O'Reilly

Great app but really hard to download content for offline. Most of the time the downloads hang forever after a few seconds. Pausing it and resuming often leads to a corrupted file, or even freeze and crash the app. I have this problem on both my iPhone XS and iPad Pro 2018 and the customer service was unfortunately not very helpful. They told me to uninstall and reinstall the app, which didn't fix it. This happen on both mobile or wifi connection and I can confirm that my internet connection isn't the problem (good latency and bandwidth, no pb to download netflix content, etc.) This seems like a bad implementation of the network stack of the app. Update Jan 10: App doesn't open anymore, get stuck at login. Had to uninstall and reinstall one more time. And to redownload all the contents :(

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I don’t recommend using the app at all. In the old days the app was like an extension to the website where you could easily pick up where you left off. Now all you get are “Trending”, “Upcoming Conferences”, “Recommended For You” and “Recently Added”. No history of what you had been reading or watching on the web. There’s a tab for your playlists, but that’s a poor substitute for a history* view since that means users that often search for several distinct technologies must now save every single result to a playlist. If you’re fortunate enough to only work in one domain and it uses a trendy technology, the app might be okay. But for anyone that used to use O’Reilly Media as a technical reference library - I’d say save yourself the time and hassle and skip this app. * - The history feature is also broken in the web interface anyway, so I’m not really sure their learning platform as whole is worth the price anymore. It’s been broken for months now and I think that’s kind of a telling sign. Here you have a media company whose primary focus is publishing technical literature with an emphasis on software development. In that domain is website and app building - and these are the products they release. An app that basically tells you nothing more than Google and a website that only half works. Perhaps the developers should read some of the books contained in the learning platform...

Overall, the catalog of titles is good. But there are some rough spots with the reader which are pretty unforgivable in the year 2020, given we’ve had Kindle and Apple Books for years and years. 1. Has bugs. Sometimes the reader asks me if I want to jump to the place last read on another device and I only read on a single device. If I forget and say yes, it jumps me to someplace odd (random?) in the book. 2. The top-level navigation is a bit bewildering. Why not just copy Kindle or Apple Books? 3. The reader uses a linear scrolling paradigm per chapter, which is fine, but when you get to the end of a chapter, if you continue scrolling, you inevitably flip to the next chapter which is discontinuous and you have to flip back to read the end of the last chapter. Kindle can do continuous scrolling, too, but it doesn’t have the discontinuity at chapter boundaries.

I’ve been an avid user of O’Reilly’s resources for over a quarter of a century. Throughout my career, I’ve turned to them again and again to solve problems or educate myself. That’s one reason why I have a Safari subscription – it has consistently been worth the money. However, I’ve never been fully happy with this app. I am visually-impaired, and I’ve always found it somewhat difficult to use. Well there is dark mood support in reading, it is not present in the application itself. That makes it difficult to go back-and-forth between modes. Additionally, the layout is rather chaotic and challenging to navigate using a screen reader. I really wish some more time was spent on making the interface as clean and fluid as possible. After all, the goal is to find the information you want and then read it. Or watch it. Or whatever.

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No side by side page layout. Please add this feature for the larger format iPads as landscape mode is easier on the hands. The app Keeps badgering me to give a rating on EVERY device I use every time I revert to the queue. Guess what? I have not used the app enough to know how useful it will be, so by pestering me in this fashion, you have earned yourselves a round zero rating (since I’ve only managed to experience annoying features so far). Congratulations. What brilliant designer thought that interrupting my workflow repeatedly to rate the app is a great idea? Finally, stop asking me to login. One login should suffice unless i am buying something through the app, which is not a feature at this time. If you must ask for credentials, then at least allow fingerprint or Face ID. Whether or not I renew my subscription will depend on content as well as how easy it is to use the app for learning new topics. And please eliminate these annoying interruptions to a learner’s workflow. I may revise my review once I’ve used the app for a few weeks.