Feature suggestions

[MSWallack]

I (finally) made the full transition from iBooks to Marvin and I'm really pleased. I'm not sure why I was so hesitant to make the move. Anyway, after playing with Marvin a bit more (as opposed to experimenting with a nearly empty library), I have a few thoughts for possible feature enhancements (and I apologize if these have been brought up before):

1) Sorting. One of the things that I really liked in iBooks was the ability to manually sort books in the bookshelf view. I liked my books sorted by author by series for authors that had books in a series. This also allowed me to put a book by different author with other books in the series but keep my books generally in alphabetical order by author. Marvin can sort by author sort name (yeah!) or by series (yeah, again) but not manually. I understand that a manual sort might be difficult to implement. If that won't work, perhaps either the use of a secondary sort field (author sort name, series name & number) or the addition of another sort category entirely that could be manually adjusted by the user.

2) Ok. I'll admit it. I'm one of those people who liked the look of the wooden bookshelf in the pre-iOS7 version of iBooks. Seeing Marvin's color themes (and I purchased the full theme pack in both the old and new versions of Marvin!) made me think about implementing a theme that would allow a user to either choose a bookshelf skin or perhaps a different color background in the library views. I just hate the white, white, white look of everything in iOS7.

3) Editing metadata. Yes, I know that I can change the author, title, and cover. But would it be possible to allow a user to change the text in the synopsis box? For some reason, many of the books that I've sent to Marvin have extra spaces between paragraphs in the synopsis, so it makes it a bit more difficult to read on a smaller screen and in the small area provided. Similarly, lots of data that I downloaded via Calibre's metadata import has * instead of italics. I'd love the italics, but if I can't have that, I'd prefer to dump the *.

4) Falling Asleep Mode. (Sorry. Couldn't think of a better name.) I thought of this one recently while still using iBooks. I don't know about others, but I find that when I start getting tired, I'm prone to accidentally swipe and change pages, often several pages at a time. My antidote to this problem would be a setting that requires the user to make a more deliberate swipe to turn the pages (say, swiping halfway across the screen or using two fingers) to make it more difficult for tired hands to accidentally jump to weird places in the book.

Well, that's quite a bit, I realize, especially for a new user. Please don't think of any of this as criticism. I really, really like Marvin and I appreciate all of the effort that you have put into its design and implementation. Thank you.

[kguil]

1) That's on Marvin's feature request list. I'll eventually get to it.
2) I don't feel very strongly about wood and textures. I don't think fit in Marvin's aesthetic.
3) Book summaries are HTML. I don't think it's worth building a full HTML editor into the metadata screen. Your best bet is calibre + Marvin XD.
4) I'll try and think of something without cluttering the UI with an extra switch.

[MSWallack]

Thanks for the quick response, Kris. I'll hang out in eager anticipation of #1. I certainly see what you mean about building an HTML editor and I'll try playing around with Calibre and Marvin XD.