Android App

[Palem]

I'm sorry, but your argument is just horrendously dumb. People are not chained to their desktops the way people are chained to their phones. Even in the most extreme cases of of someone being an absolute hermit with absolutely not leaving their houses, those people don't take their desktops into the bathroom with them to take a dump. If anyone is even remotely resembling that kind of lifestyle, they need to seek professional help because they've likely developed some sort of serious agoraphobia issue.

On the flip side, having your phone with you at all times is perfectly normal behaviour, given the convenience of phones these days and their general usefulness.

[khronosschoty]

I'm sorry, but your argument is just horrendously dumb. People are not chained to their desktops the way people are chained to their phones. Even in the most extreme cases of of someone being an absolute hermit with absolutely not leaving their houses, those people don't take their desktops into the bathroom with them to take a dump. If anyone is even remotely resembling that kind of lifestyle, they need to seek professional help because they've likely developed some sort of serious agoraphobia issue.

On the flip side, having your phone with you at all times is perfectly normal behaviour, given the convenience of phones these days and their general usefulness.

Your argument is stretched to its limit, just short of complete absurdity but yet there is a grain of truth to what you are saying. The amount of "advantage" your now talking about is so minute its pointless to bring up. The sane way to view this is how I already presented it.

[Palem]

If being automatically notified that something is happening to you is such a minute advantage (which it's clearly not), then it not being implemented shouldn't have any impact. So why push for it? You gain basically nothing, according to you.

[khronosschoty]

If being automatically notified that something is happening to you is such a minute advantage (which it's clearly not), then it not being implemented shouldn't have any impact. So why push for it? You gain basically nothing, according to you.

You can be automatically notified something happened on the desktop without a phone. We're not having a talk about the advantage of getting automatically notified vs not being automatically notified, we're talking about phone vs desktop or laptop etc.

Moreover, your hostility towards improvements that just make the game more enjoyable for some is harmful to the game.

[Korp]

You can be automatically notified something happened on the desktop without a phone. We're not having a talk about the advantage of getting automatically notified vs not being automatically notified, we're talking about phone vs desktop or laptop etc.

Moreover, your hostility towards improvements that just make the game more enjoyable for some is harmful to the game.

How is it harmful to the game? Besides, you dont even play the game do you?

Also why pester this thread with useless bickering. It takes away from the valuable effort of Josh.

Make a suggestion instead.

[khronosschoty]

How is it harmful to the game? Besides, you dont even play the game do you?

Also why pester this thread with useless bickering. It takes away from the valuable effort of Josh.

Make a suggestion instead.

Your one to talk? your posts consist of trolling only and therefore I refuse to actually answer your question.

Moreover, my current status as active or retired, is not relevant to this conversation.

[Korp]

Your one to talk? your posts consist of trolling only and therefore I refuse to actually answer your question.

Moreover, my current status as active or retired, is not relevant to this conversation.

Your are unable to answer my question cause you got no answer. Looking through your post history its the same story every time. You write something, usually the typical one-liners "I disagree" then when asked to elaborate you are unable. But its nice that you want to **** on someone that wants to do something good for the community with your useless ****. if you had any interest at all in Utopia you would created a seperate thread for this and lets josh do his thing. But all you wanna do is ***** and whine towards Palem. (After all you replied to a 2 week old post)

[khronosschoty]

Your are unable to answer my question cause you got no answer. Looking through your post history its the same story every time. You write something, usually the typical one-liners "I disagree" then when asked to elaborate you are unable. But its nice that you want to **** on someone that wants to do something good for the community with your useless ****. if you had any interest at all in Utopia you would created a seperate thread for this and lets josh do his thing. But all you wanna do is ***** and whine towards Palem. (After all you replied to a 2 week old post)

Actually no you are not correct. Hint the reason why being hostile towards improvements of the nature I mentioned is harmful, has to do with keeping and attracting players. I'm not going anymore into this with a troll, in fact I did not post this for you korp I posted it for others.

All of your accusations are incorrect -- I'm not making a suggestion thread because I'm not the one who suggested anything I just merely made a observation / correction.

Last Edit: I should of done this a long time ago, I'm just going to block you from now on Korp.

[Palem]

Well you don't need to make a suggestion thread, but let's take the discussion elsewhere if you want to keep discussing it. The less posts josh needs to wade through the better.

[joshmg]

v1.2.1 Released

New Features:
- Added additional news-events to the list of supported events within news-summary.

Bug Fixes:
- The app no longer crashes when sending chat messages if the chatroom credentials fail to load.
- Having zero soldiers no longer causes the population pie chart to appear broken.
- The Civilian-Population under Set-Draft is now displayed correctly.
- Stinger will now have its credentials remembered.

[Zeherah]

Hey Josh, first of all let me say your work is awesome. Just a few things I noticed that I hope are in the works for future updates:

Spy on sciences currently displaya nothing, I don't mind not viewing it on the app but it uploads a 0 science Intel to your Intel site (munk for me) and I feel that it should at least post correct science to Intel.

It isn't always clear how to release/build/raze. Maybe a small link to an image album to help new users or FAQ.

Also sometimes I can't send aid to certain provinces even though on desktop I can. I can see no reason for it I just get "invalid aid target".

Keep up the great work!

[Palem]

I gave the app a spin. A few thoughts:

There's something that's just...missing...from the throne page. I can't really explain it other than it feels like numbers inside of boxes. I realize that that's all utopia really is, but when I log in without the app, I get the sense that I'm managing a province. When I log with the app, I get the sense that I'm inputting data to a database. It's just very depersonalized. I can't find my province name, ruler name, race, or personality anywhere. This isn't a massive issue or anything, but it's something that kinda puts me off from wanting to use it.

The app can be a little confusing in places, at least when you first encounter something. For instance, I wanted to look for someone to steal gc from so my natural instinct said to go to thievery.....only there was no thievery. It didn't take too long to figure out that you can get to interactions via the kingdom pages, but it still through me for a loop. Another example is when I wanted to train military...only to realize there was no military page lol. I realize these processes are streamlined for mobile use so it's probably better laid out the way it is so there's probably not a "good" way of dealing with this, but I just thought I'd bring it up.


Other than those couple things, I think it's a fantastic app. Nice work :)

[joshmg]

Hey Josh, first of all let me say your work is awesome. Just a few things I noticed that I hope are in the works for future updates:

Spy on sciences currently displaya nothing, I don't mind not viewing it on the app but it uploads a 0 science Intel to your Intel site (munk for me) and I feel that it should at least post correct science to Intel.

It isn't always clear how to release/build/raze. Maybe a small link to an image album to help new users or FAQ.

Also sometimes I can't send aid to certain provinces even though on desktop I can. I can see no reason for it I just get "invalid aid target".

Keep up the great work!

Thanks, Zeherah. :)

Regarding the Spy-On-Science: it SHOULD be uploading the intel, and the fact that it's not is a bug; so thanks for letting me know--I'll look into that and try to fix it. And as far as displaying the science: that's just something I haven't been able to get around to yet. But squeaky wheels get the oil, right? I'll try to get to that soon now.

Regarding Aid: my monarch says the same thing--that it happens sometimes. Are you also a monarch by chance? I can't seem to figure out what's causing that to happen (particularly because I haven't encountered it yet). I don't doubt that it's happening, it's just hard to fix without being able to experiment and find out why. I'll keep an eye out for this, and hopefully I can fix it soon.

Regarding the release/build/raze: I've read Palem's post below yours, and I think they're both related to this topic. A lot of things aren't intuitive. I'm totally aware, and I'm not particularly happy about that fact. I'm planning on redesigning the UI in the near future, so hopefully this will improve. Getting so much functionality and so much data into small screens is definitely a challenge. But challenges are fun, right?

[joshmg]

I gave the app a spin. A few thoughts:

There's something that's just...missing...from the throne page. I can't really explain it other than it feels like numbers inside of boxes. I realize that that's all utopia really is, but when I log in without the app, I get the sense that I'm managing a province. When I log with the app, I get the sense that I'm inputting data to a database. It's just very depersonalized. I can't find my province name, ruler name, race, or personality anywhere. This isn't a massive issue or anything, but it's something that kinda puts me off from wanting to use it.

The app can be a little confusing in places, at least when you first encounter something. For instance, I wanted to look for someone to steal gc from so my natural instinct said to go to thievery.....only there was no thievery. It didn't take too long to figure out that you can get to interactions via the kingdom pages, but it still through me for a loop. Another example is when I wanted to train military...only to realize there was no military page lol. I realize these processes are streamlined for mobile use so it's probably better laid out the way it is so there's probably not a "good" way of dealing with this, but I just thought I'd bring it up.


Other than those couple things, I think it's a fantastic app. Nice work :)

Thanks for the feedback, Palem.

I wanted to respond to you and Zeherah individually, but I think a lot of what I'll say I already covered when I replied to him--so please check that post out too in case I forget something. But yeah, I agree: the layout is tremendously utilitarian. There's no pretty-factor, there's nothing exciting. The initial concept for this app was a stop-gap for when I was at work and couldn't log in quickly/easily. But, as all things, the app grew and is now used a lot more than I envisioned it to be--which is a great thing! But it also means that all the steps I deprioritized (i.e. an exciting and easy UI) should start making it higher in the priority queue.

So again, thanks for the feedback. I've got some more things (bugs, improving the news-summary, spy-on-science, etc) to take care of before I improve upon the UI, so don't expect it soon, but know that I will at least start working on it soon. When the UI improves I'll finally bump the version up to 2.x. haha.

[joshmg]

tl;dr: You guys crashed my server! That's cool (it was inevitable). I've increase the resource allocation for it, so it should be harder to do next time. If it happens again before I notice, send me an email and I'll fix it asap.

--
Not tl;dr:

I finally was able to sleep in! ...but then I woke up with an email from a kind gentleman in the UK that told me he was unable to get his app authenticated. So I tried. I also couldn't authenticate. Crap. That means the server exploded. Which, after a brisk walk to my desktop, I found that I couldn't ssh into my server (that resides in a datacenter across town). Fortunately, it's a VM, I ssh'd into its DOM0, attached to the utopia-app-server, saw a TON of out-of-memory errors, unattached, killed the server, quadrupled the ram, rebooted. Everything works again. Yay! Breakfast time.

I'm sorry for the outage. If it happens again before I notice, just send me an email. I'm happy that the app is becoming popular. :)

Josh