After many weeks of work, the latest release of the
Calibre Companion is ready to test. This is a major release, containing many of the features most asked for by users:
- A cover grid view
- combined grouping and book lists on tablets
- easier transition between grouping and viewing lists of books
- More information in the action bar
and many (!) other changes.
As we have changed so much, we think that it is prudent to make this release available to people willing to test it.
Some notes:
- This is a fully licensed version of CC. You must have purchased CC to run it.
- There is no database schema change so it is possible to go back a version, but it isn't particularly easy to do.
- It is possible that there may be "crashing" bugs in this test version. We have run it a lot, but everybody does things a bit differently so we might have missed some corner cases.
If you are willing to test, send me a PM with an email address and I will email you the APK today or tomorrow. You must be able to install manually the APK, something that most file managers do handily.
Please post your comments on this thread. We are particularly interested in crashes, clearly incorrect behavior, and things that are confusing. Of course we will listen to comments on appearance and artwork, but we may not act on these before general release.
The user interface now uses a variant of the "drawer" that Google is using in the new versions of its apps. In particular we are using the drawer that Google is using in their "hangout" app.
In the drawer paradigm, there are two parts to the screen, the part normally visible and the part that is shown when you "open" the drawer. The grouping functions are inside the drawer, seen when it is open. If there is sufficient screen space then the drawer is always open. If there is not sufficient space then you slide the drawer open when you need it, and shut it when you don't.
The screen shots below will (I hope) make this drawer notion clearer:
First, these 5 images are from a Galaxy Nexus:
The following 5 images are from a Nexus 7. You can see that in landscape the drawer is always open, while in portrait the book data is partially visible when the drawer is opened:
And these last 4 are from a Galaxy Tab 10.1:
