Now that the audio recording popup has been moved to the bottom of the screen in 2.0.80, I noticed that the popup contains a Cancel button on the iPhone but not on the iPad. This inconsistency makes me suspect that one or the other was not intentional.
Whether a cancel button is even needed is not clear, since one can simply tap outside of the popup to cancel. However, my personal preference is to keep the Cancel button: even knowing I can just tap outside of the popup, I nevertheless habitually go for the Cancel button.
Speaking of the Cancel button, I have been meaning to mention for some time this additional feedback:
I think it is odd that choosing to cancel a recording will trigger the previously recorded audio to replay. I think it would be preferable to play nothing at all when cancel is chosen. In my case, it is almost always a recording from the previous card, or even from a previous study session if the current card is the first card for that session, so replaying the old audio is just a distraction.
This is a minor annoyance, so it would be low priority, but it is one that bugs me almost every day. An example: I frequently use the cancel button when someone walks in the room to speak to me while I am in the middle of recording, so I cancel, but then when it starts to play back my previous recording I get a little flustered as I try to figure out how I can quickly stop the playback so I can direct my attention to the person trying to talk to me. When I am thinking quickly, it seems the fastest way is to just exit Anki completely with the home button.
You would know better than I, but as you seem to hesitate (“I think”), I hope you don’t mind if I ask if you whether you are sure, because it seems rather unlikely to me: the previous version had a cancel button on both iPad and iPhone, and the popup seemed to be the standard iOS popup. But now the popup seems to be custom, and there is no longer a cancel button on the iPad version, whereas there is one for the iPhone.
Now that the latest iOS AnkiMobile beta is passing through taps on popups, this has implications for the lack of a cancel button: the only way to cancel a button is to tap outside of the popup. However, this activates whatever action was assigned to the tap zone. There seems to be no way to cancel without triggering the tap zone action.
To be fair, this is not a huge issue to me: usually when I cancel, it is because I want to restart the recording, and for this, I can “cancel” by tapping on the area (bottom center for me) that starts recording.
The “default” they make mention of is the old style popup in the middle of the screen.
Tapping outside the popup area to cancel the dialog shouldn’t be triggering a tap in the study area though - could you confirm that is happening?
The passing through of taps was referring to messages that appear like “Card buried” - there’s been no change to windows that prompt for information or confirmation.
Thank you for confirming about that difference being Apple’s choice. It still seems odd to me, but I understand the situation. It would not be worth the effort to try to write your own solution, and usually I prefer apps fit in with the style and behavior of the host OS when possible.
I have confirmed that canceling a recording by tapping outside of the popup does trigger the tap zone underneath. To be specific:
I have configured the following taps: Bottom Center - Record Voice; Top Center - Show Answer. (I have picked just two for the sake of being specific without typing out the whole configuration.)
While on the front of the card, I tap bottom center to start recording.
To cancel the recording, I tap outside of the popup in the region of top center.
Result: the recording is canceled & the back of the card is revealed.
I redownloaded the current release version of the app, and I have observed this same behavior in the release version as well. I still have the feeling this is a recent change, since I use cancel rather frequently, and I only noticed this issue recently (I think I was still running on the last beta until a few days ago). But I can’t be sure. But at least we know that if it is a recent change, it is not as recent as the latest beta.
I just discovered that I can install older beta builds in TestFlight. So anyway, I was able to at least confirm that it has been this way since 20080.1, that is, the first build where the popup was moved to the bottom. On the last build where it was the center, 20079.1, nothing at all happens when tapping outside of the popup (neither cancel nor activating a tap zone). Sorry to be inaccurate in my previous post.