[Bas van Krieken (Bas van Krieken)]

Hi Michael!

Thanks a lot for this quick review!
I'll react to each point in your review inline.

Originally Posted by michaellxv

So I took the plunge and bought it.
Here's my review, testing on an Asus Transformer.

Main layout:
Only displays in portrait mode. I personaly hate this with the 16:10 ratio of Android tablets. Fine for a phone, crap for a tablet. Needs a portrait mode, actually needs a tablet layout as everything looks really big so probably looks better on a phone size screen.

Top third displays telescope, EP, barlow and object name. On a tablet could be a smaller font to make room for more info.

The layouts are now designed to work for both phones and tablets, some things are scaled to fill the available space.
You are using a 10" tablet (as do I to develop the layouts), but a 7" tablet user might actually like the fact that the fonts are a tad on the big side, since their screen dpi is higher, which makes everything on screen optically smaller.

Although dedicated tablet layouts might improve the UI to some extend, not much in the sense of functionality would be added. I should also mention that the number of available screen sizes and resolutions out there, would make it very time consuming to make dedicated layouts. We're on the brink of full HD screens i.e.

Originally Posted by michaellxv

Next a row of buttons for search : observation overview : observation details

An image of the selected object scaled to the viewing magnification with a circle indicating the FOV. There is enough displayed outside of the FOV that it could be used to find an object.

At the bottom, the name, type, constellation, size, mag, and location of the selected object.

Search window:
Reasonably intuitive, but currently has Messier, NGC and Planets. While images for objects from other catalogues may not be readily available on the internet it would still be nice if other catalogues were available to search. Catalogues include more that just the image such as position and mag etc.

The number of astronomical catalogues out there is surprisingly large, there are tens of them. Including all these catalogues would make the file size of the app much larger, while most observers will probably never use any of the objects in them. Most observers, not all but most, are primarily familiar with the Messier and NGC catalogues, as they are used extensively in magazines, hand controllers and star charts. Please note that the absence of a catalogue does not prevent you from logging an object, in the log screen you can change the object name to any object you like!

Originally Posted by michaellxv

Observation overview:
Displays a list of observed objects. Selecting one takes you to the observation details for the object. It does not change the object selected on the main screen.

Selecting and viewing a previously saved observation does indeed not change the settings in the main screen. I thought doing that might confuse the user during an observation session. But it might be an idea to make a setting for this.

Originally Posted by michaellxv

The Sort by window has a title of Choose Telescope.

Ah that is a bug Thanks for letting me know!

Originally Posted by michaellxv

Observation details:
Has just about all the fields you would want to record, most are pre populated with the current selections with a description field to fill out at the bottom. A lot of wasted space so that you do have to scroll down to get the description field. There is a record button if you want to talk rather than type. Save and cancel buttons at the top and bottom but they disapear from view on the middle of the scroll.

You mention a lot of wasted space. I deliberately left some space between each field so that the user doesn't get lost in all the headers, dividing lines and fields. I felt that putting them closer together made things look messy Do you consider the added space to be a mayor drawback?

Originally Posted by michaellxv

Menu button:
Gets you day/night mode, settings and help. Settings lets you and your own collection of telescopes, EP, barlow and filters. Create you own locations and import/export your observations. The location is just a name and does not use the GPS or the standard list of major cities.
It only works from the main screen.

Export function:
I got a (StringIndexOutOfBounds) error trying to export in OAL format. CSV format worked.

Hmmm that should not have happened, obviously I didn't run into that error while testing the app, nor did any of the other testers. Maybe you could send me a backup of starlog so I can examine your data? Please PB me.

Originally Posted by michaellxv

Night mode:
Weather in night or day mode this app stops the tablet going to sleep, which is good since the unlock screen is never in night mode.

Overall a nice start to what I hope develops into a very functional app.

Thanks again for your review!