Fimfiction App Dev · 2:14am Oct 10th, 2015
So, as plenty of people probably know I was developing an app way back and just kinda....stopped working on it. Not sure why, but that was like 2 years ago now. for the last month or so I've been working on a brand new app from scratch because the old attempt was garbage.
Currently I already have a whole ton of features but there are a LOT more to go. It's a huge amount of work and I want to make sure I get it all working nice, which means a good feature set and good performance. Lots of complicated stuff to handle like updating your read stories when you read one offline and such....fun, but I consider offline functionality to be integral so it all needs doing.
I've created a video which shows off basically all the features I currently have. During the chapters demo you can see I click a speaker icon and some of the words get highlighted. This is the text to speech stuff but I forgot it doesn't work with this screen recorder so you can't really see it...
Anyway, currently there's a home screen which has 4 story lists. The reading list is what you're currently reading, a bit like what Netflix does. I think this is the most important thing to display up front, as apps get closed/opened a lot and this lets you jump instantly back to what you were reading. The featured/new/updated lists act like the site's front page. I have the feed working too, which looks pretty nice in my opinion, very similar to the site. It will have the same filtering functions too when it's done. The library page shows all your bookshelves and you can sort them by name, menu order or story count. Individual bookshelves show a list of the stories in them, with lots of filtering and ordering functions as well as text search. Currently this all works locally but I need a way to call out to the API to do it really....bit WIP there. Story pages themselves are also quite WIP. They show most of the important information, including the list of chapters and, handily, how far you are through reading them which I think is really nice. Currently there's no way to manage stories in your bookshelves or like/dislike them. Chapter pages are basically done. They paginate really well (can be a bit slow on older devices with massive chapters) and the text to speech I find to be really nice. Pretty much everything you see is cached which is why it loads instantly, it just updates in the background too.
Probably forgetting stuff but let me know what you think.
Neat. All materially, too.
I mostly use Fimfiction from my phone, but I never really thought it needed an app. Just about everything functions as well for my phone as it does for a computer.
This part is what's selling me on the app idea, however.
Finally. What devices will it be released on?
3456138 This is just Android. No plans for iOS. No way I can dedicate the time to it. about 2/3rds of our mobile users are Android anyway.
I sure hope one of its future features is one that takes all of the site rules, and puts them in one easy to find place, like the the drop down menu that the FAQ is in.
Now all we need is a way to comment efficiently.
3456143 Well, I have a Kindle, so... Is that a
?
I hope the ponimojis are in it.
3456143 damn im an apple user
What benefit is there to using an app for websites, other than allowing a company to mine your personal data more easily?
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Yesssssss I get so many weird issues trying to work with Fimfic on my tablet; can't wait to try the new app out when it's ready,
Best of luck to ya, knighty!
I saw italic text, does this mean that epubs will get working text formatting soon?
Would this allow user page management? Such as moving around fonts?
Can't wait!
I dunno how much I'd use the text to speech option though. I could try it out, but I expect that it would be really slow comparatively. I'd still like to hear it and see how it works.
I'd pay. ..
That's how much I love your work as a coder.
Respect.
For Android devices once available for download?
3456159 Kindle's aren't android device and aren't likely to be compatible with this app, I'm afraid.
I also have a kindle myself, but... It's 3 years old and laggy as hell
I have 3 questions:
1) Will there be a private messaging feature?
2) Will you be able to edit your page without everything glitching like it does for me?
3) How will commenting work on blogs and stories?
Thank you for making this app
This actually looks better than allot of mobile reading apps XD cva
Sounds very promising!
Looks good so far. Hopefully there will be more than two color schemes to choose from, though. Most of the ones on the site are silly, but I'd at least hope for high and low contrast light and dark themes, plus the sepia theme shown. Glad to see pagination is a thing, hopefully there'll be an option for paging left and right with the volume rocker, since that can be nice. The thing I'm most looking forward to is the currently-reading list. Is there any chance it'll sync between the device and desktop? At the moment I have a bookshelf I use to push things to my tablet, but having it just show up would be awesome.
3456304
Sadly, I can pretty much guarantee that this has nothing to do with epub, and—if anything—will actually reduce the need for a proper epub implementation.
Sounds exciting, thanks for the hard work Knighty, we appreciate it!
3456476 Well you can see those three icons on top. those are icons of Feed, notifications and PM. So it means all those will be present. I myself am happy about colour scheme for night reading, and that it will show you your open stories... I have something about 30 tabs on my mobile browser, each with different story. I hope we will be able to "lock" some stories to that list or something.
3456608 Oh, I didn't even look at the video!
3456500 volume rocker already works for paging. As for syncing, it's kind of tricky because I have no way of measuring the progress in the same way on a PC.
General thoughts:
* I find scrolling text to be a lot easier to read than paged text. I really hope there's an option to have one giant scrollable page of text. There's at least one fic that won't work with the paging format.
* I can easily see TTS becoming my favorite feature, letting me listen to fics while I'm driving.
* If you do decide to add a comment feature, I recommend doing it first in a limited trial period to see if comment quality plummets when a mobile device is involved.
* The option to disable images would be nice for when I want to check blog posts or comments incognito in a public place.
* That is one sexy app.
I like it, it looks very swooshy ^.^
I am actually super psyched for this.
Tengen Toppa Based Knighty.
I give this new app of yours ten squees out of ten squees. I'm a freshman college student attending his first semester and that means I'm on the go a LOT. So the only way I've been able to read much of anything outside of like one hour, one day weekend is through my phone. I've been using your mobile version of the site for a while now, and while it works fairly well, but apps can work so much better than mobile ver websites.
But I have one question on this; what devices do you support with this iteration of the app?
Looks great! Exactly the kind of high-quality work I associate with you.
I'm excited to use it! Mobile Fimfiction is good, but easy offline usage and a better reading experience will be awesome for sure.
3456143
I have an iPod touch, & I recently got an iPad mini too. I hoped there would be an iOS app, that I could use on my iPad.
Awww.
Is this still happening?
Wil this ever happen?
3456673
Hey Knighty have you abandoned the idea of an app again or are we still to be expecting one?
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