Yet Another Manual App

[makahn64]

For folks looking for a faster, simpler manual app for Android, we've just published a new one:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...nual2014&hl=en



It supports:

• Online/Offline Viewing
• Portrait and Landscape
• Bookmarking
• Search
• Latest Android design patterns

You can navigate by gestures: swipe left/right goes forward and back. And the table of contents is available on any section page by sliding your finger from the left edge of the screen (drawer style).

Good luck everyone!

[Sparkyshires]

Looks awesome! Did you do anything to decrease the loading time? That was by far the most annoying part of the other app.

[Micah Chetrit]

If I can suggest an addition, add a special page for all team updates, rather than revisions at the end of each section. And collapsible menus, rather than always having all rules expanded. otherwise it looks great! Running stable and fast, not to mention it looks clean!

[makahn64]

Thanks for the feedback, folks. To answer the questions:

1. Speed Up: Yes, we use custom networking libraries based on Loopj/AynchHttp and we use a slightly modified version of ActiveAndroid which is an object layer that sits on top of SQLite. I'm still not totally thrilled with the slight lag on the table of contents when the online version is checked for updates. If I get a little time, I'll look into this, but I think some of the ActiveAndroid code might be running on the UI thread when it is supposed to be backgrounded. Probably those cute Toast messages are the culprit...

I highly recommend anyone moving to Android from iOS have a look at both these libs. They are roughly analagous to AFNetworking and Core Data (though ActiveAndroid is way simpler than CoreData and super easy to use.)


2. Team Updates. The API for this changed and, alas, it is not open. So I have no way of getting the team update info from FIRST other than scraping the web page. Frankly, that is too much work. I'm considering doing a diff on each section when their timestamps change (i.e. it has been updated) and saving the diff off as an update that can be viewed in each section. Again, a fair bit of work.

3. Expand/Collapse. The other apps out there do this using jQuery (at least it looks that way in ETC app), and it would be nice to have here. It's a bit of work in native Android and, well, we have 2 major projects due for the SuperBowl (and some robotic thing to build ), so it may stay on the wish list.

Other stuff I have noodled on:
1. Notes per section. This is pretty easy to add. I'd also add sharing of notes via email, maybe FB, text.
2. Search improvements. Namely hinting and scrolling the hit text up into the mini webview that appears after a search. I should also intercept hits on the webview itself and not just the header, but I had to get back to my day job.