, except Readeck explicitly archives all images so it’s not really useful to not rely on them. The Readeck web app adds a button in the corner that actually opens the Readeck version of the image in the app. By default in Readeck an image is not clickable, you explicitly have to click the button in the corner to open the gallery view. The Substack anomaly is annoying because even an accidental press of the image will open the link in a browser. It would be best to strip this at article import, but, since I’m not sure how anyone could isolate specifically hyprlinked images and block that affiliation, I suppose a button overlay would be best. This issue is actually worse on mobile since the images are easier to misclick. I’ve been following the official releases since 0.9.0 or 0.9.1 and I’ve set up auto updates through Obtainium, I’m always looking out for any new features. Regarding comments, the stuff I wrote in #59 (comment) is still mostly valid, so I’ll just add some fresh observations here.
Now, about the labels. This is actually quite complex and I’m not sure what the optimal solution would be. Currently there’s a lot of shifting and jumping around the screen, which is not good as it’s a bit chaotic and disorienting. As I’m searching for a label the vertical height shifts around because the vertical selector goes from 4-5 places to about 2 as I get more and more specific with typing. The issue is if I type quickly, so the screen changes positions. While all this is happening it’s not really clear that the screen is scrollable and that most of the buttons are now concealed under the keyboard. Then, as soon as I add one label, the keyboard goes away, shifting again radically. The issue could be even worse or better depending on screen size/dpi. Maybe alter the flow a bit like this - as soon as you touch/press the label field, make the whole Save window go fullscreen, and make sure the Archive/View/Add buttons stay above the keyboard level at all times. Whether you scroll up and obscure the URL/Text fields or hide them alltogether is 50/50 for me. But the point is to keep this GUI anchored in place regardless of the number of label suggestions. The scroll positioning should be such that the label suggestions box should be completely visible at it max 5 suggestions at all times, and when it shrinks as you fix in on the label, the fullscreen window won’t move and the keyboard won’t budge until something else is pressed. IMHO this is OK since the labels are typically the last thing you add before clicking on one of the buttons that terminate the share window. An alternative way of doing this would be to mess with the label suggestions list itself. For example, make the list appear above the labels title, temporarily obscuring stuff like title and URL. This might prevent the need for scrolling the window up and down, but it’s really unintuitive. Or, perhaps the best way, keep the label suggestion list under the label field as expected, but make the list horizontal, sort of like the font selector currently is? Again, less intuitive and fewer label suggestions will fit in total, but it’s a more elegant solution overall. After all if the sharer window is fixed in position, I can side-scroll to find the one label I want easily. Another thing to add to this, I wouldn’t mind configuring the options for what the sharer will offer? I know I’ll probably never use the title option, and it takes a lot of space, etc. Some would probably prefer to remove some of the buttons etc. Since you asked about typography controls, I’ll answer since it’s a pet peeve of mine, and IMHO reader apps like this live and die by the reading experience. I’ll describe my ideal sort of setup, feel free to take all or nothing from it into consideration. Generally, I would welcome more granular settings for everything. For example, more granular spacing and margin options, sort of like Pocket had back in the day. IMHO, margins at 0 should be the absolute extreme, 0 = no margin, meaning letters going right up against the screen edge, and go up from there per user preferences in fine increments. The same for line spacing. With granular increments of like 10-15 steps, this should be enough to accommodate anyone’s tastes. For instance, line spacing 0.7-2.0 and margins from 0 to 13pt, etc. It would also make sense to allow setting font size in pt rather than percentages, and also expose the full gamut of sizes from very low to very large (again, screen/dpi sizes etc. I think more options and flexibility is best here). I would also like the ability to sideload fonts, like from a user directory named MyDeck or something, or better yet, the ability to just point MyDeck to a directory where I store fonts for use with other reading apps. The granular margin/spacing settings above have the benefit that sideloaded fonts make sense to use. In my experience, not all fonts respond well to the standard line-spacing settings some require much higher settings to look average, while others need to be placed at 0.8 to look standard. That’s what my ideal feature set would look like, combined with the details about styling/colours from the previous comment. I know some people would like TTS abilities, or some auto-scroll text feature, which to me aren’t that interesting. |
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Stefan, When you have time, would you please give build #520 a try? It has a light box feature for images in the reading view. If you click on a single image then it opens that image in the light box with thumbnails across the bottom. If there are more images one. You can swipe left or right on the image to get to a different image. Or you can scroll back and forth and pick a specific thumbnail. That Saudi Arabia article you sent a link to is a good one as it has a large number of images. The light box is intended to handle three different scenarios:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Thomas_More_(play) When you are viewing an image in the light box, tapping on the image makes other elements on screen such as the icon at top left, external link icon on top right if it exists, or the thumbnail bar at the bottom disappear. Tap on the image again for them to reappear. In terms of image handling, this solution will fit a very large image onto the available screen space with the ability to pinch to zoom in or out. If the image is smaller than the screen, It will be displayed at its natural resolution rather than blowing it up so that it doesn't look low. Res. The user can still pinch to zoom in and get the same effect as if it was initially sized to fill the screen. Unfortunately, there are some cases where the extracted image saved by Readeck is pretty small. Save this blog post and you'll see what I mean with some of its images. http://wind-n-sky.blogspot.com/2025/03/shadow-patterns-journey-begins.html The light box works in both portrait and landscape on mobile. I haven't gotten on the computer to test it in the emulator for tablet layout yet. If you find examples in any of your bookmarks where this this breaks or doesn't work as expected, please send them to me and I'll see what I can do to address. Regards, Nate PS. I added the long press feature for links and images in the reading view to match what's in the list. View. I will come back later to work on the suggestions you had about how to improve that but at least the basic feature is available in both places now. |
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Hi Nate! Just tested build #526 which I guess has a few other goodies besides this one. In short, thus far I haven’t had any unexpected failures in the couple dozen or so articles I tried. I find all the controls and capabilities of the lightbox quite intuitive. As you warned, I also encountered a few cases where Readeck saved thumb images instead of the real thing, but it is what it is. Landscape seems to work equally well. With regards to longpress on links in reading mode, just a small note to keep in mind for when the rework starts. I noticed that the popup (Copy Link Address, etc.) is glued to the top left corner of the screen, whereas it would be better to have it appear adjacent to the link that was pressed. I also noticed the sidebar is now swipeable, nice! There is still one bit of confusion about the sidebar, it doesn’t seem to react to the back button/gesture. Even while the sidebar is open, doing a back gesture will switch from article to list in the background, with the sidebar obscuring the view. You can exit the app without ever closing the sidebar by pressing back. IMHO it would make sense that the appearance of the sidebar would override the usual back gesture/navigation flow, so that pressing back while the sidebar is open would first close the sidebar, only then activating the remainder of the flow. Apologies if you’re already aware of all of this and I’ve just installed an intermediary build. |
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Reworked the long-press context menus in both the list and reading views so try out the latest build. Lots of other changes - I'll follow up soon with a summary. |
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It would be nice to have a button in the corner of in-text images that would activate a galley feature or a way to view the images full size. Perhaps it would also be beneficial to allow zooming in, etc. on the image that is open, and maybe even swiping left/right to move to the previous/next image from the text being read?
The reason why I think a button (like Readeck itself has) is the optimal solution is because some sites link to their images and in those cases clicking anywhere on the image itself activates that link and just opens the same image in a browser. Having a button overlaid on top of all that would ensure functionality in all cases.
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