Android e-reader scroll buttons don't work

I use Newsblur on an Android e-ink e-reader (Boyue T62+) that has physical scroll buttons. These buttons are highly preferable to dragging the screen, because of e-ink’s low refresh rate and responsiveness.

But the scrolling buttons don’t work in the Newsblur app on my device. Instead, they try to navigate the apps menus.

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Did they used to? I know we built in support for volume navigation, but I’m not sure why it isn’t working.

I don’t remember them ever working.

It’s hard to tell on a device not built for multimedia, but my impression is these aren’t volume buttons - I think they may be actual scroll buttons. No volume dialogs appear when I use them, Pandora ignores them, and Firefox uses them to scroll.

Hmm, if we can figure out what keys those buttons correspond to, it should be easy enough to support them.  Can you run the following and let us know the codes for those two keys?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sonelli.keywatcher

One other thing - if you tap a single time on the middle of text/body of a story and then use those keys, do they scroll the story content?

No, if I tap in the story body, then press the scroll keys, selects the hamburger menu button. Subsequent presses don’t actually do anything to that button (no presses, no further menu navigation).

Key codes: 92 is scroll up/left, 93 is down/right. Android docs say they map to KEYCODE_PAGE_UP / KEYCODE_PAGE_DOWN

Date: Thu Feb 04 20:22:51 EST 2016
Device Manufacturer: Boeye
Device Model: rk30sdk
Device Board: rk30sdk
Device Bootloader: unknown
Android Version: REL 4.2.2 (sdk:17)

*** Key Event Detected ***
Key Code: 92
Action: 0
Meta State: 0
Flags: 8
Source: 257
Keyboard Type: 1
Device ID: 0

*** Key Event Detected ***
Key Code: 92
Action: 1
Meta State: 0
Flags: 8
Source: 257
Keyboard Type: 1
Device ID: 0

*** Key Event Detected ***
Key Code: 93
Action: 0
Meta State: 0
Flags: 8
Source: 257
Keyboard Type: 1
Device ID: 0

*** Key Event Detected ***
Key Code: 93
Action: 1
Meta State: 0
Flags: 8
Source: 257
Keyboard Type: 1
Device ID: 0

Excellent! Just what we need to get it working.  And just to be clear - you want this to scroll the story, not to switch stories, correct?

Correct. And if it’s possible, to scroll the story list too.

Just a quick update on this:  I have played with scrolling via pgup/pgdn keys, and while it “sort of” works, Android makes it somewhat tricky.  Since those are hardware keys, using them flips the app into keyboard / non-touch mode, for which we don’t yet have great support.  For instance, trying to do keyboard scrolling of the story makes it jump up and down in somewhat unpredictable increments depending on story content (images, text, etc).

I’ll see if I can crack a simple way to make the app keep scrolling via normal rules after using the buttons, but if I can’t do that in a simple way, this might have to wait until we address better keyboard support. (https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/issues/837)