11-15-2011, 09:40 PM | #736 |
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The app quits whenever you switch to another app. You have to re-launch it to start reading again. Not the worst thing in the world, but we don't want to have diminished feature set for the vast majority of users who do not modify their operating system. You could just use the Libri app, yes?... Same app other than that specific difference.
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11-15-2011, 09:46 PM | #737 |
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11-16-2011, 01:42 AM | #738 |
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11-16-2011, 08:57 AM | #739 |
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I don't actually know the nitty gritty details (I'm basically a UX guy) - but our devs do. I assume it has something to do with the C++ libraries that make up the guts of the app. Most iOS apps that support either PDF or EPUB leverage built-in native iOS features/API's. In order to support Adobe's DRM, our app has to do all of the PDF rendering and EPUB rendering itself - from scratch essentially (e.g. the EPUB renderer in Bluefire Reader essentially is a custom-purpose web browser for eBooks - with full CSS support, etc). It is *many*, *many* thousands of lines of code. Far more complexity than 99.9% of apps including games.
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11-16-2011, 09:18 AM | #740 |
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For example, enabling text selection in most apps would take a developer a minute or two, and a couple lines of code. In Bluefire Reader, it is many thousands of lines of code, as we can't use iOS text selection API's.
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11-16-2011, 02:45 PM | #741 | |
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Quote:
I thought basically the adobe sdk does it all for you and you're writing the UI wrapper. |
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11-16-2011, 04:46 PM | #742 |
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To clarify, the sdk *is* those C++ libraries I was talking about. We did not have to write it all ourselves -thank goodness. That said, porting those Libraries to work on iOS (Objective C environment), or Android (Java environment) is a substantial task that goes far beyond just UI "wrapper". e.g. making text selection work nicely on iOS still took us weeks of work -after porting the core libraries. Overall, it took a very skilled/experienced team about 1 year to build Bluefire Reader. The point I was trying to make was in relation to your question of why we have challenges with modified versions of the OS that some other apps don't have - which is in part due to the fact that we are not using "built-in" features of iOS for rendering, and the code is a complex mix of C++ and Objective C code.
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11-28-2011, 02:56 PM | #743 |
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11-28-2011, 02:59 PM | #744 | |
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Quote:
If you needs any testers, I'd be happy to give it a go. |
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11-29-2011, 07:32 AM | #745 |
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A heads-up that Bluefire Reader 1.6 is available for iOS in the App Store.
Improvements to PDF handling seems to be main feature, along with a score of tweaks and minor fixes. Looks good so far on my iPad... |
11-29-2011, 08:44 AM | #746 |
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11-29-2011, 09:53 AM | #747 |
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There's improvements in 1.6 in terms of how the library is "built" so it should now handle bulk imports a bit better. The more fun stuff is coming in 1.7 - including swipe up down for brightness. Shooting for December
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11-29-2011, 12:21 PM | #748 |
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11-29-2011, 09:40 PM | #749 |
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One fun feature did make it into this more "functional" update - edit meta data! You can now change the Title, Author, Publisher of any book. I doubt I'll use that much, but we had lots of requests, and we listen.
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11-30-2011, 06:11 PM | #750 |
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Downloaded it and it looks good. Glad to see internal links working.
Any chance of a dictionary in the December update? Doesn't ios5 have one built in that you can use? If you do include it, it'd be great if the definition pop up were dark if you are in night mode. I'm switching back to this from Stanza. It's a good app and looks to be only getting better. |
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