Bluefire reader app

[1611mac]

Hey.. just thought I'd mention...

Another great and convenient feature of Bluefire Reader (especially if you create ebooks.) Just set "Use Publisher's Formatting" in Settings and you can very quickly and easily see the book as the publisher created it. No "un-setting" of my own personal prefs and setting them back again. Nice!

[Barty]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

You can find out more on CBR and CBZ on our own wiki. It would be a good format to support however it needs really good image handling such as fit to screen, zoom, pan and perhaps a kind of jumping around the page to facilitate reading comic books. Most Comic book readers are fairly primitive. The wiki page talks about metadata for example.

Dale

My 2c: I think there are stand alone programs like comiczeal and even free ones like cloudreader that do a good job with cbr/cbz and should be used. Bluefire should concentrate on its core capability: epub. (I would say get rid of pdf too if not for the fact that there aren't many -- any? -- iOS apps that handle DRMed pdf.)

[Philantrop]

DRM?
- Adobe Reader
- GoodReader
- <Quite a few more>

[Micah]

Originally Posted by Philantrop

Hear, hear!

I, too, support your position with regard to proprietary formats but maybe you could consider adding support for (a subset of) the Comic Book Archive file format. It's a de-facto standard and "open" in the sense of basically being a simple archive.

Jason Sacks our Project manager would probably vote for that too. He's really, really into comics.

We'll think about that. EPUB3 will be nice for comics too.

[Micah]

Originally Posted by Valkrider

Micah, Just FYI I have updated to iOS 5.0.1 and I still have the terrible lag problem in page turning.

Sorry to hear that. I've just not been able to reproduce that on any device. Is it a variety of files? Or specific ones? We have an update coming in a few weeks, and maybe we'll get lucky and that fixes it. Lots of changes in both PDF and EPUB rendering in the update. PDF has more changes overall though.

[Micah]

Originally Posted by Philantrop

DRM?
- Adobe Reader
- GoodReader
- <Quite a few more>

I know Adobe Reader does not support their ACS4 eBook DRM (go figure) and I'd be really, really surprised if GoodReader did.

[Valkrider]

Originally Posted by Micah

Sorry to hear that. I've just not been able to reproduce that on any device. Is it a variety of files? Or specific ones? We have an update coming in a few weeks, and maybe we'll get lucky and that fixes it. Lots of changes in both PDF and EPUB rendering in the update. PDF has more changes overall though.

I only read ePub's and it seems to be all of them. Looking forward to the update and will report back after then.

[kyteflyer]

Is there an update coming soon, Micah? The Stanza that Amazon has given us is broken in some areas, so we still need a decent replacement.

[Micah]

Originally Posted by kyteflyer

Is there an update coming soon, Micah? The Stanza that Amazon has given us is broken in some areas, so we still need a decent replacement.

Yes, in weeks. but it is stuff we've been working on for many months, like better PDF reading, and better image handling in EPUB. The Collections, Brightness, Meta edit stuff is next.

[am_mread]

Originally Posted by Micah

We do have some font choices, more coming soon. Also you can set the background color, either by choosing a theme or customizing it. Working on Collections features now among other features (e.g. swipe screen for brightness). Update coming very soon will include much improved PDF reading, and improved image rendering in EPUB.

Looking forward to the additional font choices, especially Baskerville that seems to be a system font.

The themes are great, although I find it somewhat difficult to use the sliders to get the right color; not sure what an alternative could be though; perhaps a direct entry RGB value as an option. If you could duplicate the "Sepia" theme that iBooks uses that would be fantastic, I can't quite get it with the sliders.

Also, while it's great to have preset margins, if we had a bit more control as a custom margin setting that would also be great.

Thanks for bringing us Bluefire!

[Micah]

Originally Posted by da_jane

I would love to see the ability to make some sort of collections on the app itself.

Yes, We've got that working in a beta build right now. Still some polish work to do.

[Micah]

Originally Posted by am_mread

Looking forward to the additional font choices, especially Baskerville that seems to be a system font.

The themes are great, although I find it somewhat difficult to use the sliders to get the right color; not sure what an alternative could be though; perhaps a direct entry RGB value as an option. If you could duplicate the "Sepia" theme that iBooks uses that would be fantastic, I can't quite get it with the sliders.

Also, while it's great to have preset margins, if we had a bit more control as a custom margin setting that would also be great.

Thanks for bringing us Bluefire!

Thanks for the input.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Micah

Warning! I've heard reports that upgrading to iOS 5 will "blow away" your entire library. And I've head a report that it even blows away bookmarks/annotations. Anyone experienced that? Oh Apple, come on.

Upgrading to iOS5 blows away all the covers in all the books loaded with iBooks. The only way to fix the covers is to delete the books and reload them.

[kjk]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Upgrading to iOS5 blows away all the covers in all the books loaded with iBooks. The only way to fix the covers is to delete the books and reload them.

Oddly, it didn't blow them all away in my case, just some (most). No idea how it decided to spare some of them. Annoying. (But as you noted, unsyncing and resyncing brings them all back).

Plus that crappy blue "New" banner makes zero sense. Unread/in Progress/Read would make more sense.

Haven't seen it blow away my library yet though.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Micah

actually, now that I think of it, there are differences. We fixed the jailbroken issue for eBooks. There were major downsides to that fix, so we chose not to use it in Bluefire.

What are the downsides to the jailbreak fix? Can they be worse then my iPhone rebooting?