Feedbooks.com iLiad Downloader
 

We've been working on an application for the iLiad and Feedbooks.com that will have the following features:

• Download directly the feeds/sudokus/newspapers that you subscribed
• Search & download all of the books available on Feedbooks
• Get personal recommendations based on your downloads/favorites
• Select between the iLiad template or your custom settings for the overall look of the PDF files

Here's a few screenshots of the work in progress.
We're currently developing the application on Linux, but a skilled iLiad programmer, Adam B., will handle the port.

Email or PM me the source, and I'll port it in the next few days. :thumbsup:

Very nice looking by the way. It looks like it'll fit well with the iLiad.

We're still tweaking the UI. The UI and the app were made from the ground up for the iLiad. Btw, is there a specific path for books and/or newspaper on the iLiad ? That's part of our final tweaking on the app...

The default books path is: /mnt/free/books/
The default newspaper path is: /mnt/free/newspapers/

OK we'll use these paths.
I think that the single coolest thing with the app is the fact that you can get book recommendations directly on your reader and download them as a customized PDF with the right font, margin etc...

This definitely looks to be a killer app for the iLiad. Very cool indeed.

Something to keep in mind, the fonts may not look exactly the same from the Desktop GTK version as on the Iliad. The iLiad's gtk version is configured to force text in a larger font size, although I don't have the exact numbers.

Also, when you will need to input text, the software keyboard will block around 1/4 of the bottom of the screen. You may want to keep this in mind when designing screens that require text input.

Edit again: With the latest firmware version (2.10), you can modify the path of the News and Books buttons. This path is stored in /mnt/settings/er_registry.txt. It may make more sense to read the configured path from there, and adjust where your program saves the files accordingly.

This looks REALLY cool! The ability to download RSS feeds and books DIRECTLY to the iliad is great. The device is starting to live up to its potential! (Thanks to all the great devs on MB!)

Hadrien, another thing that could be really cool if integrated is the ability to input an ULR (pdf, txt, mobipocket) and the device to download it and save it. Or (even better) an integration with the web browser.

Also, another idea, would be to be able to access the 'personal' library hosted on private (or public) webhosting, browse and download the book you feel to read at the moment.

I feel that your app Hadrian has almost limitless potential in terms of accesing content and making use of the iLiad's wi-fi. Hope that your collaboration with Adam will be fruitfull!

The application is centered around Feedbooks: http://www.feedbooks.com

Currently with the app, you can search for a book or get book recommendations (we analyze previous book downloads and your favorites, and based on download patterns, books are recommended).
Once you've listed them, you can also select a specific book and ask for similar ones (that's still based on our download patterns algorithm).

What we could add, that would act a bit like a 'personal' library:
- list previously downloaded books
- lists favorites

How does a sample er_registry.txt file looks like ?

Totally agree. This is the application that finally will make iLiad use its strengths (WiFi, Linux, OSS) fully. Imagine the rave reviews when a journalist picks up the iLiad, browses through lots of books and newspapers, downloads them and reads them - all of this on a beach/in a cafe/whatever...

Here's my er_registry.txt. I've manually edited it to point the news button to the compact flash card. Everything else is the stock location.

Edit: You may want to hold off on adding this to your program. It seems the registry format has changed in 2.11

It won't be a killer app for some, if pdf conversion loses most of the formatting... I read a lot of developer blogs with code samples...

Have you tried using feedbooks to convert some of your blogs to PDF?

You can always report any bugs to Hadrien...

If it were possible to also get recommendations from LibraryThing, that might increase the value.

We support verbatim mode, but the problem with code samples is that you simply can't change at all the way its displayed. If the code sample is larger than the iLiad, you either need to break the line or scroll through the code. You can't scroll with PDF or even any XML format.

We render those RSS feeds directly on the server, not on the application itself. This mean that we'll keep updating and upgrading the overall look of those PDF files (Epub support will also be available pretty soon).
Our main focus for Feedbooks for the last few months was e-books but this Autumn we're going to work mostly on our newspaper component (the RSS rendering is still in an "alpha" state, and we'll add many more news widgets, not just RSS/Sudoku).

Is there an open API for LibraryThing ? I haven't seen any thing like this on it.
We're using the Amazon REST API though, we could give those recommendations. The only problem with Amazon is that the recommendation system is based on ISBN, and you can have multiple ISBN for a single book (different editions).
We'll keep improving our recommendations algorithm though, and keep in mind that the more people use Feedbooks, the better recommendations will be.

We might work with the french equivalent of LibraryThing in the future: Babelio. And we also have a lot of cool features for Facebook in development. I really love Facebook: their API for Facebook applications is quite wonderful.

Good to know this beta is actually alpha :) On the code rendering - i'm afraid nothing less than converter with browser equivalent rendering capabilities will do, many bloggers use i-dont-know-what tools making use of heavy CSS. Some do it more simple way but feedbooks fails to convert them as well. For exampl, see the picture I attached :)