A sweet new update for the Windows Central app for Windows 10 and Mobile should be hitting the Store in the next few hours (maybe more, the Store has had some quirks lately).
Build 30 of the Windows Central app continues to add some highly requested features mostly relating to comments that should make our core users quite happy. This update follows build 29 last week that added the ability to edit comments and our notification tone for new articles.
Here is what to look for when you get the update:
Windows Central App Build 30 (v1.1.30)
- Comment sorting (Local and Global) – You can now you can sort comments by oldest first or newest first. There are two places for this configuration with one comprehensive under the general App Settings for all stories by default and the other within each article, should you wish to change it on the fly.
- Jump to end of comments - You can finally jump to the last comment in each article by hitting the down-arrow icon in the app bar. This feature will help in those situations where there are 200+ comments.
- Refresh Comments - We know many of you thrive in our comments section so you can now hit the refresh button to see new replies and any new comments added since initial article load
- Improved startup time - We're always trying to make the app faster for mobile so with this build you should see some significant improvements on app and image loading. We know this is a pain point for Windows Phone users, and we'll continue to optimize where we can.
- Improved comment loading performance - Same as above especially with the revised user avatars this should help to scroll
- Call to action for comment - At the bottom of the comments you will now see a comment box if logged in for quickly posting and a small dialog to share your thoughts or asking you to log in
Note: We found there may be a rare case where quickly scrolling comments could crash. We already have a fix in place and that patch should roll out tomorrow morning.
Besides all of that, there are a few other more minor tweaks to the app bar and icons. The Share feature is moved to the sub-menu, but we'll be adding the icon back on the next release likely coming later this week.
What's coming next
For the next update we're looking to add a few more categories to the top of the app and haptic feedback (vibrate) for feed and article loading. We also have to fix some indenting issues with text and move around some icons from this build. We may be able to get that update out later this week.
Afterward, we also have a few more ideas for comment sorting we'll be working and later on, we'll try to do something about adding the ability to collapse individual comment reply threads, but that is a little tricky and will take some time. Reworking some of the forum layout and functionality is also getting close, and we'll try to make it so that a notification for a comment reply takes you to that comment, but that is also not easy so give us some time. We'd also like to add back support for Pocket (read it later) too.
We still have a lot we plan to do for the app, so don't forget to keep voting for features and fixes on our Windows Central UserVoice page!
As always, if you have left a review for the app in the past and would like to revise it based on our work and improvements, we'd appreciate it. And if you have never left a review for our app in the Store, and you are happy with how it's going, please take the two minutes to rate it as it helps app visibility for new users. Thanks!
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