L360

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Although the new app has the slight advantage of allowing random access to the articles so that you can go directly to a topic of interest, it has several drawbacks. On the IPad it will only display in portrait mode. My IPad Pro will only stand on its keyboard/cover in landscape mode so that makes it harder to use. I also miss the intro and the current organization is not chronological. Also, there is no vocabulary page or list idioms. These problem could be easily fixed (since the content exists and almost all IPad apps switch modes). Two things I would like to see added are the ability to create a list of words and definitions to study later, and the ability to look up any word in a French-English dictionary. The highlighted phrases and translations are helpful, especially for idioms, but I often come across other words/phrases I need translated. When reading French text on my Kindle I can highlight any group of words and get a translation to English. That would be very helpful here. As a developer myself, I don’t think it would be hard to make these improvements and then this App would be better than the older version.

I love that you can now grab clips that interest you and set up a playlist to practice with a bunch at a time. The old format had so many boring segments interspersed with interesting ones. Now pick and choose and make a playlist. Downside: downloading playlists for offline usage is tedious/not possible. One playlist I made will only partially download. The other keeps saying “error, try later,” and never downloads. Not good.

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The podcast is excellent and I’ve listened for years. Unfortunately this app appears to have been intentionally designed to prevent you from accessing it. The app used to provide the weekly podcasts through a simple one-touch download. This app takes all that away. And replaces it with only part of the podcast (minus the introduction). The rest is broken up into multiple shorter segments arranged confusingly into different categories. The available segments can only be downloaded one...at...a...time....in a clunky 1990s-style multi step process. The vocabulary list is gone also.

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I love the podcast and content. Works great on the web but this app is absolutely awful. A massive downgrade from the previous version. It is now nearly unusable for me. Previously you were able to listen to the entire episode continuously, each segment one after the other with a very nice introduction. The introduction is not gone and apparently only available on the web version. I have twice emailed linguistica360 regarding this issue. They have twice told me that the full episode will be on the next release and neither time has that happened.

This is a large improvement over the old app. It brings it more inline with their website. I specifically like how the articles are grouped. This makes it easy to find articles you are interested in reading. The advanced section of opinion articles is amazing! Perfect for pushing one’s abilities. I am using the Italian version.