Wanting so bad to love this app
First I have to say I love Safari Books and have been waiting eagerly for this application. Ive only used this app for about an hour but already I see many glaring issues with it. Firstly there is no easy way for you to know whether a book in your Bookbag has been downloaded or not. The app gives you instructions to tap on the book in your book bag but it is not obvious looking at that screen whether the book has been downloaded. There is some text that says "Processing offline book", but for whatever reason that text is in the button for marking a book as favourite. This makes no sense at all from a UI perspective. Please take a look at the WSJ app to see a better way for showing users what is downloaded and what is downloading.
Another huge issue with this app is performance. This app has to be one of the worst Ive ever used in terms of responsiveness. I find myself repeatedly dragging my finger across the screen just to scroll through a document. Sometimes there is a delay and the page doesnt scroll until after Ive stopped dragging. Sometimes the screen jitters back and forth rapidly while dragging.
The app also doesnt use swipe gestures for navigating between pages. Almost every book reader on the iPad supports swipe gestures for moving between pages and I cant understand why this app doesnt either.
In order to make a book available offline you need to either favourite it and then choose to add it to the Bookbag category or go to your favourites and drag it from one category to the Bookbag category. The problem though is that in latter use case, if you drag a book from your collection of favourite (Java) books to the Bookbag it no longer belongs to your collection of favourite Java books. Its now your favourite Bookbag book. This is terrible. By placing the Bookbag in the dialog for managing favourites you have mixed the concepts of a favourite group and books that you can read offline. Please find a better way to manage the Bookbag.
The potential for this app is HUGE and Im glad they finally released it.
To the developers:
Im not sure what the problem is but it feels like the app is using non-standard controls all over the place. It makes no sense that scrolling is an issue. I feel like you guys have gone out of your way to give the app a particular look and feel at the expense of the responsiveness and consistency of a typical iPad app. Please improve the responsiveness of this app.
I look forward to future improvements.
Gallahad about
Safari To Go