Why????? You ruined a perfectly good experience. Now I can’t listen to the entire episode at once in my car. Downloading is a pain now. There’s no introduction anymore which helped to understand what was coming. The previous app was simple, and it was my favorite way to learn Spanish. I’ll probably cancel if this doesn’t improve. :(
Horrible. Was perfect before. Easy functional. This is one of the most useless “ improvements “ ever. Change for the sake of change. Might b my last month. Too bad was enjoyable
I love that you can now grab clips that interest you and set up a playlist to practice with a bunch at a time. The old format had so many boring segments interspersed with interesting ones. Now pick and choose and make a playlist. Downside: downloading playlists for offline usage is tedious/not possible. One playlist I made will only partially download. The other keeps saying “error, try later,” and never downloads. Not good.
Developer Response
We have been improving playlist and download functionality in recent updates. Please try downloading your playlists when you have a reliable wifi connection. Overall, the direction of the app seems good. The original one was a bit outdated. Functionally, the new one needs some adjustments like landscape mode, more familiar organizing, and some general UI tweaks. At the moment, without landscape, it’s pretty much unusable on my iPad. Looks good on the iPhone though.
The content is great. 5 stars there. But maybe consider adding an option to just play one episode all together. A big use case I would think is hopping in the car and just letting it play. Can’t do that with this app because it’s so broken up in pieces. So maybe also have a place where the all the pieces of July 7th for example are together in a ~25 minute episode.
Developer Response
We have addressed this feature in recent updates. You can now listen to full episodes just like on our website.This is a large improvement over the old app. It brings it more inline with their website. I specifically like how the articles are grouped. This makes it easy to find articles you are interested in reading. The advanced section of opinion articles is amazing! Perfect for pushing one’s abilities. I am using the Italian version.
Whoever thought it was a good idea to release this app only in portrait mode on the iPad should lose their job. Punto!
What used to be a terrrific app is rendered unsuable if iPad is in landscape mode, this is a significant problem for people using the large iPad pro. This makes me very sad, because I will now have to use the web site. It also makes me angry because this is clearly the result of thoughtless development and careless release. Common guys get it together!
Developer Response
We have improved several features in recent updates. landscape mode now works on the iPad and other devices.Although the new app has the slight advantage of allowing random access to the articles so that you can go directly to a topic of interest, it has several drawbacks. On the IPad it will only display in portrait mode. My IPad Pro will only stand on its keyboard/cover in landscape mode so that makes it harder to use. I also miss the intro and the current organization is not chronological.
Also, there is no vocabulary page or list idioms.
These problem could be easily fixed (since the content exists and almost all IPad apps switch modes).
Two things I would like to see added are the ability to create a list of words and definitions to study later, and the ability to look up any word in a French-English dictionary. The highlighted phrases and translations are helpful, especially for idioms, but I often come across other words/phrases I need translated. When reading French text on my Kindle I can highlight any group of words and get a translation to English. That would be very helpful here.
As a developer myself, I don’t think it would be hard to make these improvements and then this App would be better than the older version.
Developer Response
We have addressed several of these issues in recent updates. Landscape mode now works on iPad and other devices. Also you can now listen to full episodes, organized by date, just as on our website.
We are currently working to implement our Grammar and Expressions sections in a future release. As for a French-English dictionary feature, we will take that into consideration.Agree with others, not organized by date. A very juvenile error. Why do this? They actually made the app worse.
The new app is a step down in at least two respects: 1) articles are not grouped primary by date, but by category. So the most recent political article, for example, will flow to political articles from earlier dates, which the user has already seen, and not to current releases in other categories; 2) The iPad version does not switch to landscape view when the iPad is rotated—a very basic feature for any iPad app.
The old app was very basic, but it worked fine. This new app was apparently designed by a non user.
Developer Response
We have corrected these features in recent updates. Landscape mode now works on iPad and other devices. You can also listen to full episode which are organized by date, just like on our website.
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Why why why why ????
