A Few Gripes About the L10 Mobile Update
Ok, I love the panel update for the iPad, but.. the L10 update for the iPhone has been a big step backwards in my opinion. Here’s my gripes:
The tapping of the screen beginning a highlight is absolutely terrible for me because I’m not a big highlighter, and I much more often want to have the menu appear when I tap the screen. As it is now, if I want the menu to appear, the only thing I can do is tap the far upper corner of the screen - which is quite a reach with the new iPhones - it’s a two handed procedure. I constantly ’accidentally’ tap the screen thinking the menu will appear - only to have the screen shift in to a highlighting option. It’s honestly pretty frustrating.
My other gripe is that the top menu never goes away for complete distraction free reading. The old app used to have the menu fade away entirely, but now I’m stuck with the title of the book at the very top of the screen. The other issue I have with it is that when I use the iPhones native text to speech, it now reads this title every page turn. The old app would run perfectly with the iPhones native text to speech, but now you are interrupted with the book’s title every page (or really paragraph because the phone screen holds only so much text). I noticed a few days ago the title screen would disappear when the top of the phone was tapped! - which solved the whole problem! But now it’s back to the way it was.
Ok gripes over… but honestly, does anyone else have issues with these new ‘improvements’?…
Comments
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Liam said:
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Ok gripes over… but honestly, does anyone else have issues with these new ‘improvements’?…
Not me! I deleted all my Faithlife mobile apps (except one on my Mac M1 ... captures Safari Logos refs). For the reasons you discuss.
Life has improved immeasurably. If Pharoah remains working at FL Mobile High, life may well be FL mobile-free.
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Oh the problems and troubles we have in the first world.
It does. It bother me having the book title at the top of the screen. This is not distracting to my reading.
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Kenneth Neighoff said:
Oh the problems and troubles we have in the first world.
A hammer that can't grab a nail, is still a hammer that can't grab a nail. No matter which world. Smiling.
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I, too, dislike the title in the top bar because of text to voice reading it every screen change. This is on an iPad and not an iPhone, though.
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Liam said:
Ok, I love the panel update for the iPad, but.. the L10 update for the iPhone has been a big step backwards in my opinion. Here’s my gripes:
The tapping of the screen beginning a highlight is absolutely terrible for me because I’m not a big highlighter, and I much more often want to have the menu appear when I tap the screen. As it is now, if I want the menu to appear, the only thing I can do is tap the far upper corner of the screen - which is quite a reach with the new iPhones - it’s a two handed procedure. I constantly ’accidentally’ tap the screen thinking the menu will appear - only to have the screen shift in to a highlighting option. It’s honestly pretty frustrating.
My other gripe is that the top menu never goes away for complete distraction free reading. The old app used to have the menu fade away entirely, but now I’m stuck with the title of the book at the very top of the screen. The other issue I have with it is that when I use the iPhones native text to speech, it now reads this title every page turn. The old app would run perfectly with the iPhones native text to speech, but now you are interrupted with the book’s title every page (or really paragraph because the phone screen holds only so much text). I noticed a few days ago the title screen would disappear when the top of the phone was tapped! - which solved the whole problem! But now it’s back to the way it was.
Ok gripes over… but honestly, does anyone else have issues with these new ‘improvements’?…
I assume you are working on that "other OS" called "IOS"... which is "Non OS" lol..... As for me.... I absolutely love the Mobile 10 App on Android.... I will agree there are some things that could be improved.... but the Logos Mobile App is one of the things that sold me on Logos. On the "Good OS" (lol) ... I think it works great with a few minor things that I believe will be improved....
I have written programs in the past... and have come to the opinion... that nothing man does is "perfect"....But with the "Oklahoma Gaurantee" (if it's wrong we'll do it again) .... I think programs eventually work. So don't give up on Mobile 10 yet....
xn = Christan man=man -- Acts 11:26 "....and the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch".
Barney Fife is my hero! He only uses an abacus with 14 rows!
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Liam said:
As it is now, if I want the menu to appear, the only thing I can do is tap the far upper corner of the screen - which is quite a reach with the new iPhones - it’s a two handed procedure.
You can also swipe down anywhere on the screen to get the menu to appear. I can do this one-handed on my iPhone 13 Pro Max.
I hated the new tap-to-highlight until I figured out the swiping down trick.
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I have flagged this issue here:
You can vote on it if you like. Spread the word!
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Levi Durfey said:Liam said:
As it is now, if I want the menu to appear, the only thing I can do is tap the far upper corner of the screen - which is quite a reach with the new iPhones - it’s a two handed procedure.
You can also swipe down anywhere on the screen to get the menu to appear. I can do this one-handed on my iPhone 13 Pro Max.
I hated the new tap-to-highlight until I figured out the swiping down trick.
Yep. Same.
And, I think the mobile app has come a long, long way. I love it and use it all the time. I whined about it a few years ag, but no longer. Today, it is awesome.
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Swiping down doesn’t work for me unfortunately. Just makes the page scroll.
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tjebme said:
Swiping down doesn’t work for me unfortunately. Just makes the page scroll.
Under View Settings for the resource do you have Scrolling mode enabled.
That would cause a down swipe to scroll but, at least on my iPad, it also brings up the bottom toolbar.
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Graham Criddle said:
at least on my iPad, it also brings up the bottom toolbar.
Well, ignore this comment, since non-standard usage.
But on my Mac (my current test-bad for the mobile), scrolling does scrolling. And clicking around brings up the highlighter menu. Even clicking far in the margins, brings up the highlighter menu. It's a UI disaster.
Luckily, Verbum is running great now. The disaster-ball is in the FL mobile-team's court at the moment.
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I agree about the need to remove the book title from the top of the page.
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Back when we read dead tree books the book’s title was usually at the top of every page. Did you complain about that, too?
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I disagree. Make it optional. Some of us want it there.
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Ron Baughman said:
I disagree. Make it optional. Some of us want it there.
I disagree also. Make it optional! Please!
xn = Christan man=man -- Acts 11:26 "....and the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch".
Barney Fife is my hero! He only uses an abacus with 14 rows!
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Ron Baughman said:
Back when we read dead tree books the book’s title was usually at the top of every page. Did you complain about that, too?
Apples & oranges my friend. No need to start throwing stones.
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Levi Durfey said:
You can also swipe down anywhere on the screen to get the menu to appear. I can do this one-handed on my iPhone 13 Pro Max.
Hmm. I guess this will solve the issue if you read with the paginated setting. Just surprised such an essential function is limited to only the paginated setting and will not work with the way most people use the app - the infinite scroll setting.
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Agree Liam
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On Android here:
I love having the title at the top -- a big improvement for me. Why? Because when swiping through 20 linked Bibles/Study Bibles/commentaries -- I now know, with minimal screen space taken, which Bible (or other resource) I just swiped to. Big win.
But a single tap bringing up the text selection menu has been hard for me (for context, I'm a scroller, not a pager). I see the benefits, but MOST of the time I just want to toggle the toolbars, not pull up the text selection menu. Tough one. I'm hoping I'll make more and more use of the text selection menu over time, and get good at taking the tiny to of the screen area to toggle the tool bars.
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Jonathan Sheehy said:
I just want to toggle the toolbars, not pull up the text selection menu
Hi Jonathan. You may already be aware, but in case you aren't, you can bring up the toolbars by doing one of the two:
- Single-tap on a word will select the entire verse or sentence
- Double-tap (or long-press, your choice!) on a word will select only that word
Take a look at this forum post for more guidance on the new text selection menu. I hope this is helpful. Thank you for your feedback!
Ali Pope | Logos Desktop and Mobile Program Manager
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Liam said:
The old app would run perfectly with the iPhone’s native text to speech, but now you are interrupted with the book’s title every page.
Found myself going to Kindle for books that I want to listen to with the siri voices…
I would much rather support Logos, but the text to speech reading the title bar is pretty disrupting to the listening experience. Wondering how involved this change would be for the developers. I notice that if I have footnotes showing, they still remain unread - which is great, but for some reason the title header still is read with each page turn. Wondering if a change can be made so that the header remains visable, yet is unread by the text to speech audio reader.
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Liam said:
The other issue I have with it is that when I use the iPhones native text to speech, it now reads this title every page turn.
Thank you for your feedback, Liam. It's helpful to hear the good and the bad from our users. For L10, we built the second most highly desired feature according to Faithlife Feedback votes: Add read aloud / text-to-speech to the mobile app. Included in bronze packages and above is mobile's Read Aloud feature, so you now don't have to do the workaround of using iOS's native text to speech. This is all under the assumption that when you say "iPhones native text to speech" you are referring to the VoiceOver in Accessibility. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
If we were to adjust the feature to where the title was not read, it would hinder those who can't read the screen and need the title read out loud.
Though we see the benefits of removing the minimized title bar completely, this has implications, as well. We may decide to implement this in the future and you can vote for it on Faithlife Feedback.
Again, thank you for taking the time to provide your thoughts. We take into consideration all of your suggestions!
Ali Pope | Logos Desktop and Mobile Program Manager
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Please don't remove it! Make it an option! Please!
xn = Christan man=man -- Acts 11:26 "....and the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch".
Barney Fife is my hero! He only uses an abacus with 14 rows!
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I'll add mine:
This probably isn't new to Mobile 10, but I haven't used an Android tablet larger than 7.8" for years. Now I have one. I deliberately did not change any layouts from my smaller screens because I wanted them to sync across all my Android devices. They don't sync, however. If I start using the layout and updating it on the larger device, it no longer syncs to the smaller devices.
On the positive side of things, pop-up word info dictionary stopped working late in the Logos 9 app, but it came back better than ever before in the 10 version.
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Ali Pope said:
This is all under the assumption that when you say "iPhones native text to speech" you are referring to the VoiceOver in Accessibility. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
If we were to adjust the feature to where the title was not read, it would hinder those who can't read the screen and need the title read out loud.
Yes Ali, I’m referring to the iPhone’s voiceover feature. The siri voices for the iOS are simply much much better than the ones that can be used with the new feature, and the update makes using the Siri voices more difficult in that it forces the title to be read each page turn- this is a function it did not have before the L10 update.
I can see how the title being read in the library book selection panel, or even maybe if it was read just once would be helpful for readers with accessibility needs. However I don‘t believe the title being read each page turn would be desirable even for those requiring the accessibility features. It seems to me that it would affect them the same way it would affect any listener to the audio, and likely also drive them to a service that reads a text without interrupting with the title every page turn. It seems strange to me that Logos would feel that accessibility readers would desire the title read to them every page turn (or really every paragraph on a small phone screen).
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Hi Liam,
In case you're not aware, please note that on iOS:
1) You can use the "Spoken Content" feature instead of "Voice Over" to have it read text to you. Spoken Content is very similar to Logos' new Read Aloud function, except that it doesn't pronounce Bible reference abbreviations properly.
2) Logos' Read Aloud feature does allow you to change to a different voice (by tapping on the Read Aloud popup at the bottom of the screen, and then tap on the Voice icon). It is a curated and much more limited list than Spoken Content or Voice Over's lists, and this shorter list does not include Siri voices, I think due to licensing or some other Apple limitations.
Hope this helps.
I'm personally so glad that "read aloud" is finally getting the attention it deserves from Faithlife. Hoping that the desktop Read Aloud feature will also get some love and get a long-overdue makeover and enhancement of functionality in the next release.
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