[Android] Flaming Durtles - Android app with offline support

Yep. There are two ways, basically. Both can be found in Settings → Advanced → Lesson. You can set your ordering to for example Type, Shuffle and then enable reverse order. Or further down, you can set the minimum number of vocab items per session to 5 or however large your lesson batches are. That way the app will do its best to always pick vocab lessons first before filling out the session with other items.

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I had tried setting the maximum kanji and cardinals to 0, but I guess 0 means no limit :stuck_out_tongue: Didn’t occur to me to try and set a minimum on the vocab like you suggested but it worked this time. Thank you for the app and for the help :slight_smile:

Hello,

For some reason flamingdurtles won’t sync with wanikani. It started yesterday morning and is still refusing to sync. I was able to complete lessons on wani itself. So I don’t know what is going on with it.

Thank you,

Aideng

Hi! Thank you for making this app! I’ve been using your app every day for the past three months and I am now liking it better than my previous app which lost its support (RIP). The only thing I’ve missed/don’t know how to setup in this app is getting some notification for multiple meanings. I think my last app would prompt you to view meanings to make sure you knew the rest. In this app I would assume it would do something like enter answer → temporarily disable lightning mode → “did you know there are other meanings” prompt → see meaning or continue → lightning mode back on.

Is this something you have considered? Thanks again, as an app developer myself I know how time consuming this is and how few people understand the effort this requires from you.

Doing that should have worked as well. Are you sure that’s the way you had it set up? I’ll have a look to see if I can find out why.

Are you getting a big red error message on the dashboard? If so, you’re either having network problems, or your API key is incorrect (or doesn’t have the right permissions), depending on the message.

If not, that usually means your network access rule only allows syncing over unmetered connections, but you’re on a metered connection. (Usually wifi is unmetered, and mobile data is metered, but some wifi connections can be metered as well.) Try setting that (under Settings → API) to always allow syncing.

And finally, just to be sure, can you check what version of the app you’re on (Settings → About)? If you’re not on the most recent version (2.2.1), please update to the latest version from the Play Store. A recent WK API change broke older versions of FD.

If none of these help, please upload your debug log, last option in the settings menu. Maybe I can see why the app is not syncing for you.

Hm, it seems that would get annoying really quickly, wouldn’t it? Since many vocab have more than one meaning, you’d get pestered by that message a lot I’d think…

No, I never considered it I think, but I’ll put it on the list.

Does the app have any public bug trackers?

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I think the important thing is for it to be as unobtrusive as possible.

I have gone back and looked at it, and I used this feature mainly for the first few levels (1-4). It’s entirely possible with the later levels that so many words have alternative meanings that maybe it’s not practical. I think even now (level 7) this might be more annoying than even a few levels ago, so maybe it’s not practical long term

looks like no? @ejplugge, any particular reason for this or do you simply prefer to keep bug reports in this thread?

Thank you for such a quick response! The app update resolved the problem with synch.

Not at the moment. If you think you’ve found a bug, just post it here or in email.

No really particular reason, just that I don’t think there’s a big added value in it. Since issue trackers usually offer a horrible user experience for users who want to report an issue, I’d rather do without if there’s no strong reason to have one. It’s rare (these days) to have more than one or two open bugs in the app at the same time. The bugs that pop up tend to get squashed pretty quickly.

Also, I don’t want to be held accountable for how I prioritize my time working on the app, and having too much of the development process out in the open would probably just become an annoyance in that area. Especially since the ‘development process’ largely consists of ‘do whatever the heck I feel like doing today’.

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It was very smart from me to post a feedback intended for Flaming Durtles in KameSame thread. Either way here is what I wanted to post:

I want to give some feedback:
I’ve gone for a 2 week journey where no internet or calls are available. Flaming Durtles seemed like a perfect way to avoid vacation mode and I was ready to take risks either way.

Around 4 days without syncs passed and everything went as planned. Then my phone’s battery died suddenly mid review when I was chatting to someone next to me. I knew I would have around ~100 reviews coming up per day, cuz I checked timeline as deep as I could. Though when I turned on the phone I had funny stuff in Flaming Durtles waiting for me.

Phone screenshot

My time on level resetted or went down (I don’t remember when I took the screenshot, but I think I didn’t do it at the exact moment when due to shock). And I had no upcoming reviews. And my leftover reviews before phone shutdown also vanished.

When I got back to civilization I got greeted by 1000+ reviews. So when I got home I had to deal with a pile of 1200. Thanks god I annihilated it within 5 days and now I am clean… more or less…

Oh man, that sucks. Sorry you had such a bad experience…

Based on what you describe and the screenshot, what must have happened is that your battery must have died just as the app was writing a database update, and the database got corrupted (except for your settings - those are not stored in the database).

Android uses the SQLite database engine, which is very robust against this kind of corruption. At most, you should have lost just one answer in your active session. The only explanation I can think of is that the dead battery caused the flash memory to be corrupted while it was being written. Again, the platform should handle that cleanly, but for some reason this didn’t happen in your case.

I’ll do some tracing to confirm that the database is running with proper journaling protection as it should, but other than that it’s a mystery I can’t explain or fix.

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Would it also be possible to change navigation bar to dark mode, when app is set to dark?

I also have some feedback on dark theme. Even tough you can customize kanji character colors :+1:, I think they should follow Wanikani theme (blue, pink, purple) by default. Just my opinion, since default font colors confused me.

Is there also undo option? I often misspell a word, due to keyboard misclick, and I would like to correct it.

Simply dropping by to say “Thank you for your work!” & to ask “Why is it a D instead of a T?”.

There are creatures known as Durtles in the WK lore. Example: :durtle:

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It’s on the list.

The WK default colours are meant to be shown on a light background. On a dark background they look bad. The Dark Breeze theme in the app was specifically requested to look like the popular Dark Breeze theme for the desktop site, so that’s where the colours come from.

I can always add another theme if there’s enough interest, but as far as I know most people are content with the Dark Breeze theme as it is.

There is, but it’s disabled by default. Look for the special buttons in Settings → Advanced → Other. You can assign various functions to them.

Rendaku :wink: . Plus, with teriyaki sauce and udon, flamed durtles are just so much more delicious than regular turtles.

Boring answer: I wanted a name for the app that would have a clear connection to WaniKani without actually using “WaniKani” in the name. Durtles and durtling are something of a meme on the forums, so it seemed a good option. It literally took me five seconds to come up with the app’s name, and I never looked back :slight_smile:

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I would but I have a backlog of nearly 300 vocab lessons :sweat_smile: unfortunately Firefox Android just got rid of most addons too so no scripts at all… I’ll have to stick with desktop WK for lessons for now, thank you though :smiley:

Thank you very much for making and maintaining this app! It’s incredibly powerful and customizable, I love it!

One of the userscripts I use on the Desktop automatically plays the audio again after answering the meaning question. It only does this if you answered the reading correctly already. I feel like this helped me link the sound, the meaning and the Kanji a little better. Is it possible to add such a setting to Flaming Durtles?

Sorry for requesting yet another thing to be added to the already lengthy list of feature requests. Or maybe it’s already possible and I just haven’t found the setting yet?

I’ll add it to the list.

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