Loving the new v1.6!

[je...@chessmetrics.com]

Thanks so much for releasing a version that uses the full screen of the iPhone 5!  The existence of iFrotz was a big factor in motivating me to finally upgrade from my Palm Centro to a modern phone (okay so I'm weird - I admit it!) and I spent a delightful six hours last week trying to finally solve Zork III after thirty years of hibernation.  And I am even happier now that the full screen is used.

A little feedback: since my fingertips are pretty big, I can only type reliably in landscape mode, which is why I decided to wait for the bigger iPhone 5.  My initial impression with v1.6 is that we get a lot more text onscreen in portrait mode than in landscape mode, whereas I remember with the earlier version of iFrotz on the iPhone 5 that it didn't matter much whether you were in portrait or landscape mode; you pretty much could see the same text onscreen.  Now it seems like you get maybe 60% of the content onscreen in landscape mode that you do in portrait mode.  I think that this is probably just the fact that there are diminishing returns from increasing screen width in landscape layout, due to all the line breaks in a typical game. So probably in this new version you are much more likely to get all of the content from a new room to fit onscreen the first time (rather than having to tap a key or scroll to see all of it) but it's not that likely that under v1.6 you will suddenly start seeing a whole room further back on the visible screen (at least not in landscape mode).  Maybe smaller line spacing or smaller left/right margins?  I would be interested to know which fonts are most popular for the tradeoff between readability and real estate, and whether you have considered adding a setting to let you squish lines together more closely.

Anyway, thanks again!!
  -- Jeff

[Craig Smith]

The line spacing hasn't changed any from the smaller iPhone landscape mode, so I guess it's just diminishing returns due to line breaks as you surmised.

I'll consider adding adjustable margins and line spacing.  I was already planning to do this for the iPad but hadn't really thought it would be useful on iPhone, but I suppose at least on the iPhone 5 in landscape mode, it may be. 

 

Here's a thought -- on iPhone in landscape mode, do you think it would be useful (as an preference setting, perhaps) to have the keyboard automatically hide after each input?  Then you would get an entire screen worth of output text, but have to tap again before you could enter your next command.  Seems like this might be great in some situations and really annoying in others, so it's hard to decide if it's a good idea or not.

[je...@chessmetrics.com]

Since the first thing you are going to do each time is read what you can, and think about it, I like the automatic hiding in principle.  Perhaps it would get annoying or flickery but I think I would like it a lot.  I definitely find there are lots of times where I wish the keyboard would go away (for some reason when in landscape mode I rarely get the bar at the top where I can tap Story List or show/hide the keyboard) and it seems great to recover so much real estate automatically.

I would think the main downside to the automatic hiding is if you lose characters as you are trying to zip through a maze or something, where you already know what you want to enter and are in a hurry.  However I have noticed that when you tap so that you can scroll (or enter your next command), if it is a non-space character you tapped then it actually does double duty and scrolls to the command line and also registers toward being a command.  I like this.  And since it does this, I don't see any downside to the automatic hiding.  I do think you already get style points for having so few preference settings right now, but they don't get in the way, so I would favor adding this as an option.

Under v1.6, I have noticed some irregularities in the size of the left margin in landscape mode - I was playing Zork III and at one point I was at the Barren Area (so of course it said "Barren Area" in the left edge of the status bar at the top), and the left margin of the main content lined up exactly at the end of "Barren Area", so that left margin was at least a half inch.  Whereas now I am looking at it (still landscape) and the left margin is much smaller, lined up with the lowercase e in "Endless Stair", so it's maybe a quarter inch.  I noticed the margin shift significantly horizontally yesterday when I was saving or restoring or something; I don't remember the details.  I know I was getting killed by the mysterious stranger a lot.  But even now it seems like the margin is larger than it needs to be; when I switch to portrait the margin lines up with the capital "E" in "Endless Stair".  I am using Marker felt, 14 point, if that matters...

And just to be clear, I am NOT complaining about anything - I love it! - just thought you might like some debugging info.

  -- Jeff