Aura HD Kobo Glo/Aura/Aura HD future firmware feature request thread

[vice-versa]

what I'd like to have is

• a notepad rather than the sketchbook (that is unusable on the glo or the touch before).
• an improvement on the highlighting (sometimes, I select a word to search it in the dictionnary and a whole paragraph get selected... I can't figure why)

[llcj]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

BTW I hear they have discontinued the mini. Too bad, I actually like the mini.

Helen

The Mini is still for sale on Kobo's site. I went through to checkout with it but did not purchase as I have one, so it is still there at least.

Edit: List price is $49 (Can.) (I guess that probably does mean it is discontinued.)

[filmo]

Quite often I see Kobo MIni on sale for reduced price. I bought mine about 3 months ago for $40.00 US dollars. Lower $40. price was never diplayed in the store but it was in the store's computer. A week later they were out of stock but it now still being sold in that store for $59. This is smart marketing selling razors a little above cost so they can sell more razor blades. Kobo later should sell reader up grades and many books to these new customers.

[llcj]

Originally Posted by filmo

Quite often I see Kobo MIni on sale for reduced price. I bought mine about 3 months ago for $40.00 US dollars. Lower $40. price was never diplayed in the store but it was in the store's computer. A week later they were out of stock but it now still being sold in that store for $59. This is smart marketing selling razors a little above cost so they can sell more razor blades. Kobo later should sell reader up grades and many books to these new customers.

Have to agree with you on this. I always Thought Kobo's strategy was to sell the Mini as a loss leader.

[arspr]

Originally Posted by davidfor

It can only come to the epub reader if Kobo can add the code. But, that could be difficult as it is based on the Adobe SDK and might need some changes there.

I fear that you are probably right although I still desire it if marginally possible. Nevertheless if Kobo fixes the bug with dashes, I'll probably abandon RMSDK in favour of ACCESS. (And maybe even without fixing it...)

I mean that I've seen some issues from Sony PRS-650 also present in my brand new Kobo. So probably the fault is in Adobe's hands and they don't seem very concerned. Examples are the long paragraph issue, lack of native small caps or even this strange bug with images within the books from Aon Project.

Originally Posted by davidfor

But, long press has a meaning which you demonstrated. It allows you to select something to add a highlight. People will want to highlight and annotate the images.

The problems here is that highlighting an image doesn't seem impossible. So unless this is a Work In Progress, a future planned enhancement so Kobo crew is just leaving room for it, or something like that, the current behaviour is pretty strange.

Originally Posted by davidfor

This is a horrible idea. In case you haven't noticed the "search bar" on the home sceen is not actually a search bar. It is a button that opens another window to do a search. It is a waste of space on the home screen and should be replaced by a real "Search" button in the menus at the bottom of the screen. On the library lists, a search icon in the top bar makes sense.

Also, next time you are looking at the library list, tap the top-right of the screen to open the top menus. A search button (yes, it looks like a search bar, but again it is a button) will appear. Press that and the search window will open.

Yes, you are fully right. I did have seen the bar/button but I didn't "realize" about it.

What I was asking for is pretty pointless. And what you say about just having a little and direct icon somewhere is far better. A typical easy and minor tweak which can be pretty useful.

(I will delete the request in the first post).

Originally Posted by davidfor

Can I disagree with the need for this thread? I don't think the firmware versions have diverged enough yet. And I don't think Kobo will let them diverge any more. From statements made by Kobo, I do know that things like Pocket will come to the Touch. And the interface probably will as well. Kobo have spent this year concentrating on the new devices. The Glo received all the updates because it was the same resolution as one of them. That made it easy to do and allowed them to test a lot of the changes for the Aura.

The Touch and Mini have not been forgotten. All these firmware versions have been tested on the Touch and Mini. And lots of people are sideloading them with no issues. Pocket will come to the Touch. As to the rest of the updated interface, we'll see. I could see Kobo not doing the tiled home scree, but the rest of it should be there.

As evidence of the fact this thread is not needed, look at the first set of suggestions. Only two of them are specific to the current Glo, Aura HD and Aura interface. And one these just needs to be reworded a bit for the Touch interface. And one of the others is a bug, A bug that is present on all devices.

A more useful thing would be to restart the feature request thread. The current thread has been going for over two years. Some of the requests have been fulfilled. Others are no longer valid due to other changes. And overall it is a mess. So, refocus and make the suggestions we need now based on the current firmware for all devices.

I fully agree with you here too.

I started posting in the Kobo Touch thread, and I have stated my doubts about starting a new thread (and about being myself the person who started it).

I really think that a "power and experienced" user/administrator should try mixing all the "best and more frequent" requests into a fully brand new thread and CLOSE all the obsolete ones. I'm not going to be offended/wounded in any way if this thread is closed with the objective of clarity, (and I suppose nobody is either going to be wounded when/if "his" thread is closed and merged).

And I think, like you do, that even if Touch/Mini are left behind, separate threads for them are not necessary. As you say most of my suggestions (or any other people's suggestions) are completely valid in all the models with just minor tweaks between them. And if a model is left behind without some enhancement or if it were completely unsupported because Kobo considered that it's obsolete, I doubt that it will get ANY kind of improvement in the future. So a thread for requests on specific old models would be plainly useless in either way...

[afieldsmd]

Hello,
First time here. Google washed me up on your shore while looking for a place to make a suggestion. I'll post this elsewhere if it's ok, I simply wanted to put this here to let others know there is still a desire to suggest features (although I agree they may not need to be device specific.) Here we go:

On the sleeping home screen (in my case the book cover), it shows a "xx% read" under the word "Sleeping." If I plug my Kobo Aura HD in, another line shows up above that: "Battery xx% charged." I would like that line to always be there in the same way that "xx% read" is always there when it is asleep.

If I'm evaluating whether or not I need to charge my Kobo Aura HD, I currently have to plug it in or turn it on and tap the top menu to open up. It would be nice to be able to simply look at the screen and know if I need to charge it.

[Abtacha]

That would indeed be rather nice, I'm pretty terrible at keeping up with the battery charge myself.

[murg]

The % read is known when the device is put into sleep mode, so it isn't difficult to display it. And since eInk screens consume no energy when not changing, it doesn't cost anything in terms of battery use.

The % charge however, changes while the device is asleep. Changing the display to reflect this would require additional code to monitor the battery while asleep and change the screen appropriately.

Now, it may be that the battery is already being monitored, I'm not sure if the devices will automatically power down if the battery gets low enough (for some reason I think they do).

All that being said, I'd like to see this also.

[davidfor]

While I would like to see the battery level on the sleep screen, it isn't reliable. Unless the device wakes and updates it, then it will not reflect reality. And if it is waking to do this, then it is using battery which is exactly the opposite of what we want.

[afieldsmd]

Originally Posted by murg

The % read is known when the device is put into sleep mode, so it isn't difficult to display it. And since eInk screens consume no energy when not changing, it doesn't cost anything in terms of battery use.

The % charge however, changes while the device is asleep. Changing the display to reflect this would require additional code to monitor the battery while asleep and change the screen appropriately.

Now, it may be that the battery is already being monitored, I'm not sure if the devices will automatically power down if the battery gets low enough (for some reason I think they do).

All that being said, I'd like to see this also.

This seems like a fairly circular logic. If sleeping doesn't consume battery life, them the % battery shouldn't change either. So you could have it display the battery life when it goes to sleep and neither would change. I'm sure that's not true or maybe even what you are trying to say. If it is true, perhaps it could refresh once daily. I assume some monitoring of the battery life is happening because it will change the screen to a charge your device screen if it gets too low. So if that's already happening, the incremental battery loss of a single page refresh is nearly inconsequential.

[murg]

Sleeping does consume battery. Slowly.

If a sleeping device can power down when it detects the battery is too low, then the device is checking battery state while asleep.

If the device is checking battery state while asleep, it can update the little bit of the screen when the battery percentage changes. This should cause very little additional battery usage, and, of course, should be a settable option.