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Record a movie from the app is irritating. If I do it using all the defaults on screen, it uses a series recording and adds that movie in My Shows (making the My Shows list quite hard to manage).  Can Ice TV please put more logic in so that when attempting to record with a prefix of "Movie:" the record screen should default to 'episode only' recording? 

Also Possible refresh issue with 'my week' - I deleted an entry but still appears in my week, as well as adding a show which appears in 'my week' but not marked as red on the 'tv guide'.
Also when doing this, for some reason the multidonuts dont go red, they go grey.  The show has not passed.  I need to delete the episode, then delete the series, then reset the recording and then it went red. 

I'll second the request for shows that are not part of a series to default to "episode only" when setting the recording.

I'm also having a similar problem with "my week". For exameple, this morning I set a series recording which seemed to work fine.  There were two upcoming episodes in my week - perfect.  Decided to detele the second episode - was asked to confirm the deletion.  However, it was still showing in "my week".

That was this morning.  Just checked this afternoon - my week was the same.  Did the "pull down" (which I love!) and it showed the last update was this morning - thus the no change in my week.  "Pulled and released" to update.  Still no change.  "Pulled down" to check last update time - says it was just updated.  Still no change in "my week" then a few seconds later it reflected the changes.  I therefore suspect that the screen is actually refeshed *after* the "last updated" time is reset - suggest it should be the other way around.  Also, just a cosmetic thing but after "pull and release" the screen goes black and says "Loading..." - would look much nicer if the grey "pull to update" area remained with a "loading/updating" message and disppeared when complete such as the Facebook app does.

Have also noticed that after looking at a show synopsis it doesn't always take you back to the same place in the guide but have yet to work out the pattern for this as most of the time it is fine - will post again if I find the pattern.

Thanks for the updated app.

Regards,

Patrick

I want!!!

Looks good Dan.  I assume you have the same thing working in "my week"?  That's the area that I'd really like to see it in.  Based on what I saw (as detailed in my earlier post, where it was missing scheduled recordings in the middle of week) it's the "my week" screen that has issues with updating so being able to force an update (or see if it is in the midst of an update) would be really helpful.

Regards,

Patrick

Hi Dan,

Sounds reasonable except with the phone now caching the EPG why would there be any 'overhead' in changing days?

Regards,

Patrick

Thanks Dan.  I don't know why the Facebook "pull down" didn't occur to me earlier as I use it all the time.  It would certainly make it quick and easy to confirm the status of the "my week" data that is being displayed.

Regards,

Patrick

Hi Dan,

I've been thinking more about the "my week" matter.  Whilst checking Facebook on my iphone, I wanted to check when it last update and so "pulled down" the news feed which shows when it was last updated and also can initiate a refresh.  It then occurred to me that this might be a neat way to check when "my week" was updated and manually initiate a refresh.  Do you know what I mean? What do you think?

Talking about "my week", I have another problem to raise.  Yesterday on the way home on the train I decided to check "my week".  It showed 4 days (Thursday, Friday, Saturday Sunday) with the last few days with red doughnuts - presumably because it had been several days since I had checked it and so it was showing me old cached data.  The network activity spinner was merrily spinning away - stopping and starting several times.  It was quite a number of minutes though before the doughnuts changed to solid dots (and I had to go in and out of the "my week" screen several times before I saw this).  However, even after it had apparently refreshed it still only showed me 4 days.  I checked a few minutes ago and it was still only showing me up to Sunday.  It did, however, say that there were only a few days EPG left and that it was going to do an update.  So, I've now checked again and sure enough, the EPG appears to be updated but "my week" is showing Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Thursday - even though I know I've scheduled shows for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday (confirmed by checking the web site).

Regards,

Patrick

I love the little up and down arrows either side of the day name at the bottom of the screen but would love it even more if they would allow you to scroll to the previous/next day rather than becoming inactive once you reach the beginning/end of the day displayed.  Actually same functionality with finger scrolling would be good too.

Thanks,

Patrick

Good idea. I'll second it.  And include yesterday's scheduled recordings.

Patrick

Hi Dan,

Thanks for your response.  I'm not really that worried about the EPG and I did notice that in the settings one can see when the EPG was last fetched.  It's the 'my week' that I really find frustrating.  For example, not long after my last post I had a look at my week.  I've got four series set to record that all occur on a Saturday.  When I looked at "my week" it showed two of them so I assume that the series must have finished on the other two.  However, when I looked a few minutes later, the other two were showing.  So, I'm guessing when I first look I was looking at cached data and then by the second look it had downloaded an update.

I've also noticed the spinning network activity indicator but I've found this to be somewhat unreliable insofar as if I'm in an area of patchy network connectivity then just because the spinning indicator isn't spinning doesn't mean that it's finished just that it's having connectivity issues.  However, I'm sure this is an iphone thing and nothing you can do anything about.

So, after all that rambling, what I'd like is some sort of indication of whether I'm (a) looking at 'old' cached data, (b) the app is in the middle of a download or (c) I'm looking at fairly fresh data.  My initial thought is two fold:

1. as well as putting the date and time that the EPG was last updated in the settings screen, put the date and time that other data was last updated there too - this would be more useful for trouble shooting than anything.

2. in the screen title line put an icon that indicates the three states that I mention above, for example, show the yellow triangle with the exclamation mark if the data being shown is 'old', a red doughnut if the app is currently downloading data and a red dot if it is showing 'fresh' data.  In fact, as I'm typing this I'm thinking that you could even forget about the third state as no icon could simply mean that the data has been recently updated.  This is just one idea.  Alternatively you could use different colours for the screen heading.  I'm sure that there are lots of options and your interface design people would have some good ideas.

The way that I would find this useful is that if I saw some indicator that said that I'm looking at cached data then I know to wait until the app has downloaded fresh data.  If after a few minutes it's still saying that the data is 'old' then I know there is potentially a problem and I need to check a few things (some way of forcing an update without doing a complete reset would probably be handy here).

If I see an indicator that says it's in the middle of updating then again I know to wait until it's finished.

The same thing could apply to the EPG but is less of a concern because I'm assuming that EPG updates tend to affect days further from "today" rather than closer to "today".

Having the cached data is good if I'm in a area of poor or no network connectivity but it's frustrating when I'm assuming that I'm looking at up to date data but in reality I'm not.

I'm sorry if I sound like a whinger.  I really do like the app (and the IceTV service overall) but I'm just finding the app unusable with this quirk.  Thankfully, I can use safari to view the web site directly but the app interface is so much nicer on a small iphone screen.  I'm also probably fussy about the 'my week' screen because of the lengthy time it take my Topfield to update recordings (just over an hour for a single cycle), which I know is a Topfield issue rather than an IceTV issue but it means that I tend to rely quite heavily on the 'my week' screen to tell me what the current status of my recordings are.

I hope that this makes some sense.  Please let me know if I can provide more info or clarification.

Thanks,

Patrick

I'm assuming the new iphone app cache's most of the data (EPG, "my week", etc) and downloads updated in the background?  Is there any way to highlight to the end user how old the cached data is and display something that says it's in the process of updating.  I'm asking this because I'm finding the app virtually useless now.  For example, what I'm finding is that I look at the my week screen and wonder why some of the recordings I've scheduled aren't shown as having been downloaded to my PVR.  I then look a few minutes later and then it says that they have been downloaded.  I'm having essentially the same problem with the EPG but since it seems to download full days it's a bit easier to see when you're working from cached data and when you've got reasonably up to date data.  Since it's a real hit and miss affair as to whether I'm looking at cached data or recently updated data, I've come to not use the app and instead just use the safari browser instead.  Bit of a shame really because I like the app's interface on the iphone but functionally it's too frustrating.
Is anyone else finding this frustrating or am I just being too fussy?
Regards,
Patrick

I decided to return the Strong since Strong have no interest in fixing their product and the feedback from others on other forums simply confirms what I had suspected. I bought the unit from The Good Guys and thankfully, I had no problem exchanging it for a different brand. Got a Topfield 2400, cost me $141 more than the Strong but at least it works!

All I can say is that if you are considering a Strong, don't â€" you will regret it.

Regards,

Patrick

I recently bought as Strong 5492 and am pretty happy with it except for the way the unit behaves when turning off with timers. I emailed Strong about it and Gavin from Strong replied that in over a year of the product being on the market, I'm the first person to complain about it. Can I therefore urge everyone who agrees with me to email Strong and ask them to fix their software. I have summaried below what I see as the problem and the fix that I want:

At the moment when a timer is set to turn off when finished it will do so even if there is another recording happening at the same time. I want the unit to stay on if there is another recording happening and only turn off if a recording is set to do so when there is no other recording going on - it doesn't need to display warnings or anything, just stay on. Given that the unit will warn me if I try to turn it off manually when there is a recording going on, I think that its curent behaviour is a design flaw but Gavin from Strong insists what I'm asking for is a feature request.

The other thing that I'd like - but it could be argued that it is a feature request - is if a timer is set to turn off when finished and there isn't another recording going on then display a warning message sayng that the unit is about to shut down and allow the user to abort the shut down (in case they happen to be watching something at the time). If the user doesn't respond within a given time frame then shut down.

And lastly, if the above were fixed (particularly the first one), have IceTV sheduled timers default to turning the machine off when finished (currently they are set to leave the machine on).

Again, can I urge people to email Strong so that they will understand that this is a real problem that they should fix. If you could then post to this forum that you have emailed Strong it would let others know how many of us support this change enough to hassle Strong about it.

Thanks,

Patrick