Touch Kobo Touch Firmware 1.9.5

[EldRick]

I've been a competitive product analyst, product tester, and software product manager in the computer industry for decades, I have significant typographic and font-creation experience, and I'm very conscious of poor typography and lack of readability.

If a product in my hand has flaws, I'll find and document them. That's how products improve. Compliments may make a Product Manager feel good for a few hours, but do not serve any purpose in improving a product.

If you care to look, you will find that I've written comparable critiques on various Kindle forums and the Nook forum here. I'm an equal-opportunity griper, but I do give credit where credit is due, and not where it isn't.

The decision to ship half-baked software for an earlier ship date is always a difficult one, and in this case, I believe that it probably did not result in improving the long-run sales of the Kobo Touch, because the product was initially less-capable than the Nook II and got mediocre first reviews as a result = lost future sales.

If you disagree with my comments or can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen, but let's not be insulting to each other.

[SensualPoet]

At the risk of not serving any purpose in improving the product, I have a compliment to share with the Product Manager.

Kudos to you folks: the Kobo Touch is a reasonably brilliant device which I know has been built with fantastically scarce resources. It's a remarkable journey of a single year from Original Kobo to Kobo WiFi to Kobo Touch. I love the underlying vision: keep the user experience simple, and add features that support this vision, rather than just add features. Incrementalism can be a beautiful thing.

It's so brilliant there are folks who bought it two weeks ago, returned it, and then have bought it again already since. Show me any other e-reader out there with such am agile development cycle and I'll show you, well, I'll show you a Kobo Touch!

Thank you folks, once again.

[baronrus]

Originally Posted by EldRick

I've been a competitive product analyst, product tester, and software product manager in the computer industry for decades, I have significant typographic and font-creation experience, and I'm very conscious of poor typography and lack of readability.

If a product in my hand has flaws, I'll find and document them. That's how products improve. Compliments may make a Product Manager feel good for a few hours, but do not serve any purpose in improving a product.

If you care to look, you will find that I've written comparable critiques on various Kindle forums and the Nook forum here. I'm an equal-opportunity griper, but I do give credit where credit is due, and not where it isn't.

The decision to ship half-baked software for an earlier ship date is always a difficult one, and in this case, I believe that it probably did not result in improving the long-run sales of the Kobo Touch, because the product was initially less-capable than the Nook II and got mediocre first reviews as a result = lost future sales.

If you disagree with my comments or can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen, but let's not be insulting to each other.

qualified and experienced as you may be your presentation to the forum leaves some to be desired. My comments and to some degree my angst over your posting style comes from the fact that from your very first post here you had nothing but kvetching to say regarding the kobo and much of it was over the top.

If you had a faulty unit to start with that would explain your discontent with your initial experience. this may in fact be the case as the rest of us did not experience your issues with laggy screen and unreadable fonts.

So my apologies for being insulting.

May I suggest that if you can express you discontent with a product or more recently a website (that has nothing to do with kobo) in a more palatable and respectful manner you would likely not be met with so much push back from other forum members.

Perhaps with a more considerate expression of your opinion you could have stayed longer and contributed more to the beta group? That would certainly have been an avenue that you could have leveraged to help improve the product so that it could be more to your liking and the product developers could no doubt have benifited more from your experience.

[jackastor]

Originally Posted by rashkae

For those who want to revert to 1.9.4:

If you happen to get a copy of the firmware somewhere, after you reset your Kobo to factory settings, skip the set-up when you start, then unzip the contents of the update file into the .kobo directory of your Kobo. There should be a koboroot.tdz, manifest.md5sum, and an upgrade folder (with a couple other files in the upgrade folder.) Eject the kobo the same as you would a USB thumb drive, unplug, and the update should install itself. Good luck and have fun.

Edit: PS Technically, I haven't seen anythign in the firmware updates that gives anyone permission to copy and distribute it. While I'm sure it would be very entertaining for anyone to post a moral objection, if anyone were to engage in this wantom act of piracy, it would probably best to not flaunt it where kobo employees have no choice but see/respond.

No but what good would those files do anywhere but on the kobo itself.
I do have a question though. Why doesnt kobo post these files on the main kobo webpage so that users can utilize them if they want to undo the upgrade. Also What happens to the wifi zip when one downloads the update over a wireless sync?


regards

jack

[jackastor]

Originally Posted by baronrus

qualified and experienced as you may be your presentation to the forum leaves some to be desired. My comments and to some degree my angst over your posting style comes from the fact that from your very first post here you had nothing but kvetching to say regarding the kobo and much of it was over the top.

If you had a faulty unit to start with that would explain your discontent with your initial experience. this may in fact be the case as the rest of us did not experience your issues with laggy screen and unreadable fonts.

So my apologies for being insulting.

May I suggest that if you can express you discontent with a product or more recently a website (that has nothing to do with kobo) in a more palatable and respectful manner you would likely not be met with so much push back from other forum members.

Perhaps with a more considerate expression of your opinion you could have stayed longer and contributed more to the beta group? That would certainly have been an avenue that you could have leveraged to help improve the product so that it could be more to your liking and the product developers could no doubt have benifited more from your experience.

You know baron I put him On ignore.. its easier that way.
And his critique as he puts it leaves a lot to be desired. What i got from him was he was whiney SOB who likes no better then to be the center of attention.

any way
kudos to your mature way of handling it. a much better way then i would have reached.


regards

jack

[taming]

Originally Posted by Mithradyr

I'm also having issues with italics not being displayed in 1.9.5.

Apparently the issue has been identified and fixed, just not pushed out to us yet. I was reading a book in which the italics did work on 1.9.5, so I honestly did not see the problem when it was first brought up. That book must have had a different coding thing going on.

I don't think I would revert to an earlier edition for this, but only you know how important it is for you to have this feature right now.

[charleski]

Originally Posted by SCION

Thank you. Perhaps the original post can be updated to include this. That's a big addition to some folks who would consider the Kobo. I've directed some to this thread.

Yes indeed! So hyperlinks within ePubs work now? That's a critical change that makes the KT useable as an ereader and MDK should have announced that as well.

The problem with bold and italic is obviously linked to the need for separate fonts. If the Opentype properties fields are correctly specified it's often possible for software to recognise that different font files belong to the same family and group them together properly. But a more general solution would be to change the way fonts are loaded onto the device. There has to be a method for specifying which fonts files are associated variants and which weight/style they serve. For instance they could change it so you have to create a directory with the font family name, then create subdirectories inside this called 'bold', 'italic', 'regular' and 'bolditalic' then drop the correct font files into each directory. It's more fiddly than just dumping in a file, but could be automated by the desktop software, and has to be done to make user-supplied fonts a viable option. Whatever they do, they must resist any temptation to fake bold and italic by slanting or fattening the regular font (which would be the kiss of death).

[Toastedpine]

I played with a cbz file last night. Zoom for comics works The controls are really well thought out. The slider is needed for the zooming in. There's no double tap option, but you can turn pages just by taping once even while zoomed in. Thanks dev team, your attention to detail is like love.

[portablejim]

What is the upgrade path from a shipped Kobo to the current firmware? I have gathered that a manual update (seems easy) is required before the kobo will update more automatically.

Does the manual update take the reader straight there (current), or is it two step process, first to version X, then to the latest?

[baronrus]

I think you will need the most up to date desktop. Plug it in, follow prompts and the viola updated to most curent version. I think the manual upgrade was just for the beta build. The officially released build should be automatic. Once you have set it up once. Future upgrades can take place over wifi by hitting the cloud icon on the device. When going to 1.9.5 that upgrade was entirely automatic and took less that 2 min

[portablejim]

Originally Posted by baronrus

I think you will need the most up to date desktop. Plug it in, follow prompts and the viola updated to most curent version. I think the manual upgrade was just for the beta build. The officially released build should be automatic. Once you have set it up once. Future upgrades can take place over wifi by hitting the cloud icon on the device. When going to 1.9.5 that upgrade was entirely automatic and took less that 2 min

Thanks.

[jackastor]

Originally Posted by baronrus

I think you will need the most up to date desktop. Plug it in, follow prompts and the viola updated to most curent version. I think the manual upgrade was just for the beta build. The officially released build should be automatic. Once you have set it up once. Future upgrades can take place over wifi by hitting the cloud icon on the device. When going to 1.9.5 that upgrade was entirely automatic and took less that 2 min

The only drawback to over wifi upgrade is you cant save the update. when you update from the desktop software it does save a copy of the upgrade in zip format on your computer allowing you to go back to an older update if the new update is causing some issues.

regards

jack

[Charbucks]

Thanks to rashkae and PeterT! I'll be rolling back to 1.9.4 I can't believe how bad 1.9 was compared to 1.9.5 though, aside from the fonts issue. I am glad to see so much development going on at Kobo HQ, and to be honest, I'd rather have frequent beta-status updates than none at all. Though, perhaps an optional update would be the way to go...

[siraks]

has anyone tried a choose your own adventure book yet with the new firmware?
if i had one on hand i'd give it a go but wondering if they fixed that feature.

i read somewhere earlier that hyperlinks work, is that the same thing as what i mentioned?
thanks.

[SF&F Reader]

Originally Posted by taming

Apparently the issue has been identified and fixed, just not pushed out to us yet. I was reading a book in which the italics did work on 1.9.5, so I honestly did not see the problem when it was first brought up. That book must have had a different coding thing going on.

I don't think I would revert to an earlier edition for this, but only you know how important it is for you to have this feature right now.

Does anyone know if there is an ETA on the fix? I leave tomorrow for a week and a half trip away from the internet. I think I might do the roll back just so that I'll have all my books working, not just the kepubs.

@siraks: Who sells the Choose Your Own Adventure eBooks?