Before I start, my first point is not specific to Go Eye, but indeed to any IOS Go apps. The screen size of iPhone is just not big enoug for any Go apps when showing the full 19x19 board. To give you an idea, my index figure is about 6 cells wide. This will of course be a problem for fine operations on the Go board. If you are lucky enough to have an iPhone 6 or 6 plus the extra screen estate is clearly a big bonus.
Now my comments and suggestions:
* Settings > Show coordinates: this is something really useful when reading game commentaries. Given the small screen size, would it be better if coordinates are only shown at the right and bottom sides of the board for iPhone?
* Settings > Stone sound: I really want a faster way to turn on/off the sound as I often sneak into the kitchen of my work place to quickly go through a game. How about adding a 'speaker' icon somewhere around the Go board so that sounds can be switched on/off without leaving that view?
* The docking behaviour when viewing a game. See the two screen captures below:
* Related to the above, if users pull the board down, the Auto mode should respect that. Now in the Auto mode, the board will be moved upward after a while, which I think is strange.
* I can use the + and - button to navigate games without any problem (A tip to users: hold the + or - buttons for a few seconds the navigation will speed up). However, I always feel that the slider is lacking responsiveness. Don't understand why.
* I expect fewer people use Go Eye on iPhone as an SGF editor because of its screen size. I actually quite like Go Eye's handling of input - tap and hold for a while, you get a horizontal and a vertical line to guide you to place stones at the correct location. On iPad, user can go to Settings and select 'Single tap to add a stone' to place stones much faster (given that any misclick can be fixed quickly). For Go Eye developer, the same input mechanism should be available in scoring mode so that users can more easily mark dead stones. Lacking this, the scoring function is not very useful on iPhone now.
* Another point on scoring - it is really only useful for finished games. I know this isn't easy, but for ongoing games, there must be some other algorithms to give positional judgement, as implemented on almost all Chinese Go servers. Maybe this is something for the future.
* For new users, it is not obvious that Go Eye has an integrated web browser which can be used to access Go resources online, e.g. go to Sensei's library to view the Go problem collections there. Tip for users: everything you visit is kept locally on your device and you access games/go problems natively (not via a web interface!). To make this obvious, for new installation why not populate the home page with some popular Go website (Sensei, lifein19x19... plus Google)?
* In web mode, I often tap the 'back' button on the top left corner which takes me back to Go Eye's main menu screen, when my intention is actually going back to the previous web page. So maybe it is better to bring the navigation bar to the top?
* Having used Go Eye to visit some web pages, its home page will be populated by the thumbnails of those pages. Please provide a way to delete unwanted pages (maybe long tap to activate a delete icon, something like that). Keep the most frequently used sites at top positions.
* For the Go4Go integration, add a tip to highlight the importance of the search function (the magnifier icon at top right corner). The search function is actually very well implemented with auto completion and kept history.
* Live broadcast mode: this can be more useful for many if player names are translated to English. For those sina.com.cn games, translation can be done easily by query the Go4Go database - I can supply another web service if needed.
* For image recognition, while it works well most of the times, there are still some sensitive bugs. One bug I met a few times is when you long tap an Go board image to activate the 'recognize' button, Go Eye sometimes picks up a different image on the same web page. Might this have something to do with your way parsing the web page?
Overall, I quite enjoy using Go Eye. I think it definitely offers many functions not available in competing apps.
Unfortunately it is very hard to change people's established habits - e.g. many people think that a new Go server should be KGS plus new functions, not a completely new design no matter how good the new design might be. Similarly many people want tree view to browser games with branches, although I personally think Go Eye's way (based on thumbnail images) viewing branches is also quite intuitive.
So for users I recommend you to spend some extra time with Go Eye. With more patience you might appreciate more of its design ideas. For the developer, please try to accommodate users' habits so that they can optionally switch back to their favorite ways doing things at the same time still enjoying the features.
