A New Era for PAD Friend Finder (The Time of v2.0) - Gear61/PADFriendFinder-Android GitHub Wiki

PAD Friend Finder v1.0 (for Reddit) was more or less functional, but it left a lot to be desired. The entire interface was very bland, there was a lot of technical debt, and unfortunately, there were a few bugs as well. Since then, PAD Friend Finder has been given a complete makeover. Here are the differences between v1.0 and v2.0 with the details behind each change:

  1. The interface and navigation have been completely overhauled - Starting off with the most obvious change, the main page now uses a navigation drawer to match the look and feel of modern-day Android apps. There is also a floating action button, one of Google's tenets of their new Material Design, to add monsters to your box. The navigation is infinitely smoother than it was before, and you can now do much, much more from the homepage. We also heavily incorporated Font Awesome to make the app richer and less bland.

  2. The app now pulls the monster pool from the server - Before, the monster pool was packaged in the app itself. This made the app very bloated and prevented us from pushing new monsters quickly because we had to wait for our app updates to be approved (2-4 hours for Android, 5+ days for iOS). Now, adding new monsters is literally a single line of code and the change is picked up by everybody's version of the app everywhere in seconds. PAD Friend Finder has gone on a diet and is now 1.84MB, down from a monstrous 14MB.

  3. Supported leads page - Before, it was kind of hard figuring out exactly what monsters we supported. You had to open the monster form and just awkwardly fiddle around with the input. Now, there's an entire page dedicated to showing you exactly what leads we support. It's equipped with a search bar that updates the monster list dynamically as you type. The monster list is sorted by monster ID descending, so the most recent and most relevant monsters are always at the top. Lastly, clicking on any monster immediately opens up the friend searching form and pre-fills it with that monster for your convenience.

  4. The monster form has been revamped for a smoother experience - First of all, the form is now scrollable when the keyboard is open and the keyboards each have a sensible next or done button based on their context. I consider these as bug fixes. Second, you can now max individual stats as opposed to only relying on hypermax for this functionality. Lastly, each field now has a header before it to tell you what it is. Before we relied on the input hint to tell you what the field was, but after you filled it out, it was gone and confusing. Never again.

  5. You can now browse monster boxes by PAD ID - Pretty self-explanatory. There is now a page where you can type in an ID and see what monsters they have in our system. If you want to figure out if a certain player can put up a certain lead for you, this page is for you. If you've searched for a player and you like their box, you can copy their PAD ID to clipboard or favorite them. Speaking of the latter...

  6. Favoriting - You can now favorite PAD IDs. By favoriting a PAD ID, you can see it from your favorites page and simply click on it to immediately check out this player's monster box. You can also favorite/unfavorite IDs from this page (obviously), and favorited IDs will also be suggested via auto-complete on the ID search page. Also, by favoriting an ID, it will be hidden from your search results, because we assume you have friended this player already. In short, favoriting is our weird version of friending.

  7. View monster box from search results - Let's say you have very few friend spots left, so you gotta be picky. You main Light Kali, so you have just searched for hypermaxed Light Kalis. However, you want to make sure that these guys have other leaders that you're interested in to get the most value from them as friends. Simply click on the monster box icon on the right of any search result to conveniently load that user's box. From there, make your decision to favorite them, copy their ID, or add them.

  8. Settings - You can now choose the monster picture of your favorite monster in app and set it as your avatar. You can also change your PAD ID in case you messed up entering it in when you first opened the app. Your user information (avatar and PAD ID) are in the navigation drawer at the top, and you can click on these as a shortcut to change them. Clicking on any monster in your box gives you the option of setting it as your avatar as well. Lastly, you can send us feedback from the settings page, and, if you're feeling nice, rate us from there as well.