Ok, since I spearheaded this whole rigamarole, I guess I could give a little review of tapatalk.
This will be the Android version of tapatalk, as seen on a Motorola Droid, the original. I'm sure other phones are similar in nature. There is a demo version, however you can not post messages with the demo version. The "Pro" version is $2.99. A small price if you're a forum junky.
Tapatalk now has widgets you can put on
your home screen as you see here at the
top. With the last update to tapatalk I
have lost the TFP logo that used to be
there. Now it's defaulting to the tapatalk
icon. I haven't researched this yet, so I
can't say what happened.
Also, if you own a droid and are wondering
why this screen looks different, it's because
it is different. (Warning! Completely unrelated
geek talk ahead!) I'm rooted, and have been
running Android 2.2 (Froyo) with the Sapphire
Mod overclocked to 1ghz, along with ADW
Launcher for a month or two now. Stable
as all get out!
So if you tap on the widget, it'll bring you here.
These are the latest unread topics for you to scroll
through. Tapping on one will take you to the thread.
Tapping on a users avatar almost anywhere in this
program will take you to their profile. I forgot to
grab a shot of that screen, but there's not a whole
lot in there. You can view their posts or topics, send
a private message, see their post count, and when
they joined.
Clicking on the "All" tab brings you here.
Same deal, only it's all the latest topics. The orange
bar on the left of the topic shows there are new
messages. If there's no bar, you've already read all
messages.
The Participated tab is new with the latest version.
It doesn't work on this forum, or the forum I run, or
any other forum I use this with. I think there might
be an upgrade on the server side, but I haven't
looked into it yet.
Tapping the Forums button on the top will get you here.
Listed by category, you can drill down to the forum you
wish to look at.
Tapping the "By Name" tab brings you here.
This is simply an alphabetized listing of all the forums.
The PM Button brings you to your private messages.
This has no frills, just send and receive messages.
The More button? Right here.
Nothing exciting going on in here.
Reading an actual thread looks like this.
Sometimes the pictures show up, sometimes they don't.
I think if the picture is located somewhere else, it shows
up, if it's actually uploaded as an attachment, it doesn't
show up. Again, I haven't looked into this problem much.
You can tap on a picture, and it'll bring this screen up.
If there's multiple pictures in the message, you can scroll
through them on the bottom.
The settings menu looks like this.
You can set a custom signature. The only problem here
is you can't set a separate signature for different forums.
It's the same for every one of them! I think they're
working on this though.
Posts per page, I maxed it out, of course.
Display style is light or dark, I usually have mine at dark,
but I lightened it up for this review.
Image quality, probably self explanatory.
Select default is which "Home page" you'd like to
start at when you first come into the app.
Overall, there's a lot that could be improved. It doesn't show bbcode formatting or the smiley's... You can manually type in a bbcode, or smiley code, and it'll show up on the web just fine though. On rare occasions it does seem to lock up while grabbing data from the server. I'm not sure if it's the program, or something my phone is doing in the background. If you wait long enough, it comes back to life. I've never had it force close on me though. Will it ever be on par with the web version?
Never. But for keeping up on forums on your mobile phone, I don't think it can be beat.
On my phone, it's a lot easier to navigate around
the forum with this
...then it is to navigate on my phone with this
Plus, we won't even mention the Trouble Free Poo.
Thanks again Jason, for putting this on your board!
