Version 5.0 - circles displayed along the top and bottom of the reader pane

[jim_chapman]

Hey Jim,

I just wanted to precise that exactly 0 (zero) users find this feature helpful in any way. How would I know? Because, remapping an action is a *voluntary* process, and I really hope you have enough faith in us to not think that we would be dull enough to forget the two or three inputs we *voluntary* remapped.

All that was achieved here was to bloat the reading interface with meaningless circles. Although I find this feature surprising in a bad way, this is not what I am the most confused about. The fact is, even now, I cannot comprehend how no one thought about also implementing a way to disable this behaviour.

And you want us to wait four weeks for that? I am sure this update brought some much-desired changes and I am in no way trying to stress you, but I really wanted you to have an insight on how this feature is perceived from this side. Hopefully I can tamper with the source files and get rid of this somehow...

I'm not sure why you think you can speak for every user of Freda.  Obviously you can speak for yourself, but I don't think you've done a general poll of everyone who uses the app 

But the reasoning is simple: user interfaces are meant to be discoverable, and I've received criticism from various places (including Microsoft's UI mavens at times) to the effect that the Freda UI doesn't always make it obvious whether a particular UI gesture will do something, and if so what).  So this feature is intended to address that criticism.  As for why I didn't include a setting to optionally turn off UI-discoverability, the answer is just that Freda already has a confusingly large number of settings (another thing that is regularly criticised).  So I'll normally prefer not to add yet another setting, unless there's actually a clear demand for it.

Evidently there is demand for it, so I will be adding a setting to optionally remove all the UI-discoverability labels from the reading screen.  It's not a big coding change, and it may be possible to roll it out within a few days.  But I'm giving a pessimistic estimate because:

• Sometimes it takes a while for Microsoft and Google to approve the release of app updates
  
• Adding a new setting to Freda means messing with localisation files, the layout of the settings screen, and the logic for deciding when to refresh the book display.  None of these things is major but I have learned from bitter experience that such changes do sometimes bring regression bugs, so I need to allow some time for running automated and manual regression tests.
  
• The release of Freda v5 has prompted quite a lot of support emails and posts, and I need to take time to respond to them (this one included)
  
• I'm about to have a busy period in my personal life (leaving my job and moving from a house that has twenty years-worth of accumulated stuff in it)
  
• I am a team of one, supporting and developing Freda as a personal spare-time project (and if you wish that Freda had a bigger team behind it, the answer is just that you would need to pay more for the app!)