Life In 19x19

Just found a cool new problem app on Android. Search for Master of Go in the market. It has over a thousand problems for .99 cents! They are sorted into four levels, but I found even the "easy" ones quite useful for my level (1K). Probably not so good for beginners, but SDK up will enjoy this. Also, there was a problem with the level selection when I downloaded the app. I posted about it, and the developer released an update the fixed it the very next day! I love Android, you just don't get this kind of responsiveness from Apple, lol. Here is a link, not sure if it will work: https://market.android.com/details?id=c ... rch_result

I got this app a couple of weeks ago ... and IMO it sucks! My screen size is not properly supported (HTC wildfire) - the bottom two buttons are off screen and the sound effects are too loud and can't be turned off as far as I know. I emailed the developers and got a thanks for your feedback generic response but it was never fixed. Good job we've got go grinder now.

I'm not sure you're entitled to complain that a 240x320 screen is lacking support. That's tiny.

short answer - complaining that it doesn't support my screen resolution isn't the salient point of my post. I stated the fact then complained that they couldn't be bothered with a proper reply even after I went to the trouble of writing a very polite email.

long answer (sorry for the rant!) -

Actually I'm sure I am entitled to complain since I paid for it - but actually if you read my post I'm pointing out why it didn't work for me - at least one other forum user has a HTC wildfire (they're popular phones and the screen resolution is low but the screen's not tiny at all) but more importantly mentioning my experience with their 'customer support'. - If it didn't support my screen specs it shouldn't show up on the market place for me. To be honest I don't care if does support it I was only trying to improve the Android Go market by providing feedback (for the money I spent I would be happy with a polite - "sorry we don't have the time to fix it"). Plus I presume the sound effects are annoying how ever much you spend on your phone. GoGrinder is 1000% better than this app, for example.


The HTC wildfire is quite a popular phone and most apps manage to support it's screen just fine - GoGrinder did not originally work for that resolution then the author kindly fixed it! - it works perfectly well now, even on my 'tiny' screen and I don't think it's difficult to do. The DGS client works fine, so does the KGS client and several other Go apps I have. So does facebook, Amazon, ebay apps etc. So basically it's only poorly tested apps that it's a problem for. I'm not going to hold back in posting a review because someone might say I don't have a good enough phone! (and again, I mentioned what phone I have so anyone with the spend-as-much-as-you-can smartphone can disregard as they want!!! I know I got a cheaper smartphone so I certainly don't feel I can demand all apps support it's screen specs.

now I have never bought an apple gadget but this points out a big weakness of the Android market - too many different screen sizes.

edit: I'm glad for this thread as I'd forgotten all about it and hadn't gotten around to deleting the offending app.

CnP, you're entirely right that it's a crummy support response. In partial defense, they're probably hobbyists, or professionals doing this as a side project--customer support is probably not their forte or passion.

Btw: removing the app from the market for screen resolution isn't trivial. Either the developer needs to get a huge variety of phones to test (maybe this could be done well in a simulator), or they'd have to specifically exclude phones that they knew would be too small.

hyperpape wrote:CnP, you're entirely right that it's a crummy support response. In partial defense, they're probably hobbyists, or professionals doing this as a side project--customer support is probably not their forte or passion.

Btw: removing the app from the market for screen resolution isn't trivial. Either the developer needs to get a huge variety of phones to test (maybe this could be done well in a simulator), or they'd have to specifically exclude phones that they knew would be too small.

Screen resolution is trivially testable without having any phone. Apparently the developers marked it as supporting that resolution without testing how it looks.

hyperpape wrote:CnP, you're entirely right that it's a crummy support response. In partial defense, they're probably hobbyists, or professionals doing this as a side project--customer support is probably not their forte or passion.

Btw: removing the app from the market for screen resolution isn't trivial. Either the developer needs to get a huge variety of phones to test (maybe this could be done well in a simulator), or they'd have to specifically exclude phones that they knew would be too small.

Kivi has it right. It is very easy to test different resolutions, and also very easy to disallow devices with the "wrong" resolution from buying your app.

I had a few nasty surprises when developing the KGS app, where screen sizes that I didn't know actually existed looked bad or were unusable!!! But on the good side, once you know that size mmmxnnn doesn't work right, it's usually only 15 or 20 minutes to set up the emulator, test, then tweak the GUI config file to make it be at least usable.

So, hobbyist or no, I don't think there is much excuse for not fixing this problem once the developer is aware of it. It's easy to fix, or easy to protect against if you don't want to bother fixing it.

And if you have a phone where the KGS client has buttons off screen or similar issues, just mail me! I really do fix such things, and I tend to fix them quickly! Now the "game list disappears sometimes" bug took me a very long time to fix, because to this day no phone or emulator I could find showed the problem, so I had to just guess at what change fixed it. It looks like I finally got it with the latest release, which is a big relief.

As for one of the complaints--the sound can be turned off. Just click the little speaker icon in the lower left. Although, if you're missing the "bottom two buttons", I guess you'd be missing that button as well....

Yeah, I was just going to point that same thing out. I know what you mean about an app not working on a given screen size. My first Archos had that problem with anDGS, and Michael kindly fixed it for me immediately. My device doesn't even have "official" access to the Market, so I use a hack to access it at all. This is true of lots of third party app devices. I am much happier having access to programs that may or may not work on my device, than being locked out of buying them all together because Google won't let devices that aren't phones access their market.

As for GoGrinder, this app does not work particularly well on my device (Archos 43 IT). Loading problems is not very smooth, and most of them don't work. I have tried about ten different problem sets, and only a couple of them will even run on my device. Also, I really hate that as soon as you solve a problem, it disappears. If it was a hard problem, I want a chance to think about the solution, and read alternate paths out. Magic GoBaduk does this best actually, it lets you review a problem after you have solved it, if you want to. Master of Go at least has a back arrow, so you can go right there again. You can do this in GoGrinder too, but you have to select the main menu which is kind of annoying when other programs let you check it right there.

How is gobandroid on the archos?

oren wrote:How is gobandroid on the archos?

It totally rocks. This is the main application I use for recording my games, and with the Sente skin, it is beautiful. The Ai doesn't seem to understand scoring, it can't count, or even finish a game. Once you get to the pass stage, it just stops responding. Occasionally, gobandroid has a glitch while recording or playing back, and you have to re-start it. Most of the time it works perfectly though, and I record all my games with it. I am very grateful for the function that lets you go back to a given move that was mis-recorded, and replace it with the correct one.

It looks like ligi pushed out a gobandroid-gnugo update a couple days ago. I haven't asked what it does yet, but you might want to see if it fixes the problem.

wms wrote:I had a few nasty surprises when developing the KGS app, where screen sizes that I didn't know actually existed looked bad or were unusable!!!

This probably doesn't apply to CnP's screen, which is probably an ordinary small resolution, but that does seem non-trivial.

I think I did overestimate the problem, though. If there's a comprehensive list of screen sizes, then you'd just have to try those in the simulator. You might end up with a problem where the app isn't very usable because of size, but at least you'd have all the buttons on screen.

The app works good on the new Samsung Infuse with 4.5" diagonal screen.

One of my gripe is that most of these programs have preprogrammed response (or no response) for correct moves only.
In some cases, alternate but good solutions come up as failed.
IMO, it should accept all legal moves whether good or bad and make a response and then say you failed.

I find it useful and worth the money to kill time in transit.

Got the iPhone version of this. Even the easiest problems give me a workout, which was kind of a pleasant surprise. When I feel like consistently hard problems, I open this one. Other apps help more when I need occasional confidence boosts. =D