MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Firmware Update Added abilites we would like to see

tomsem · 07-27-2010, 06:30 PM

More or less in order of descending priority; assumes current hardware:
- PDF links and annotation, if not PDF reflow.
- Unicode fonts (supporting at least Cyrillic, Japanese/Korean/Chinese for a start).
- Overdrive support for Kindle MOBI/TPZ formats. Amazon's not going to support ePub directly as long as their own format is 70% of the ebook market. But they could add ePub-to-MOBI conversion to the conversion service...
- Access to the 'NCX' TOC via hotkey. Kindle ebooks are now supposed to have an NCX TOC in addition to an HTML TOC for better chapter navigation, but there's no way to view and navigate the NCX TOC text itself except with the Kindle Previewer application. Navigating to the HTML TOC is awkward (2.5 update made it more so by removing TOC option from MENU, now it's: MENU/Go To.../joystick to Table of Contents button), and navigation within the HTML TOC is too inefficient, especially when the TOC spills out over several pages as it often does. The NCX TOC may have multiple levels for better presentation and more efficient navigation. My idea would be to have ALT+T (or whatever) pop up a window displaying the NCX TOC, highlighting your current position in the document, and allow you to navigate elsewhere directly using the joystick. NCX TOC is a feature shared with ePub format and which many ePub reading systems support, and it is better than what Kindle currently offers.
- 'jump to hyperlink' page navigation. When you see a hyperlink on a page, you have to navigate over the intervening text, requiring a complex series of joystick maneuvers. Hotkeys that let you navigate to hyperlinks directly (such as ALT+N for 'next' and ALT+P for 'previous') would be very helpful when reading material with footnotes or links to other locations in a book (or external web links).
- Ability to play embedded audio files (as you apparently can with Kindle for iPad now) in 'enhanced' ebooks. (Video will have to wait..)
- a way to alternate quickly between two locations (which could be in different books), or perhaps a split screen mode so you could have two locations/books displayed at the same time. I'm not sure what I'd use this for beyond language learning (e.g. Italian text in one, english in the other).
- I would LOVE to see them figure out how to map text to audiobook (or vice versa), so you could navigate audiobooks with text search, and see the text that's being read, etc. But Kindle needs more storage space to handle more than a handful of audiobook files.
- ability to customize screen savers. I'm too lazy to hack just for this, but admit it would be nice to personalize the screen saver images.

07-27-2010, 06:30 PM	#13
tomsem Grand Sorcerer Posts: 6,959 Karma: 27060153 Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: USA Device: iPhone 15PM, Kindle Scribe, iPad mini 6, PocketBook InkPad Color 3	More or less in order of descending priority; assumes current hardware: - PDF links and annotation, if not PDF reflow. - Unicode fonts (supporting at least Cyrillic, Japanese/Korean/Chinese for a start). - Overdrive support for Kindle MOBI/TPZ formats. Amazon's not going to support ePub directly as long as their own format is 70% of the ebook market. But they could add ePub-to-MOBI conversion to the conversion service... - Access to the 'NCX' TOC via hotkey. Kindle ebooks are now supposed to have an NCX TOC in addition to an HTML TOC for better chapter navigation, but there's no way to view and navigate the NCX TOC text itself except with the Kindle Previewer application. Navigating to the HTML TOC is awkward (2.5 update made it more so by removing TOC option from MENU, now it's: MENU/Go To.../joystick to Table of Contents button), and navigation within the HTML TOC is too inefficient, especially when the TOC spills out over several pages as it often does. The NCX TOC may have multiple levels for better presentation and more efficient navigation. My idea would be to have ALT+T (or whatever) pop up a window displaying the NCX TOC, highlighting your current position in the document, and allow you to navigate elsewhere directly using the joystick. NCX TOC is a feature shared with ePub format and which many ePub reading systems support, and it is better than what Kindle currently offers. - 'jump to hyperlink' page navigation. When you see a hyperlink on a page, you have to navigate over the intervening text, requiring a complex series of joystick maneuvers. Hotkeys that let you navigate to hyperlinks directly (such as ALT+N for 'next' and ALT+P for 'previous') would be very helpful when reading material with footnotes or links to other locations in a book (or external web links). - Ability to play embedded audio files (as you apparently can with Kindle for iPad now) in 'enhanced' ebooks. (Video will have to wait..) - a way to alternate quickly between two locations (which could be in different books), or perhaps a split screen mode so you could have two locations/books displayed at the same time. I'm not sure what I'd use this for beyond language learning (e.g. Italian text in one, english in the other). - I would LOVE to see them figure out how to map text to audiobook (or vice versa), so you could navigate audiobooks with text search, and see the text that's being read, etc. But Kindle needs more storage space to handle more than a handful of audiobook files. - ability to customize screen savers. I'm too lazy to hack just for this, but admit it would be nice to personalize the screen saver images.