While reading articles (after, say, selecting “all stories”) on the Android app, swipe left takes you to the next unread article among all those queued in your feed. Intuitively, swipe right (my first search was actually for “swipe back”) should take you to the last preceding article you read. And it kindof does, maybe even mostly, but I’ve definitely noticed that it sometimes doesn’t take you back from your current article to the one you were reading a moment before. This is kindof disorienting, but maybe I just don’t know what swipe back is actually doing.
No search results on “swipe right” in the last six months and the most-likely-looking older results don’t seem to address this issue, so… any explanation of what’s going on?
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Depends, are you swiping from the edge of the screen or in the middle?
Hah ok maybe I need to RTFM… Is this documented somewhere that I’m just failing to find? I’ll have to wait until I get more articles queued up before I can experiment with the difference…
If you are looking at the list of stories, swipe gestures are whatever you’ve configured them under Preferences->Gestures. The exception is that we respect the standard Android gesture to go back to the drawer of feeds by dragging in from the left edge.
Edit: while the above is all true, I just realized it sounds like you’re talking about scrolling between actual stories as you read them? That just goes forwards and backwards in the story list depending on what order you view them in. If you’re using the default “Newst First” story order, newer stories are on the left and get older if you scroll right.onbeforeunload = function() {};onunload = function() {};onbeforeunload = function() {};onunload = function() {};
Yep, between stories while reading. I am almost 100% certain that backwards sometimes does not do what I would expect, but will test more thoroughly to confirm. The cause for my writing this question was that I was reading story #5 (say), swiped left to go to #6, had a thought about #5 so swiped right to go back and re-read it, but found that I did not return to #5 as expected, instead arriving at something earlier in my recent reading history, possibly #3 or #4. Going forwards (left swipe) brought me back to #6, and another back/right swipe brought me back to #3/#4/whatever, so it was as if #5 had vanished from my recent reading history despite my having been reading it seconds previously. The most obvious difference between my setup and your comment is that I’ve chosen “Oldest first”.
… and just to be clear since I am not a touchscreen UI expert, could have my terminology wrong and can’t immediately see a Wikipedia article canonicalising the terms, by “left” or “forwards” swipe I mean putting my finger down in the middle of the screen, dragging it to the left edge and releasing. The opposite, drag-to-right-edge, is a “right swipe”. Both mainly do what seems to be intuitively correct, but right swipe sometimes surprises me as above.
In this case you’re more scrolling left and right (by dragging your finger right and left respectively). Swipes/gestures are a slightly different case.
If you’re reading oldest-first and/or in unread-only mode, it is possible you can occasionally get weird behaviour if your reading session is very long, since already-read articles might be cleaned up by your device to save space. It should take many hours before this becomes a problem, but if it happens more quickly, please do use the “Send app feedback -> email a bug report” feature as soon as you see it happen and be sure to reference this discussion.
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