Awful Android app - Still not the general app thread.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > Awful Android app - Still not the general app thread.

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

^ Agree, that would be great.

Also, it seems the link colour setting is ignored currently, which makes the link text rather difficult to read using a dark background.

Another thing I noticed is that posts with too large horizontal content cannot be scrolled sideways anymore. Granted, that won't happen all to often with text, but I can see this quickly becoming a problem when images are involved.

Though overall I'm really liking the update so far

# ¿ Sep 11, 2011 10:49

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# ¿ May 25, 2013 20:50

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

Rohaq posted:

Something I've just noticed: Awful doesn't seen to respect the autorotate setting on my Galaxy S2: I disable it in the toggle menu, and Awful still wants to reorient the screen.

Set: Awful App > Settings > Screen Orientation > Default

This way it will use the orientation reported by the OS. Setting it to "Sensor" (which I'm 99% sure is what you have) will use the sensor-based orientation regardless of the auto-rotation setting.

# ¿ Oct 5, 2011 14:33

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

Geekner posted:

The current position code doesn't account for rotation. Probably because it's a pain to guess where the resized text will end up.

Actually, if the JS functionality is anything close to that of a regular browser, it shouldn't be too difficult to accomplish this at least on a per-post granularity via scripting.

Assuming you have jQuery and the HTML is similar to that of the regular forums, once you detect a screen orientation change coming, go through all posts found via $("table.post") and find the one with the closest .offset() to that of the WebView's scroll position (in Firefox that'd be window.scrollY - I assume there's an equivalent for this). Then after the orientation change has completed, let the WebView scroll to that post again the same way you're currently focussing the last read post.

If there's no way to execute code directly before the orientation change, you would have to constantly calculate the currently viewed post instead - in that case I'd store all post offsets in an associative array in the .load() handler and then hook a .scroll() event with a clearTimeout + setTimeout delayed function (so you don't calculate the position constantly during scrolling, wasting battery) to find the post.

Not exactly top priority, but it would be a nice usability improvement nonetheless

# ¿ Oct 27, 2011 18:13

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

Can anyone else confirm Awful (still?) eats CPU like mad? I'm on a SGS2 running 2.1.4 and it uses like 50% CPU while viewing a thread. After a few minutes the top of my phone gets rather hot and battery life goes down the drain

I'm not sure, but I can't recall having this problem with earlier versions.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2011 00:00

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

Giblet posted:

I don't have this problem on my SGS2 but I use the built in task manager widget to keep an eye on and close apps fairly consistently.

Unfortunately it's not an other app consuming the battery; with a CPU usage monitoring tool (the task manager is unusable for this*) I can definitely identify Awful as being the culprit. There aren't even any other active apps running, and when idle my phone battery lasts about two days, which I've heard is rather good for a SGS2, so it isn't background apps either. Android version is 2.3.4, btw.

FYI this is what a few minutes browsing before going to bed and after waking up looks like:

* It only shows the current CPU usage, but Awful only eats CPU while it is in the foreground. The very act of opening the Task Manager, or hiding Awful to look at a widget or something, will "fix" the problem as Awful ceases any CPU activity immediately.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2011 09:24

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

No sorry, my screen being on doesn't make the CPU poo poo bricks. It does get noticeably hot after a bit of browsing with Awful (I'm talking minutes here, maybe half an hour), but I can browse all day using the normal internet browser and the phone doesn't get hot either. Sure the battery drains faster than idle, but not this much. Even playing some 2D games doesn't drain the battery this fast

Fake edit: Did some investigating, it seems like animated GIFs are likely the cause. They seem to push the usage to 50%, which means one core is fully pegged. Look at the three bars up in the notification bar on the left, this shows current CPU usage (of the last 6 seconds, to be exact):

Thread overview

Thread view (with animated avatars)

A different thread, GIFs (SWSP's avatar) stopped animating in here for some reason

CPU usage history

Real edit: Viewed a few threads with animated avatars using the internet browser and while the CPU definitely didn't stay at idle when viewing a post with a no-delay animated gif, it was more like 20-30%ish usage, not constant 50%. If this is not a bug per se or not something that can be fixed (black box WebView specific), maybe an option to hide avatars would be a good workaround? They seem to be the main source of animated gifs anyway, and the emoticons pretty much all have an animation delay built in, whereas some avatars seem to be of the "render as fast as you can" kind, which is likely a killer I imagine.

SirViver fucked around with this message at Dec 17, 2011 around 15:53

# ¿ Dec 17, 2011 15:44

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

Regarding the CPU usage, my phone is non-rooted and updated to the latest firmware version released by Samsung / the service provider.
Model number : GT-I9100 Android version : 2.3.4 Baseband version: I9100XXKI1 Kernel version : 2.6.35.7-I9100XWKI4-CL575468 root@DELL143 #2 Build number : GINGERBREAD.XWKI4

# ¿ Dec 19, 2011 12:27

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

rolleyes posted:

The device SirViver posted is the Galaxy S2, which I also have (and Awful runs fine on) but mine has a different baseband and Android version (2.3.3) so I'm guessing either his is a US model (I'm in the UK) or I've missed an update somewhere.

Nah, it's an European one. According to this rather garishly formatted site, 2.3.5 should be available for me (and also UK, btw), though Kies being the piece of poo poo software it is tells me 2.3.4 is the latest firmware.

Thanks whoever mentioned turning off avatars via the User CP, in combination with disabling emoticons I can finally use Awful again without it eating my battery. Sure as hell won't open the PYF GIFs thread, though

# ¿ Dec 19, 2011 20:49

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

Gotta say, I really like where Awful is going lately

. The WebView gif bug is a bummer, but now that avatars get disabled with the "Don't load images" option as well any CPU issues have vanished (and I can finally turn them back on for regular forum viewing).

If there's one more thing I'd like to see - which I've noticed especially with avatars turned off - it's better use of screen real estate in landscape mode. The post titles take up way too much space, mostly due to the huge (and IMO rather unintuitive looking) context menu icon. Replacing it with a smaller and simpler one would be great, as well as an option to auto-hide the notification bar in landscape mode. Portrait mode is OK, but I find reading much more comfortable in landscape.

Some quickly thrown together mockups:

Original

Better

Minimal (Button too small? Personally I wouldn't mind though...)

I think having an image that overall more resembles a classical dropdown/combobox button would make it much more obvious that it opens a post related context menu. The current one still trips me up, not in the sense that I forget what it does, but to me it just looks much more like something that means "scroll to next post" or "scroll to bottom of the page".

# ¿ Jan 20, 2012 19:28

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

Is there a trick to get the jump to last read post to work again? On my SGS2 it always puts me either at the top or bottom of a thread since the 2.x (?) release.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2012 07:22

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

rolleyes posted:

...

Thanks, but unfortunately I already have that option turned on. I've also tried clearing data and toggling the option off/on, to no avail.

Some other observations I've made in the meanwhile are that jumping to the last read post works directly after using the "mark last read" function (though that might use different code to jump there, not sure if that indicates that the algorithm itself works?), and that it actually doesn't necessarily jump to the bottom of the page - instead it seems it tries to jump to the last read post but it jumps "too far", depending on where the first unread post is located. If it's located near the top of the page, it barely overshoots the post (it's even still visible on the screen), but if the unread post is somewhere near the middle or the end, the amount it overshoots increases, up to the point were I'm just sent to the bottom of the page every time. Font size and image loading options do not seem to affect this, just to rule out those as the source.

Party Boat posted:

I'm having an issue where I can't scroll sideways to see wide posts. Large images get automatically resized and can be opened in an internet tab which is fine, but if anything else breaks the tables (eg code) I've got no way of seeing it.

2.2.2 on a Samsung Galaxy S2.

That's been the case since the switch to the WebView, and as far as I understand the problem is that the "overflow-x: auto/scroll" CSS style is not correctly supported in the Gingerbread and earlier (?) browser render engine, so a fix for that might not be possible.

SirViver fucked around with this message at Mar 7, 2012 around 13:00

# ¿ Mar 7, 2012 12:56

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

I think I found the problem, or at least a hint, regarding the jump-to-last-post issue. It seems that for a very short time after loading the thread, the WebView (or HTML content) is not filling 100% of the screen width. If the positioning happens during that time, it will scroll too far, due to the narrower width resulting in "longer" posts. This would also be consistent with the "the farther down the more it's off" behaviour.

I even managed to get a screenshot - I can upload it later if you need it. Not sure if I mentioned it, but I'm running a rooted SGS2 with Android 2.3.4, if that helps.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2012 23:36

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

Geekner posted:

Do you have image loading off? I could see this happening, the jump happens both before and after images load, but if images are disabled both jumps might happen before the page is fully rendered. Not sure how to fix it though, we're already using the window.onLoad callback, which I think is the last one in the loading chain for javascript.

Yes, it's turned off, but I've tried already and unfortunately turning it on doesn't solve the problem. Neither do smilies or avatars.

Here's the screenshot I talked about ealier, by the way (nevermind the darkness, I forgot I had the screen filter active):

It will display like this for a split second only, usually a few milliseconds at best. Happens both in landscape and portrait mode, though I only managed to get lucky with capturing it on the former. The width of the content/WebView(?) in this case is 533px, btw, which is exactly 2/3rds of the screen width - a rather suspicious value, I think.

E: Managed to also snag one from portrait mode. Again, the content only takes on 66% of the screen width for a fraction of a second:

E2: Oh and yes, having image loading turned on when there's actually a non-cached image on page seems to delay the scrollPost() function enough for it to jump to the correct place. Maybe a window.setTimeout with 500ms delay would be a workaround? Or attaching an event to $(window).resize that does the same but de-attaches itself after the first successful call / after 500ms have passed (whatever happens first), so that changing from portrait to landscape and vice versa doesn't reset the scroll position constantly. Seems rather hacky though, I have to admit.

E3: By the way, isn't this missing a few commas? Not sure if the parser cares, though vv

_{AwfulThread.java > getHtml()}
<meta name='viewport' content='width=device-width, height=device-height, target-densitydpi=device-dpi, initial-scale=1.0 maximum-scale=1.0 minimum-scale=1.0' />

SirViver fucked around with this message at Mar 13, 2012 around 20:07

# ¿ Mar 13, 2012 19:14

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

spanky the dolphin posted:

I can't seem to be able to get the icons to display as their dark versions. Also I don't know if you added any changes in the code to mod the bottom menu, but I'm still getting white icons on white background for those ones. Also, I posted a more recent icon pack a few pages back. Love the roboto italic /bold support!

Not 100% sure it works like this, but I think you first have to pick one of the premade themes to basically select which icon set to use (light or dark), then switch back to custom to set you colors to whatever - the icon selection should stick, I think. At least it did for me, or maybe it was all just coincidence, I dunno v

# ¿ Apr 25, 2012 14:04

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

Soviet Canuckistan posted:

Here's a bug report for you, though. On my Atrix running Cm7, the app will jump several posts past the last read one. What seems to be happening is that it will briefly load the page at 2/3 width, set the offset, then load the correct width with a now-incorrect offset.

Yep, the exact same thing is still happening for me as well (SGS2 @ 2.3.4) - I think it's already on the bug list, though.

Looking at the code I didn't see anything obviously wrong. It almost seems like a bug in the webview where it reports the wrong width (exactly 2/3rds of the real screen width) to its HTML layout engine initially, causing the jump-to-last-read to overshoot its target. I think just executing the jump again delayed by 250-500ms should do the trick, though, as I've never seen the 2/3 width up for more than a blink. (Here's my previous post on this, btw.)

# ¿ Apr 26, 2012 08:32

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

Thread/WebView background now back to white while loading (0.5 - 1 sec) after I installed Awful Betamax. Worked fine on Geekner's beta previously. Runing rooted 2.3.4 on a SGS2.

E: Also, switching themes overrides some settings of your Custom theme.
E2: Force-closing the app and relaunching seems to have fixed the white flash issue

E3: Yeah, it seems like the background color used while loading is only read on application start, but not updated when you change the theme / background color yourself.

SirViver fucked around with this message at May 10, 2012 around 21:37

# ¿ May 10, 2012 21:21

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

Noticed one minor thing: the last updated time doesn't put a zero before single-digit minutes (and hours, but that's a style choice).

E: A Read Post Font Color setting would be awsome as well. On a dark theme I'd rather make the post text "fade out" than making the background lighter.

Also, when editing a post instead of composing a new reply, please make the confirm message reflect that.

SirViver fucked around with this message at May 10, 2012 around 22:13

# ¿ May 10, 2012 22:04

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

Geekner posted:

I disabled that grab part of the slider, it is a lot less annoying now. I also slightly prioritized the y axis. I'll have an update with that and some theme options that were missing.

Also added the previously-read-post font color setting, although it defaults to the same as the regular font.

You're awesome, just sayin'

# ¿ May 13, 2012 21:41

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

Zedicus Mann posted:

Mine just said 8:5 instead of 8:50

You sure it was 8:50 and not 8:05? Also have you installed the latest update, released not too long ago? The time displays properly for me.

On a different note, but regarding the same subject - I feel kinda silly asking this, considering how minor it is - is there a way to read the "Use 24-hour format" system setting and format the time display according to that? Or infer it from the post timestamp, which (at least for me?) is also in 24-hour format. It's really just a polish thing, but I think it'd be nicer for the formatting to be consistent.

Really digging the previously-read font color setting. Looks so much nicer on a dark theme

# ¿ May 14, 2012 14:11

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

It seems like the white icon theme isn't applied everywhere now (or maybe there never were white variants for those?) - for example the menu buttons and refresh button are now very faint on a dark theme. The black icons appear to be larger than the white ones for some reason as well.

I also kinda miss the action bar separator line

# ¿ May 24, 2012 06:29

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

Have you tried turning off all loading of images (avatars, emoticons, inline) yet? I admittedly haven't tried enabling images since well before Betamax, but any animated gifs were complete CPU hogs / battery killers for me back then.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2012 21:41

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

Since the latest update usernames and the button texts (last read, etc.) are huge on my SGS2.

Maybe the best solution would be to add a second font size option for those parts so everyone can set it up individually, instead of trying to get it right on a million devices and OS versions at once? v

# ¿ Jul 8, 2012 07:51

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

One thing I've been wondering, are the menu icons supposed to be this faint on a dark background?

Running on a SGS2 with stock 2.3.4.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2012 12:43

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

...! posted:

There is a kinda funny/kinda irritating bug I've been dealing with in this app.

This sounds like a bug in the SALR highlighting code and should be quite trivial to fix - fix in the sense that only "...!" gets highlighted, and not any word ending with "!". Though I guess the usefulness of that might still be somewhat questionable v

v

Actually let me have a look...

Javascript code:

// application/assets/salr.js

SALR.prototype.highlightOwnUsername = function() {
	...
	var re = new RegExp(this.preferences.username, 'g');
	...
}

Yep, found it. The username is used as regex but not escaped, resulting in the "..." of your username meaning "any three characters". With your name that's actually quite a benign result - I imagine usernames with parenthesis or asterisks could see much more bizarre outcomes.

@Geekner/Sereri: Something like this should do the trick:

Javascript code:

RegExp.escape = function(str) {
	return (str+'').replace(/([.?*+^$[\]\\(){}|-])/g, "\\$1");
};
...
var re = new RegExp(RegExp.escape(this.preferences.username), 'g');

# ¿ Sep 9, 2012 10:07

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

I'm not sure what the deal with Honeycomb/ICS is, but I'm still on Gingerbread (2.3.4) and animated gifs have killed my battery ever since they were first introduced with the webview switchover. IMO the most practical solution to this problem would be a "animate gifs? yes/no" option and be done with it. That way I could finally turn images/avatars back on without suffering a half hour battery life. (E: Unless there's simply no way to turn off gifs without breaking JS?

)

The current(?) behavior of tapping the screen to start the animation is not satisfactory, as it's very easy to accidentally turn them on without being able to stop them again, as far as I can tell.

On a sidenote, the gif implementation in the webview seems pretty poor besides being a performance killer; it appears to use a non-capped accumulator loop (to ensure constant animation speed at different render performances), which results in paused/halted gifs speeding up hilariously on resume to "catch up" with the frames they missed, instead of simply discarding them.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2012 15:29

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

Manky posted:

I was thinking about coming in here and requesting a page down feature. Since there's an option to have two next page buttons, I'd love seeing one of those have a page down function.

Even better, have the app intercept the volume +/- buttons to do the page up/down action. Then as a bonus for devices without volume buttons add an option to transform/add a page down button in the navbar.

I think Awful as it is now is almost perfect. The things missing that would make it flawless for me:

Fix the bug where Awful loses the last open page index when switching to another app. Seems like it reverts to the page initially opened from the forum view, respectively the one where you last manually set a post to last read. Using the app icon or task switcher to re-open Awful makes no difference in behavior. This is not so hard to deal with normally, but can be a real PITA if you're on a slow/unreliable connection.
Note: this mostly (only?) seems to happen when you follow a link to an external app and then don't return via the back key, but by using the task switcher/app icon instead.
Implement page up/down using the volume +/- buttons (hint).
That one sounds kinda tricky, but I'd really like to have a next page swipe action, in the style of pull-to-refresh. Just instead of pulling down you pull to the left, and upon release it loads the next page. Though, from what I've heard the current PTR implementation is already very much of a hack, so if the library doesn't have a horizontal PTR mode already implemented I guess this one would be too troublesome to add.
E: Alternatively a pull-up-to-load-next-page when you reach the bottom of the current page would work equally well.

SirViver fucked around with this message at Mar 9, 2013 around 17:49

# ¿ Mar 9, 2013 17:27

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

Just updated to the WIP build on a Galaxy S2 @ 2.3.4.

Gif animations still play, regardless of the setting. However, I think Samsung has implemented some strange thing in the webview, since gifs only start playing after tapping the screen once (also was like this before the WIP build).
The PTN bounce still uses inverted velocity; hitting it with full speed doesn't show it at all, but if you make the scroll barely reach the PTN area it will jump out at you.
~~The resistance is good in portrait mode~~, but in landscape it's now impossible to pull it far enough to actually trigger. E: Actually, the resistance in portrait mode is too high as well, requiring you to swipe almost the whole screen height, which is impractical when holding the phone in one hand.
Please fix this, it's like the main reason to use PTN in the first place

Anyway, big thanks for implementing PTN - back when I suggested it, I didn't even realise the iOS app had this

SirViver fucked around with this message at Apr 14, 2013 around 11:52

# ¿ Apr 14, 2013 10:09

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

Salvador Dalvik posted:

Awful Betamax 2.4.1rc

Works very well for me - thanks for the quick fix! The bounce is still weird, but otherwise not an issue.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2013 21:00

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

Just got logged out of Awful Betamax for some reason (cookie expired? dunno) and was unable to log back in again. It appears the app cannot handle special password chars properly (��,.-, etc.), as I can log in fine if I change the password to something more plain. If I then change it back to the original, more complex password, I get kicked out of Awful (as expected) and am again unable to login.

Phone is a SGS2 @ 2.3.4

# ¿ May 2, 2013 08:35

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# ¿ May 25, 2013 20:50

SirViver: Oct 22, 2008

Salvador Dalvik posted:

Ok, I've resolved the loading hang and the password charset issue, please try this build and let me know if your password works now. I've also switched to SSL login now that the forums offer it.

Betamax 2.4.2-rc1

Please test! I'd like to push this out to take care of the remaining issues in the current market version. I won't have time to do anything major for at least another few weeks.

Nope, unfortunately no change for me. Login with the "plain" password works, but as soon as I attach for example an "�" at the end of it the login still fails.

# ¿ May 3, 2013 10:49

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > Awful Android app - Still not the general app thread.