Graphical timeline for finished books

[ssarkisy]

At first, app is absolutely awesome. Thank you so much for your work!

What do you think about adding the graphical timeline for finished books? It would add better insight what you accomplished through year(s).

Regards!

[AndrewBennet]

Hey - thanks!

Adding timeline graphs is definitely something I'd like to do. I've been thinking about using the Swift Charts library, but I haven't had time to look into properly yet.

My main focus at the moment is developing iCloud Sync (which is getting close) - once that's finished I'll try to plan the next "big" feature; charts is a good candidate.

Cheers,
Andrew

[nimmerman]

I'm also really enjoying using Reading List!

I know this might be a crazy time to be asking but any update on graphs and icloud sync? I think these are 2 features that would really make a lot of impact on the app.

[AndrewBennet]

Hi there,

I'm afraid I haven't moved any further on the graphical features. Funnily enough, I've been resuming work on iCloud sync yesterday and today. I had previous done a whole bunch of work to write robust synchronisation functionality myself, using CloudKit. However, it was quite tricky to iron out a lot of more minor issues, and the quantity of code was growing a bit out of hand. I kept on stalling on that and working on easier features!

Since then, iOS 13 was released and Apple made available a class called NSPersistentCloudKitContainer, which lets you set up an automatically synced database. Most users are on iOS 13 now, so I am inclined to abort the previous work and use that instead. I hope it will be much easier to add. I've done some preparatory work recently, and am now looking at using NSPersistentCloudKitContainer in the app. I have not yet managed to get the syncing to happen yet, but it's early days!

I can never really predict how long features will take to complete, as my available free time seems to vary a lot! But I would really like to add iCloud sync soon if possible.

All the best,
Andrew

[nimmerman]

Sounds great @AndrewBennet, looking forward to it!

[nimmerman]

@AndrewBennet First off, awesome work on the iOS 14 widgets! I think they look great! Second, how do iCloud sync and reading graphs stack on your feature priority list?

[AndrewBennet]

Hi there,

Yeah, sorry it's been so long with no progress on these features 😬 Thanks for the comments about the widgets - glad you like them!

Basically, I hit a few roadblocks with the NSPersistentCloudKitContainer idea, and that avenue stalled, unfortunately. There seem to be just a few too many limitations with it which pose problems. But I have picked up a few techniques which may make a manual sync implementation a bit easier.

I hadn't had time for very much development on the app for a few months. iOS 14 coming out spurred me on to put together those widgets, as I felt I ought to have something out there.

With my project management hat on, iCloud sync should be my highest priority. I know it would be very useful for a lot of people. It is quite a big project (the merge conflicts alone now may take a while to sort out), and I am susceptible to appeal of knocking together features I can release quickly 🙈 I will aim to make iCloud sync the next big thing I pick up.

With the reading graphs, I feel I don't have an intuitive idea as to what graphs would be most useful. What kind of visualisations were you thinking of? I can imagine simple bar graph of books read over time, but perhaps there's more interesting analysis that could be done...?

[nimmerman]

I used the word graph but I guess a better word would be statistics. Personally, I most interested in basic stats such as the number of books I read each month, each year etc. I haven't been using the reading progress percentage feature, but I could see that information being used for some cool charts.

[mkudija]

First, @AndrewBennet thank you for a great app! I've been using it for a bit over a month and it perfectly fills most of my use cases for planning and tracking my reading.

With the reading graphs, I feel I don't have an intuitive idea as to what graphs would be most useful. What kind of visualisations were you thinking of? I can imagine simple bar graph of books read over time, but perhaps there's more interesting analysis that could be done...?

To answer your question above, one visualization feature I would find very helpful is the ability to forecast the date I will finish a given book based on the average number of pages per day I have read. For instance, this is especially helpful to a make sure I'm on track to finish a book before I travel.

I currently use a Google Sheet to track this by entering each day the page number I am on and saving the forecasted finish date.

This could be implemented with simple "statistics" as @nimmerman indicates, perhaps by showing some text at the end of the Reading Log section when you click on the details of a book. Or you could include a click-through to a progress chart and more detailed information.

I'm curious if others would find this to be a useful feature?