ReadMore Makeover, Engine Tuneup, Speaks German!

ReadMore v1.5 is now in review in the App Store! This update has a lot more under-the-hood improvements, the first language translation, and a major design overhaul on the book summary page.

First, I’m pleased with the direction the engine under the hood is going. In order to tackle things like the iPad version I’ve had to do some rearranging of code that no-one sees.

Second, ReadMore is now in German! My thanks to http://www.literaturcafe.de for the excellent work.

Third, the book summary page has been drastically redesigned. You can check it out in the screenshots on http://readmoreapp.com. In order to support languages other than English, I had to abandon my nice “wordy” description of the statistics. I’m sure some will be disappointed with this, but it was necessary. Translating user interfaces is very difficult and the smaller the chunks of text, the better. I also think it’s much cleaner now and will be more flexible when I can finally tackle the iPad version properly.

In addition to the redesign, I did some experiments with my beta testers to make the stats more useful. The layout and grouping is clearer. I’ve tweaked the predicting algorithm a bit more so that it only takes into account your last two weeks of reading to predict an end date. If you haven’t read the book in a while, there’s no use trying to pretend that you’ll finish in 4,325 days reading 0.3 pages per day. :)

I hope you enjoy the new version. Implementing features is a delecate balancing act. There’s a lot more planned in the near future. Backup and restore, picking a date you hope to finish by, more colors, iPad…don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten!

Release Notes

• Revamped the book summary screen based on user feedback. Better focuses on your reading session pace and clearer predictions.
• Added the new “Options” tab where some future goodies will live.
• Made the progress “pie chart” on the reading stack a tad larger for better contrast.
• German!

Bug Fixes

• All dates and times should be localized according to your device settings. Let me know if otherwise.
• Fixed tapping on the status bar to scroll to top in the book summary view
• Fixed bug where the keyboard toolbar would stay visible if you transitioned away from the Book or Reading Session editor while the keyboard was visible.
• Fixed bug where deleting the next to last book in the reading stack with a large number of pages would not cue the stack to redraw with new heights.