Link Premium Membership with Pocket3 iPhone App

[kgreger]

Hi JapanesePod101.com team!

I just downloaded your Pocket3 Japanese iPhone app. I like the idea of having the brilliant JPod101 podcasts living in their own app, as using the iPod app on my iPhone never really worked for me:
- browsing the episodes is a pain due to the long episode titles (which on the other hand help to keep things organized!) as the iPod app cuts them before the "interesting" part, i.e. the episode number etc.
- following the dialog transcripts in the iPod app is a pain due to the horrible font and line spacing. Also, while centered text works great for lyrics (which I guess is what this feature was planned to be used for by Apple), it makes the dialog transcript almost illegible.
- keeping the lessons organized by season (and additionally in categories like complete lesson, dialog only, review track, etc.) required lots of maintenance in iTunes (BTW another horrible piece of software by Apple...).

So after all this ranting, here's finally my questions to you guys:
How can I link my existing JapanesePod101.com Premium Membership Subscription to the Pocket3 iPhone app, so I can download all the episodes into the app without having to pay for them again?

I know that I can download the most recent app of every season into the app for free, but I'd like to be able to use older lessons in the app as well.

よろしくお願いします、
コンスタンティン

[Jessi]

Hello Constantine!
Thank you for posting
I have forwarded your feedback to the mobile apps creation team.

Regarding your question, the Pocket3 iPhone application is a standalone application and is not connected to the website. Regretfully, there is currently no way to synchronize the lessons that you have on JapanesePod101 to Pocket3.
We're sorry for the inconvenience.

[kgreger]

Hi Jessi,

thank you for the prompt reaction!

It would actually be a great and very useful feature if Premium subscribers could reap the whole potential of all the JapanesePod101.com lessons from within this app...

Apart from that, there seems to be something wrong with the assignment of the listings in the lesson store and the lesson data that is being downloaded by the app:
- under category "Lower Intermediate" I found a "Season 7"! While I thought the current season was season 6, I dug deeper, only to find the 16 lessons from Season 6 listed there. The only lesson that was downloadable for free there was "Who Is That Japanese Person?", which is lesson 1 of Lower Intermediate Season 6 (cf. http://www.japanesepod101.com/2011/01/0 ... se-person/). Shouldn't the newest lesson be available for free (i.e. lesson 16)?
- same goes for the "Season 6" listing - it actually contains the season 5 lessons, with the oldest (lesson 1) downloadable for free.

--> Looking into this more closely I realized that there was no season 2 listed in the app, so everything from season 3 through 6 is shifted to 4 through 7. The same seems to be true for many other lessons (e.g. Advanced Audio Blog, Beginner, JLPT, Survival Phrases, Upper Intermediate (no season 2); Absolute Beginner, Basic Japanese, Newbie (starts with season 2, not 1); Kantan Kana (starts with season 3, not 1); Learn with Pictures and Video (starts with season 5, not 1); but then again I didn't check all of them)...
This doesn't explain, though, why only the oldest lesson of each season is available for free, while it should be the most recent one.

I hope my findings made any sense and will help you to find the bug. And just in case: my CV should be somewhere at your HR department. Just in case...

よろしくお願いします
コンスタンティン

[Jessi]

Hi Constantine

Thank you for letting us know about that issue as well - I have let the app team know about it, and they will have it fixed in a future version of Pocket3.

As for which lessons are made available for free, although JapanesePod101 gives free access to the latest lessons, Pocket3 only gives free access to the first lessons of each seasons so that the users can try the season before deciding to purchase additional lessons from that season.
I hope that helps Thank you as always!