[Archived] Marvin ePub reader for iPad

[kguil]

@vega:
1) Textured backgrounds are on my to do list. Right now, I'm prioritising some updates to the iPad version and the iPhone version.
2) I've got 'plans' for the home screen.
3) I'll look into the prompts.

@Jessica Lares: That's great. Good luck with your project.

@mariosipad: Could you send me the XML document for your root OPDS page? If you need help with this, feel free to send me an email.

[Faterson]

To me, highlighting is not a learning tool, but a tool to ensure that great passages I encounter while reading books, do not fall into the realm of the forgotten. (I sometimes also highlight passages that are particularly badly written, but focus on the good things in a ratio of 99:1.) I'm running an online quotations project at www.aboq.org, still in its initial stages after many years. (I lack the programming expertise to customize the MediaWiki software to fit the project's needs, so I'll need to hire programmers to do that for me, if I can get the necessary funding to hire the programmers.)

So, the passages I highlight in Marvin (and GoodReader) are later transferred to www.aboq.org. However, the project is conceived so that anyone from around the world could publish their favourite passages there, not just myself. Here are a couple of examples of what a quotations/highlights page might look like:

• The Thirteen Problems (1933) by Agatha Christie (to me, hands-down the best Miss Marple volume)
• Двенадцать стулев, i. e. The Twelve Chairs (1928) by Ilya Ilf & Yevgeniy Petrov (much-loved, hilarious Russian classic)

*****

crashnburn, I'd forget about underlining in Marvin, instead of or in addition to highlighting. It was tested in the Marvin Beta group, and wasn't working properly. Why? Because Marvin gives you so much flexibility to customize line spacing in the books you read. It's easy enough to accomplish underlining for, say, GoodReader, which gives you no such flexibility (because PDF files, by nature, are rigid and inflexible).

The same applies to highlight colours. The only reason GoodReader gives you the full palette of colours for highlighting, is because it's totally inflexible in terms of customizing the background of pages. It can only be white (or whatever default the publisher specified), or shades of grey. In contrast, you can choose from literally dozens of delightful background colours in Marvin, and textured backgrounds are coming up. Given that, the highlight colours must be sufficiently visible no matter what background colour/texture the user may have selected. I can, therefore, understand why Kris would limit the choice of available highlight colours to 5.

To me, 5 highlight colours seems just about right. For what it's worth, here is how I use the 5 highlight colours in Marvin (and I use similar colours for the same purposes in GoodReader):

• YELLOW highlight –> typo needs to be corrected here
• GREEN highlight –> formatting needs to be improved here
• PINK highlight –> favourite passage of mine
• BLUE highlight –> otherwise important or noteworthy passage
• PURPLE highlight –> general notes and comments on highlighted passage/book content

[mariosipad]

Originally Posted by mariosipad

One of the changes (new feature actually) in Marvin 1.5 is

Improved OPDS searching. Marvin can now search in several new catalogs such as COPS, Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive and Feedbooks.

I am a COPS user and have encountered a problem with it.

Problem solved!

To use search with COPS you have to set one of the options in config_local.php.

$config['cops_full_url'] ='';
to
$config['cops_full_url'] = 'http://<IP_of_your_COPS_server>/COPS_directory/';

Example:
$config['cops_full_url'] = 'http://192.168.1.123/cops34/';

for Marvin

[kguil]

Cheers. I'm glad you managed to fix this.

[mariosipad]

All credits to the developer of COPS!

Kris, are you using absolute or relative URL in your search in Marvin?
According to the COPS developer relative URL in OPDS / Opensearch should be valid. (as if I know what I'm talking about )

[kguil]

Marvin gets relative URLs in the OPDS feed and makes them absolute based on the "master" URL of the current feed (as it should be). Marvin should work with relative URLs without any problems.

[mariosipad]

Do not want to start a discussion about a topic I, clearly, do not understand enough about.

I've learned to never day "but", but still

Marvin gets relative URLs in the OPDS feed and makes them absolute based on the "master" URL of the current feed (as it should be).

This is exactly what I had to do in the settings of COPS to make search in Marvin work.
I had to set $config['cops_full_url'] = 'http://192.168.1.123/cops34/';, the "master" URL of the feed (in my LAN).
I never needed to set this option in COPS for Marvin to work with COPS OPDS feeds. Hence the initial error report.

And now back to reading books with Marvin, served by COPS, content managed by Calibre. For me the perfect combination.

Many thanks to the developers who make this possible!

[crashnburn]

Originally Posted by Faterson

To me, highlighting is not a learning tool, but a tool to ensure that great passages I encounter while reading books, do not fall into the realm of the forgotten. (I sometimes also highlight passages that are particularly badly written, but focus on the good things in a ratio of 99:1.) I'm running an online quotations project at www.aboq.org, still in its initial stages after many years. (I lack the programming expertise to customize the MediaWiki software to fit the project's needs, so I'll need to hire programmers to do that for me, if I can get the necessary funding to hire the programmers.)

So, the passages I highlight in Marvin (and GoodReader) are later transferred to www.aboq.org. However, the project is conceived so that anyone from around the world could publish their favourite passages there, not just myself. Here are a couple of examples of what a quotations/highlights page might look like:

• The Thirteen Problems (1933) by Agatha Christie (to me, hands-down the best Miss Marple volume)
• Двенадцать стулев, i. e. The Twelve Chairs (1928) by Ilya Ilf & Yevgeniy Petrov (much-loved, hilarious Russian classic)

*****

crashnburn, I'd forget about underlining in Marvin, instead of or in addition to highlighting. It was tested in the Marvin Beta group, and wasn't working properly. Why? Because Marvin gives you so much flexibility to customize line spacing in the books you read. It's easy enough to accomplish underlining for, say, GoodReader, which gives you no such flexibility (because PDF files, by nature, are rigid and inflexible).

The same applies to highlight colours. The only reason GoodReader gives you the full palette of colours for highlighting, is because it's totally inflexible in terms of customizing the background of pages. It can only be white (or whatever default the publisher specified), or shades of grey. In contrast, you can choose from literally dozens of delightful background colours in Marvin, and textured backgrounds are coming up. Given that, the highlight colours must be sufficiently visible no matter what background colour/texture the user may have selected. I can, therefore, understand why Kris would limit the choice of available highlight colours to 5.

To me, 5 highlight colours seems just about right. For what it's worth, here is how I use the 5 highlight colours in Marvin (and I use similar colours for the same purposes in GoodReader):

• YELLOW highlight –> typo needs to be corrected here
• GREEN highlight –> formatting needs to be improved here
• PINK highlight –> favourite passage of mine
• BLUE highlight –> otherwise important or noteworthy passage
• PURPLE highlight –> general notes and comments on highlighted passage/book content

The answer to all the above is Good Data Schema Design. You need 'Data Packets & Actions' that will allow sharing of Quotes, Highlights.

Which means an all encompassing Schema for that is needed.

You are choosing background color variation over highlighting variation.

Why cannot those two be independent of each other? Yes, there may be cases of "clash / conflict".
But its like saying, in Microsoft Word I will
- DISALLOW WHITE FONTS because most people have white backgrounds
- DISALLOW Gray Fonts because some people might want to have GRAY backgrounds

This is a flawed design mindset.

Now, since your concern is 'region of conflict' - Background | Highlight | Text.

- As the independent user of the Reader App, i'd like freedom of all the above three :P

- Now when it comes to collaborative sharing - When we import / export and share highlights / underlines, we can choose ELEMENTS & ATTRIBUTES to apply or deny.

In your case the 5 colors work for you. I have a different kind of TAGGING thing in my mind.

Most people will have VARYING Color > Meaning (Key > Value Pair) tagging in their minds, depending on person and maybe area / motivation for varied tagging.

Giving people the flexibility to follow the mental tagging they would like is GOOD DESIGN fundamental.

And trust me, limiting TAGS and MEANINGS in any system is what becomes a design constraint for ENRICHMENT of that data.

On the FLIP SIDE:
- Give too much freedom to Morons and good tools become ugly.

Which is why the iPad / iPhone has a minimal UI / Button mindset. Love it, but so many people including me want to Jailbreak and many are going Android.

The simple thing to do:
- Basic Mode
- Custom/ Advanced Mode

It doesnt have much impact / overhead on the MARKUP that stores the HIGHLIGHT information.

[crashnburn]

Originally Posted by Jessica Lares

@crashnburn

I haven't read that research paper either, but I saved it, I love reading studies.

But I'll take a guess from my own experience. Whenever teachers would tell us to highlight/underline stuff, they would just hint at it by going "Oh, I'd underline that if I were you." They never told us why, except that it would be useful in the long run when we had to write an essay on the material later on or answer questions.

If you really want to grasp the material you're reading, you should actually read it. Because if you just do marks, you're probably going to end up marking the whole thing, since it's ALL important really. Instead of doing that, you really should be writing down page numbers on a separate piece of paper with your own worded summaries of events, characters, etc. If you can write it down in your own words, then you have a good understanding of the material.

When I do highlights and underlining, I keep a system. I use all the colors in my pack, and I use them for different things. It makes it easier to go back through later on.

But they don't teach you to write good notes in school, they just tell you to highlight this, write down this. You don't learn anything from material being fed to you like that. I know I didn't.

-----

Great new features, Kris! The custom commands are such a nice addition!

P.S.: I didn't forget about the list that I'm supposed to be putting up. I have my final project for this semester due on Monday, so I've been focusing on that *mostly*.

All nice and valid points and the REWRITING it is what one does when Summarizing into what used to be called Short Notes / Last Day/ Last minute Notes or Cheatsheet -

But its not always the case of application. Some quotes and statements cannot be written better than the original author.

Also, I am noting that you were not happy with how your teachers did not EXPLAIN WHY! & HOW of marking/ highlighting etc. but just do it. You have to realize most teachers would be like that, but most people are like that too. Each persons mind latches on to subjects DIFFERENTLY. What someone finds RELEVANT may be different for another person.

Teachers could definitely be BETTER and more FUNDAMENTALS based rather than MUG IT UP and REMEMBER it... Then again, even after that if and when they focus on SUBJECT X, then how one most LEARN and PROCESS SUBJECT X, Y, Z and how to LEARN is beyond what even they have realized.

We all figure out and slowly LEARN... HOW TO LEARN and ABSORB the materials that we get. There should be better CLASSES on this, but that's life

The entire education system focuses on WHAT MATERIAL to learn and not HOW TO THINK and HOW TO LEARN and FOLLOW CURIOSITY and WHY to LEARN something.

To address some of your points with how I process and mark information:

- I dont remember any teacher telling me to underline or highlight things - even if they did so at school

- I underline highlight what need to come back to - e.g. There could be 5-6 paragraphs explaining a concept or idea and 1-2 lines may be the QUOTE / SUMMARY STATEMENT of the whole thing ...
.. Next time I glance through I wont need to READ the whole thing, as that HIGHLIGHTED Quote would remind me of what I had read.. Memory Flashback
.. Sometimes I may want to re-read those 5-6 paragraphs/ pages and that HIGHLIGHT acts as a Marker Point for me to COME BACK to.
.. Sometimes when revisiting or revising things (for whatever reason - Be it reviewing final day for an exam or to be reminded of some fundamentals I forgot or because some material becomes your favorite ) the HIGHLIGHTING is an INDICATOR or MENTAL MARKER that was manifested and left in the MATERIAL.

Again, this is unique for each person. We learn by association and remember by ASSOCIATION.

You may say something and it may REMIND me of some quote from some book or some author or some movie ... or even some Friend or Relative or some INCIDENT.. These are mental markers. Everyone handles them DIFFERENTLY, but very similarly.

Person, Object, Circumstance.

These 3 are always what form impressions in our brains and triggers BRING them back to us from MEMORY.

How you are choosing to mark and write material is your WORFLOW Not mine :P

PS: Just noticed you were in Dallas - I actually went to Grad School there many years back and Data Modeling and Design and arguing over that with other PhDs was the last thing I remember doing there

[crashnburn]

Originally Posted by kguil

@vega:
1) Textured backgrounds are on my to do list. Right now, I'm prioritising some updates to the iPad version and the iPhone version.
2) I've got 'plans' for the home screen.
3) I'll look into the prompts.

@Jessica Lares: That's great. Good luck with your project.

@mariosipad: Could you send me the XML document for your root OPDS page? If you need help with this, feel free to send me an email.

@K & Faterson:

I'd rather have Custom Highlight Banks that I like to use for my MENTAL to COLOR highlighting schema than TEXTURED backgrounds.

I respect what someone wants, but in my mind, textured backgrounds are a pointless frivolous venture :P

Again - Design Choices for: Background | Highlight | Text

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by crashnburn

in my mind, textured backgrounds are a pointless frivolous venture :P

Strongly disagree, and earlier in this thread, I explained in detail why, along with screenshots of my favourite textured backgrounds. They are anything but frivolous -- I consider them a crucial feature still missing today in Marvin, and I've been waiting for it ever since Marvin first came out back in December. It's one of the very few areas (perhaps the only area???) in which the half-dead Stanza is still superior over Marvin today.

For example, I would trade in all the improvements in Marvin's import capabilities and Library management, for the feature of textured backgrounds. Why? Because I spend 99.99% of my time actually reading (and annotating) books in Marvin, not importing, accessing or shuffling them around in the Library. Those are all complete trifles, to my mind, compared to the importance of page backgrounds -- something I'm staring at all the time. I find solid-colour backgrounds (of no matter what colour) dull and therefore fatigue-inducing, which is why I can't wait to see user-customisable structured backgrounds implemented in Marvin.

[gaspine]

thanks for marvin, Bought a color scheme for support !
(search in COPS is a killer feature )

[kguil]

Thanks gaspine!

[kguil]

Updated roadmap and added a tutorial (advanced) for dictionaries in Marvin. blog.marvinapp.com

[maxjens]

Originally Posted by mariosipad

And now back to reading books with Marvin, served by COPS, content managed by Calibre. For me the perfect combination.

Many thanks to the developers who make this possible!

Cops 4.0 is out and adds multiple libraries from one feed. In Marvin it works great, the only thing missing is that when a search is done on the index page of the libraries it doesn't show how many books have been found per library.

Marvin is one great ebook reader, the combination with cops and calibre makes it the perfect tool for me. Many thanks