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From the Flames of War forums:

Posted By Chris at Battlefront on 05 Feb 2015 11:02 AM
Yes, Flames Of War Digital is about to go live. We are just waiting for it to appear in the iTunes store...

This thread is for you to post any comments or feedback. I will not promise that we will give you an answer all questions, but we will read the comments and get any bug information off to the developers.

WHAT - Bug Information... you mean there might be BUGS! Yep, that is a fact that any app, no matter how hard we check things will have some bugs, especially when you consider our relatively small testing group verses the thousands of people that will be downloading the app over the coming weeks. Stay calm, let us know, and in turn we will get the developers on to fixing them asap.

Stay tuned for more information on where and when you can download the app.

Thanks
Chris

As of right now, the app is available on the iTunes store. However, it doesn't appear that you can access any lists on it quite yet.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Lists are now available. Remagen, Barbarossa, Fate of a Nation, the rulebook, and both Know Your Enemy books, are all available for purchase. Both Art of War books are available for free, as are the Lehr and 2nd Panzer Division PDF lists from Panzers to the Meuse (Devil's Charge). Note that the other two panzer divisions featured in the online list builder Meuse lists are not available.

I grabbed one of the free Meuse lists, and briefly took a peek. I've found what are to me a couple of small annoyances. First, the application only orients itself vertically. I prefer to use my tablet with applications oriented horizontally, and every other e-reader that I've used allows for both orientations. Second, every other e-reader that I've used has you turn the page by dragging your finger sideways across the page. In essence, you're "flipping" to the new page. This one works like a very, very, very long PDF page. i.e. you scroll up and down just as if you were reading a PDF document on your computer.

Were we supposed to have access to the great war for free too?

Eumerin wrote:
Both Art of War books are available for free, as are the Lehr and 2nd Panzer Division PDF lists from Panzers to the Meuse (Devil's Charge). Note that the other two panzer divisions featured in the online list builder Meuse lists are not available.

116. Panzerdivision 'Windhund' and 9. Panzerdivision never had complete write-ups in the Panzers to the Meuse briefing. Each was a single page listing the history of the unit, the regiments that made up the division and a short list of changes to the 2. Panzerdivision Company Diagram in order to field that Panzerdivision.

 David Hume wrote:
Were we supposed to have access to the great war for free too?

I don't remember. But given that the on-line site charges for it, I doubt it.

Eumerin wrote:
I grabbed one of the free Meuse lists, and briefly took a peek. I've found what are to me a couple of small annoyances. First, the application only orients itself vertically. I prefer to use my tablet with applications oriented horizontally, and every other e-reader that I've used allows for both orientations. Second, every other e-reader that I've used has you turn the page by dragging your finger sideways across the page. In essence, you're "flipping" to the new page. This one works like a very, very, very long PDF page. i.e. you scroll up and down just as if you were reading a PDF document on your computer.

That's probably because it it a PDF. FOW Digital is a PDF reader with an inbuilt shop.

I'll be interested to see the digital exclusive Jordanian list but that's about it.

 George Spiggott wrote:

Eumerin wrote:
I grabbed one of the free Meuse lists, and briefly took a peek. I've found what are to me a couple of small annoyances. First, the application only orients itself vertically. I prefer to use my tablet with applications oriented horizontally, and every other e-reader that I've used allows for both orientations. Second, every other e-reader that I've used has you turn the page by dragging your finger sideways across the page. In essence, you're "flipping" to the new page. This one works like a very, very, very long PDF page. i.e. you scroll up and down just as if you were reading a PDF document on your computer.

That's probably because it it a PDF. FOW Digital is a PDF reader with an inbuilt shop.

I'll be interested to see the digital exclusive Jordanian list but that's about it.

It was a choice on their part. There's nothing that forces the app to orient PDFs that way or scroll them vertically. For instance, the iBooks app lets you read PDFs. It lets you read them with the screen oriented horizontally (the page is oriented perpendicular to the screen orientation), and advance the pages by dragging horizontally across the screen like most e-readers instead of scrolling up and down.

I am in no way defending their decision but it seems to me that the app is just Adobe reader + shop.

As I said I'm only interested in the Jordanian mech list, the release of which is tied to this app. Until it appears on Android I can't even use it.

At some point it was likely to be just a PDF because they're image-heavy and using the features of iBooks would preclude ever releasing on Android. Having done a few image-heavy epubs, that format is hit-or-miss such that providing a quality product in that format would likely have been far more effort than it was worth compared to what they did. Diminishing returns on investment and all that.

The forced-portrait orientation is annoying, but not really a deal breaker. The arrows that appear when when you're not in full-screen mode allow you to change the scroll direction to horizontal rather than vertical. Not quite as nice as a landscape option, but it does at least align with how the books were intended to be presented.

More annoying is the lack of an update mechanism when they revise something or correct an error (such as the index quicklinks not working in the main rulebook; minor details). Getting the communication that "hey, there's an update to this document" is kind of a thing that needs to be there in the long-run. Nothing says it will be absent forever, but looking at how long the app took to arrive...

 George Spiggott wrote:
I am in no way defending their decision but it seems to me that the app is just Adobe reader + shop.

As I said I'm only interested in the Jordanian mech list, the release of which is tied to this app. Until it appears on Android I can't even use it.

However once its released on the app, it should be available on Forces of War which works on Android.

That is precicely what I'm waiting for. If the Force org doesn't have any unique entries I should be able to start playing straight away as you can see the force org chart for free.