I started a wishlist in the wiki.
http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/ILiad_Software_Wishlist

Just enter your wishes and lets see, what gets programmed.

irc/im clients

I'd be quite interested to try designing a game for it. Not something obvious like sudoku or crossword puzzles (nice though those will hopefully be if they get made) but an actual dynamic video game.

Of course it couldn't be anything much like existing games on account of the slowness of the screen update, but I'd quite like the challenge of adapting or originating a design which accommodated that. Limitations can force designers to be more creative in order to get around them - I started game programming back in the days of 4K RAM machines and getting a satisfying game into such a tiny space was to me an interesting and rewarding challenge.

I'll be interested to see if and when the SDK becomes readily available. I'd need to be able to explore a bit to find out what the limitations are and what would be feasible, but I've got a couple of half ideas lying around already :).

what games could one imagine, working with 1 screen refresh per second?
I have no idea, what could be working with that limitation.

I'd be quite interested to try designing a game for it. Not something obvious like sudoku or crossword puzzles

Reversi would be nice to play with the stylus, or battleship.

Think of it anyway: with new devices, the classicals always come back. Think about the Palm for instance, or the first games on mobile phones. And as technology matures, faster paced action games rise. Let's do it one step at a time.

isn't that 1 sec just for a full screen change, the pen would be useless otherwise.
so how long does it take for partial changes?

well, for one thing you can forget updating the entire screen. But given that annotation has been mentioned as being a bit slow but not horribly so, one can imagine game elements that move at approvimately the speed of writing. It brings to mind ideas of games that are like interactive doodles.

Like I said, I'll have to have a play to determine what is actually feasible.

isn't that 1 sec just for a full screen change, the pen would be useless otherwise.
so how long does it take for partial changes?

Youu can use the pens info constantly, just the screen refresh is lagging behind. And the notes taking application updates quite fast (i would say about 250 ms)

Youu can use the pens info constantly, just the screen refresh is lagging behind.

Yeah. I think that as long as you hold as axiomatic "a pixel takes a second or so to change state" and build a design from there, it would still be possible to create some kind of a game.

It'd be interesting to try :).

Combining book-like device and gaming: a electronic version of one of those heroic-fantasy books where you make you own decisions on the story. The Iliad can keep score, roll dice, etc. Compatible with the actual refresh rate, and it provides something to read rather than on a paper book.

Or interactive stories for children.

Or watching again Star Trek for what use they had for their pads. :-)

Yes, these devices would be excellent platforms for a resurrection and subsequent further development of the old text-based adventure games. And those graphical point-and-clicky ones, to an extent (although I personally preferred the purely text-based ones).

what games could one imagine, working with 1 screen refresh per second?
I have no idea, what could be working with that limitation.

Text based adventures like in the good old days of the adventure games dawn :)

Would be nice to see these storys driven by your own decisions and some nice images ...

well, a DSA (or DND or Shadowrun) assistant on the iliad would be great.

I already plan to scan my source books and put them on the iliad. It's significantly lighter :)

I think every Dungeon Master in this world would love a tool which handles the NPC in combat. (So you can give your players these raid-a-camp-adventures you don't want to play because it involves throwing dice for 20 enemies)

Then add a map on which you can move stones with the stylus to visualize tactical situations and you got nearly everything for a basic rpg on the iliad.


Actually nearly every board game you play without computer might be quite easily adapted.

I would like to try to develop something realtime-interactive to an extent though, great though the text adventures would be.

Imagine a game where you could give the device to an opponent who would draw a gameplay environment to challenge you. Then to play the game you have to guide some moving entity through the playfield by drawing symbols in particular places that the entity interacts with or is commanded by.

The motion wouldn't have to be terribly fast. I'm thinking of a game that'd look like it was drawn in biro ink come to life, like interactive doodles.

It might also be nice to have some little procedural-drawing toys to play with. Allowing one to interactively doodle spirographs, fractals, and such.

Again that's probably something I might be inclined to have a fiddle with myself, come SDK availability.

A spreadsheet. It wouldn't have to require calculation till you told it to do so after entering your data. Forms with similar calculation would be nice.

Calender/Event Planning.

Address/Phone List - searchable.

All of the basic palm apps would be nice.

A spreadsheet. It wouldn't have to require calculation till you told it to do so after entering your data. Forms with similar calculation would be nice.

Calender/Event Planning.

Address/Phone List - searchable.

All of the basic palm apps would be nice.

None of these would need gigantic screen refresh rates. So, where is the problem, iRex?

Just when I think of Myst or the good old little Hobbit - hmm I think there is more to do with the device than just reading ;-)

Greetings,
Frank

None of these would need gigantic screen refresh rates. So, where is the problem, iRex?

I guess they just dont have the resources to add that stuff. Thats why they open up the device with a nice SDK, so we can do it ourselves :)

So, where is the problem, iRex?

There are already cheaper devices to do those things: it doesn't make sense to make an iLiad a very expensive PDA. Or at least, iRex isn't prepared to gamble that it might.

And until the E Ink display is quite a bit faster, I think they're right. The iLiad makes perfectly good sense as a read-only (or perhaps read-mostly) device. That's where I think iRex are.

Disagreeing parties get an SDK to play with. If they turn out to be right, it won't hurt iRex a bit.

There are already cheaper devices to do those things: it doesn't make sense to make an iLiad a very expensive PDA.

Still it could be interesting to put some effort on lining the iLiad to PDAs. So you can browse the net fast on your PDA, download content, and broadcast it to the iLiad.

It could also justify people already having a PDA to buy the "next thing".

There are already cheaper devices to do those things: it doesn't make sense to make an iLiad a very expensive PDA. Or at least, iRex isn't prepared to gamble that it might.

I absolutely agree.

Having those apps would make it so that I would not have to carry the pda! One less thing to carry, one less thing to plug in, one less charger. Also if/when things work out with the iLiad battery life will be better than my Palm T3 (which I still like!)

just a thought:
it would be cool to open books directly out of an *.zip, *.rar archive. this would be a feature of the reader, right?
this is pretty cool in fbreader, since it saves a lot of 'cardspace'.

btw: did anyone ask the fbreader guys for a port of their reader (or does it run on the iliad)? it works really great on my 770 (maemo) and they are very open to 'user suggestions' for future releases.

it would be cool to open books directly out of an *.zip, *.rar archive. this would be a feature of the reader, right?

I think the OEB files have a zip container. That would be nice. And PDFs are compressed usually. Would help with HTML Files, but i dont know if minimo does that.

And PDFs are compressed usually.

Depends a bit on what PDF version is supported. The latest can compress
pretty much anything, but earlier version can only compress strings and
streams, not all the different objects found in a PDF file.

Neeeeeds bookmarks now... I've actually got a bit of content so having to open each book from the start and remember where i was then nav to there each time is getting to be a pain...

either that or power management so I can just leave my current book open anyway and not have to turn the thing off...

or better still, both! :)

btw: did anyone ask the fbreader guys for a port of their reader (or does it run on the iliad)? it works really great on my 770 (maemo) and they are very open to 'user suggestions' for future releases.

Based on my impression on 770, it would do an easy port. But it is really so impresive, or it is only because it is the only ereader available there?

It also needs a "back" command fir when you accidentally interrupt your reading. I was just now reading mi iLiad in the loo, and I put it down to attend to the, ah, paperwork, and then when I picked it up accidentally pressed the "connect" button in top-right. Of course it then displayed the download history and I lost my place in my book (and at 171 pages in and no bookmarks and no direct-jump-to-page command yet it's a pain getting back there).

It'd be nice in circumstances like that if the "Up" button took you back to where you were before.

It also needs a "back" command fir when you accidentally interrupt your reading.

Yes, that would definately be great. i always press the news button by accident.

# A function "copy from CF/SD card to iLiad's memory" would be nice. [I have several cards in use.]
# path should be visible in card's menu [like CF/ebook/a/] [uuh, is listed already on wiki wishlist :happy2: ]

When i power on the device, i want it to put me right back, where i left of (unless i removed the necessary media)

When i power on the device, i want it to put me right back, where i left of (unless i removed the necessary media)

Ie, you want a "sleep" mode.

Basically it should be *in* sleep mode whenever you're just reading a page.

Ideally.

what games could one imagine, working with 1 screen refresh per second?
I have no idea, what could be working with that limitation.

chess
backgammon
card games
...

A chm viewer (like xchm) would be very, very helpfull.

Also some support for other formats like djvu, lit and palm ...

Some Unzip capabilites so the ebooks doesn´t take so much space ...

A chm viewer (like xchm) would be very, very helpfull.

Also some support for other formats like djvu, lit and palm ...

Some Unzip capabilites so the ebooks doesn´t take so much space ...

Um... Do you know that chm is just compiled html...? You can use many tools to extract it to html on Windows & Mac, and on Linux you can use extract_chmlib.

But yes... Chm would be nice to have... :D

Yeah I surely know that ...

Don´t want to convert it - why always converting stuff??

I want to read the stuff as it is .. under "normal Linux" it is all possible .. :crowngrin

Yeah I surely know that ...

Don´t want to convert it - why always converting stuff??

I want to read the stuff as it is .. under "normal Linux" it is all possible .. :crowngrin

Yep... And if Irex don't supply a reader, I'm feling that I'm going to supply my own as I have quite a few manuals and programming books in chm format already....

You just have to recomile xchm, should not be that big deal .. the same with djvu or palm reader ...

We just need full access to the machine .. :happy2:

the same with djvu
djvu is funny because we would have note taking already available: the usual method to see djvu is to do a small key-oriented navigation that extracts each requested page towards bmp or jpg and then feeds it into the picture viewer. And iLiad picture viewer does already implement inking

You just have to recomile xchm, should not be that big deal ..

I don't have an Iliad but just from looking at the screen shots I can tell you that you don't just recompile xchm to make it work on an Iliad. Someone would need to adapt the event handling and UI rendering logic and likely things like startup/shutdown logic as well.

My wish is that they supported a ghostscript mode, where you could shut down X and use Postscript to drive the eInk screen.

My next request, hopefully easier for Irex than ghostscript...

How about an iLiad CGI that you can POST to from an XHTML form so you can persist small bits of information? Like say an XHTML calendar? The data would be stored in a flat XML file in a location specified in the FORM tag? THe data would be retrieved via a GET operation into the same CGI.

Note to Irex: If you send me a developer email I'll happily create it myself. :)

This trivial little addition would allow several forms of software development via XHTML...

well, a DSA (or DND or Shadowrun) assistant on the iliad would be great.
Well, for Shadowrun a number of assistants (using e.g. XLS-Sheets) is already available from Dumpshock, they could possibly be used with the Spreadsheet-Program (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10482&highlight=spreadsheet+iliad)
Most Rulebooks are available as PDF form e.g. battlecorps - though some of them are quite huge.
Other things like 'cheat sheets' (see dumpshock) or home-grown PDFs with rulesets, tables, etc are easy.
I don't know how good the java-implementation is, a number of java-applets could eventually be run (e.g. dice generator, table lookups, etc)

As soon as I get the money raised, I will get myself an iLiad and, yes I intent to use it as my new GM-tool. Thus yes, in the long run I will port some kind of SR-assisstant program.
If I find a D&D group I will perhaps do the same for D&D. But don't expect anything in the near future.

Possible games: Solitaire, Minesweeper, and similar
All kinds of "record sheet" or "notes sheet" (e.g. for Yatzee, Battleships, ....)
(Anybody else thinking "diplomacy" right now?)
Games like Scrabble would be easy, though you would either need two iLiads to play or a "hot chair" mechanism. Same applies to games like battleship, Backgammon, ...
Most "play against the computer" cardgames should be possible.

Did anybody wished for a contenlister that will display more items per page by not making all records the same (usually way to big) height? It will be good if we can have a page of contenlister settings, like wrap long filenames, display file date, font size for file names. It should not be hard to autogenerate html file for nice view of each folder?

Did anybody wished for a contenlister that will display more items per page by not making all records the same (usually way to big) height?

About everyone who has an iLiad. :D