As I log on to these forums fairly regulaly, it has been interesting to see how many people are viewing both the Sony and Iliad forums. My impression seems to be that more and more people were viewing the Sony forum, and less and less viewing the iLiad forum (Sony having well overtaken iLiad) right up to the point of iRex releasing root access. Now it seems as if the iLiad forum is the more popular again.

It would be interesting to know (if logs are kept) if interest in the forums (and therefore the device) is directly related to the opening up of the iLiad, if so iRex should be looking at these statistics and taking heed and opening up more quickly!

I'm in the forum a ridiculously large amount of the time, and I'd also say that there was a strong upward spike in iLiad activity when they cracked the barn door. There just didn't seem to be much to discuss. :shrug:

Then they opened up and the activity jumped, and the discussions quickly went way over my head. :grin:

I couldn't say whether the activity of the Sony was greater than the iLiad, but I did notice the increase. One thing that might be interesting to know is if the recent iLiad activity has been mostly in the Developer's sub-forum. If so, then that would be a pretty good confirmation of your theory. :yes:

I agree...I have been spending lots of time in the developers corner as well...^^

The Developer's forum is where all the action is taking place. The rest of the iLiad forum is kinda quiet most of the time.

I feel more of an owner of the iLiad now, since I can do more with the iLiad then just what Irex offers.

I think Irex has done the right thing to give people real access. And surely they will profit from what others produce software-wise.

The market fill find out what the best software is.

As the iLiad is primarily a reading device, it will do best when it is possible to read all kinds of books and other documents (especially office-docs) on it.

Furthermore, the iLiad has the ability to write on. Irex should use this as an advantage over other (less costly) readers by supplying an Irex or 3rd party editor/ word processor to create and edit and read popular document formats (besides scribbling on read-only documents).

Another advantage is the networking capability. By now it should be possible to send documents to an iLiad, by using an e-mail addres like:
user.domain.countrycode@ids.com in which the first part is the complete email addres as known at Irex, whereby the @ is converted to a "." (not completely watertight, but will do). The document should then appear in a "Mail" folder on the iLiad with the sender and mail message probably in a manifest file. Maybe there are better ways to accomplish that.

You could send files etcetera via a web-interface (to a normal e-mail address via IDS to the iLiad) and also see if the receiver got the files from the server or not (yet) or recieve an automatic confirmation by mail to the sender.

Irex or the user community could start with a free Newsletter over IDS, to test subscription via the IDS system and to get users accustomed to this mechanism.

Using the iLiad to connect to the own PC is on the to-do list, I understand.

Another application could be to connect 2 iLiad wirelessly to exchange data-files or to scibble on each other's screen remotely (chat). Would be nice in meetings !!! but it could drain batteries fast.

What I would like very much too is a PIM (Personal Information Manager) for appointments, addresses, phone numbers etc.

I get carried away, my 5 cts becomes more of a wish list now.
I will stop here.

Irex or the user community could start with a free Newsletter over IDS

Now that is a great idea henkvdg. I would love to subscribe to this forum and receive it via IDS!

Now that is a great idea henkvdg. I would love to subscribe to this forum and receive it via IDS!
And we'd like to implement this if it anyone came up with an idea :D

The mechanism is pretty obvious, clicking in a bash script would start the network, attach to the repository, download the newsletter and installing it. It shows explicitly a motivation for iLiad bussinesmen to be afraid of user control of the machine.

On the other hand, I am not sure if we have enough volunteer journalists to do a e-ink newletter.

Using the iLiad to connect to the own PC is on the to-do list, I understand..

:blink:



Another application could be to connect 2 iLiad wirelessly to exchange data-files or to scibble on each other's screen remotely (chat). Would be nice in meetings !!! but it could drain batt.

Pretty easy to do, the network part, because fortunately the iLiad supports AdHoc networking, you do not need an AccessPoint at all.


What I would like very much too is a PIM (Personal Information Manager) for appointments, addresses, phone numbers etc..

I vote for VCARD 2 standarisation, I understand this is the IETF proposal for exchange of PIM info. But does the iLiad has some alarm system? I doubt it.

The mechanism is pretty obvious, clicking in a bash script would start the network, attach to the repository, download the newsletter and installing it. It shows explicitly a motivation for iLiad bussinesmen to be afraid of user control of the machine.

On the other hand, I am not sure if we have enough volunteer journalists to do a e-ink newletter.


I believe just hitting the network button will do the trick if the newsletter is sent to the IDS for distribution to the people (= MAC addresses + email-addresses) om the list.

I believe just hitting the network button will do the trick if the newsletter is sent to the IDS for distribution to the people (= MAC addresses + email-addresses) om the list.
So currently we'd need to publish to the official IDS in order for iLiad users to download the newsletter, right?

What I was thinking for instance is a specially prepared PDF file with a weekly report of what's been going on at MobileRead (for instance, latest threads, hottest threads, with/without posts, polls, etc).

So currently we'd need to publish to the official IDS in order for iLiad users to download the newsletter, right?

What I was thinking for instance is a specially prepared PDF file with a weekly report of what's been going on at MobileRead (for instance, latest threads, hottest threads, with/without posts, polls, etc).

Of course not nescessarily !
But Irex designed the IDS to do so. Maybe it is used for that already, but we don't see that at the moment. What we see are only Irex software updates.

Pushing a button seems the simplest thing to do.
But, of course there are many more ways.

If we publish an email letter, or a newsletter on a website as HTML or XML or PDF or TXT, al those formats can be read on the iLiad !

The newsletter idea, composed (initially) of MobileRead posts, sounds great. henkvdg, I think you should post this over at the iRex forums. They would be foolish to turn down a free source of good content like this (but they've done some surprisingly foolish things recently, so who knows?)

Heck, you ought to be able to subscribe to their own forum content on iDS. But if they don't know how to organize that (or, more likely, just don't have time to do so), then perhaps they'll take the MobileRead content.

henkvdg's other ideas sound good to me, too. The ad-hoc networks with the ability to see and markup the same document would be very helpful in meetings. I think the eMail idea is brilliant. Simple, easy to use -- a great way for someone else to send you a document directly to the place you'd most like to read it. (I don't look forward to getting spam on the iLiad, though.)

(I don't look forward to getting spam on the iLiad, though.)

Hehe that was a scary thought... there would have to be some nice spam protection in place before I would try that :)

All the other ideas are great! Especially the adhoc wlan simultaneous editing of documents! However, I guess that would be very tricky unless some open-source application for this already exists (any know of one?)

Regarding the news-letter: A news letter could be faked by us (well, you developers anyway) by having a script that starts wlan/lan, wgets a specific URL, and places it in the news folder. I started on this myselves, but I didn't have any content to download so I aborted... no websites are suitable for the iLiad browser :(

There was a perl script that downloaded BBC news (index files and linked articles) and converted links etc. If that script were set to run once a day and create a tar-ball of it, people with the .sh extension would have a simple way of getting BBC news to their iLiad. That would be a nice demonstration of a simple subset of the iLiad capabilities.

There was a perl script that downloaded BBC news (index files and linked articles) and converted links etc. If that script were set to run once a day and create a tar-ball of it, people with the .sh extension would have a simple way of getting BBC news to their iLiad. That would be a nice demonstration of a simple subset of the iLiad capabilities.

Yep, its still going at http://www.syngrithy.org.uk/index.php?pT=2 . You'll need to write a shell script to wget and un-tar it in a handy location... :D

...no websites are suitable for the iLiad browser :(

A very sweeping statement...! *Complicated* web sites don't run very well, but basic ones such as Wikipedia are usually fine...

... All the other ideas are great! Especially the adhoc wlan simultaneous editing of documents! However, I guess that would be very tricky unless some open-source application for this already exists (any know of one?) ...

www.inkscape.org it has a feature called Inkboard, since V 0.43. But i have my doubts that Inkscape will be easy or even able to port to the iLiad.

Going back to the original thread I have to say this. I have no experience in programming or electrotech, I barely know the difference between a diode and a resistance. The Iliad forums have taken mostly a technical direction where I understand nothing of what is being said as the PRS still focuses on the relation between the user and the device. But I still go to them and try to understand. I like the Iliad more than the reader in many respects, but being more bug prone it kind of scares me.

If you want to follow the discussion on the proposed MR newsletter, please continue here (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8779) so we don't have to hijack this thread any longer.

A very sweeping statement...! *Complicated* web sites don't run very well, but basic ones such as Wikipedia are usually fine...
I agree that it was a quite sweeping statement, but this is a forum after all:)

Wikipedia is actually quite useful (as well as entertaining), I'll add it to my iLiad web shortcuts. However, slashdot didn't work and I didn't really know what to wikipedi so I didn't try that one. Google also works great, unfortunately it is not much use as the search results usually doesn't work...

Hopefully the html viewer will be improved as well.