Dear LingQHQ
I know you guys have more important bussiness at the moment, so I don’t expect any kind of reply.
So I downloaded the update for the iOS app last night and just gave it a quick test. I really liked the old app and used it quite a bit, and even read two full books on it. However, the update with the ability to see new words marked in blue, and to be able to create LingQs was obviously necessary in the long term, so well done for this and thanks for the new app.
My first impression when I opened the app was that the new ability to see courses instead of just a list of recently opened lessons was excellent. The old system worked well, but was still quite awkward at times. The new system is a big advance. From what I can tell, I can even search the library from the app, which is brilliant. When I opened the first lesson, it looked excellent. The difference between the blue and yellow words is really clear and it looks very much like reading on the website. Creating LingQs using the user hints also seems to work really well. The feature where one can go through the text one sentence at a time seems a bit strange to me, but maybe when I get used to it, I will like it. Probably I will just ignore it.
Those are all the positive things I have to say about it. There is one massive negative that makes the new app basically unusable for me. Every time I press on a word, the dashboard comes from the right of the screen and covers a third, or a little more, of the text. It extends from the top to the bottom of the screen. Amazingly, it will even cover the word I am looking up if that word is on the right third of the screen. Maybe this is ok for really short beginners texts, but anything substantial, and it makes the text unreadable.
In general, I would say that the text is the sacred part of any reading interface and should never be covered. In the case of this app, this is of course not possible. Even the old app covered some of the text with the little box that came up when you looked up a word. However, here is the most important point, this box never covered any of the line that the word being looked up was on. One could quickly press a yellow word to see the hint, and continue scanning their eyes across the line while getting rid of the box by the time they get to the next line. Once one has gotten used to it, this does not really disturb the reading at all. In the new app, this is not possible. Looking up the word means stopping and waiting, and god forbid the word is on the right side of the screen and you can’t even see the word in context while looking up the definition.
Anyway, that’s my review. I look forward to what other people have to say.