MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - iLiad Community iPDF

jharker · 10-26-2007, 02:10 PM

Hi, everybody! Wow, lots and lots of great responses! Things have been really busy the past couple of days and I haven't had time to respond the way I'd like, but I wanted to let you know I'm still here!

Here's a somewhat abbreviated reply...

If a patch has been posted elsewhere, or sent to me previously, I'd still like the author to post the patch specifically in the Community iPDF Patches thread. This will remove a lot of work for me in terms of finding, cleaning up, and documenting patches. It will also make everything available in one centralized place. Finally, it will hopefully make new authors think about the quality of their patches in the context of a larger project, hopefully leading to higher patch quality and fewer conflicts in general.
That said, many people (rincewind, wpd, etc.) have made excellent patches that I expect to work with little or no modification. But please submit them in the patch thread so I don't have to!
I love the idea of this project being encouraged as an iRex Community Project. I don't know if my role warrants a whole development iLiad, although I wouldn't say no! Perhaps we should wait until the first release to gauge how much interest there is, before you decide if it's worth it?
I don't want this to become a full-fledged fork of the iPDF software, at least not for now. However, I agree that there are lots of parts of iPDF that could be substantially improved by a large rewrite. If anyone submits a (large) patch to overhaul the rendering / pre-rendering system, the landscape/portrait split, or anything else, I would certainly consider it and it would be more than welcome. I might even eventually get around to writing one myself...
I like the idea of a "feature selector", we'll have to get someone to write a patch for that... All the other ideas that have been proposed sound great, too!
For now, I'm asking for patches to be based off of the latest svn. But in the future, as wpd suggested, this will change to either more recent svns, or possibly with reference to the current version of community ipdf.

While we're throwing out ideas, here's one aimed at Rincewind because you've done a lot with gestures, and I don't know what you've already done that I haven't seen... If some simple, easy-to-use gesture-based UI could take the place of the erase, pan, scribble, and zoom buttons, that would clear up a lot of toolbar space. I'm thinking of something as intuitive as the iPhone gestures...?

Regarding the portrait/landscape split, the two are even more alike than you might suspect. If you compare the differing math sections, you'll see that they LOOK different because they're written differently... however, if you actually do the math you'll see that many of the calculations do the same thing, just using different variable names or a slightly different order of calculations (i.e. in portrait it's foo = bar - x; and in landscape it's foo = bar; foo -= x; ). So I suspect that once these incongruities are ironed out there will be very few places where it's actually different.

As far as I know, iRex is still working on a modular viewer base that will eventually replace iPDF. Does anyone know if that's still in the works? And whether it will be open-sourced?

Okay, that's all for now, I have to get back to work! So far so good! Let's see those patches!

10-26-2007, 02:10 PM	#9
jharker Developer Posts: 345 Karma: 3473 Join Date: Apr 2007 Location: Brooklyn, NY, USA Device: iRex iLiad v1, Blackberry Tour, Kindle DX, iPad.	Hi, everybody! Wow, lots and lots of great responses! Things have been really busy the past couple of days and I haven't had time to respond the way I'd like, but I wanted to let you know I'm still here! Here's a somewhat abbreviated reply... If a patch has been posted elsewhere, or sent to me previously, I'd still like the author to post the patch specifically in the Community iPDF Patches thread. This will remove a lot of work for me in terms of finding, cleaning up, and documenting patches. It will also make everything available in one centralized place. Finally, it will hopefully make new authors think about the quality of their patches in the context of a larger project, hopefully leading to higher patch quality and fewer conflicts in general. That said, many people (rincewind, wpd, etc.) have made excellent patches that I expect to work with little or no modification. But please submit them in the patch thread so I don't have to! I love the idea of this project being encouraged as an iRex Community Project. I don't know if my role warrants a whole development iLiad, although I wouldn't say no! Perhaps we should wait until the first release to gauge how much interest there is, before you decide if it's worth it? I don't want this to become a full-fledged fork of the iPDF software, at least not for now. However, I agree that there are lots of parts of iPDF that could be substantially improved by a large rewrite. If anyone submits a (large) patch to overhaul the rendering / pre-rendering system, the landscape/portrait split, or anything else, I would certainly consider it and it would be more than welcome. I might even eventually get around to writing one myself... I like the idea of a "feature selector", we'll have to get someone to write a patch for that... All the other ideas that have been proposed sound great, too! For now, I'm asking for patches to be based off of the latest svn. But in the future, as wpd suggested, this will change to either more recent svns, or possibly with reference to the current version of community ipdf. While we're throwing out ideas, here's one aimed at Rincewind because you've done a lot with gestures, and I don't know what you've already done that I haven't seen... If some simple, easy-to-use gesture-based UI could take the place of the erase, pan, scribble, and zoom buttons, that would clear up a lot of toolbar space. I'm thinking of something as intuitive as the iPhone gestures...? Regarding the portrait/landscape split, the two are even more alike than you might suspect. If you compare the differing math sections, you'll see that they LOOK different because they're written differently... however, if you actually do the math you'll see that many of the calculations do the same thing, just using different variable names or a slightly different order of calculations (i.e. in portrait it's foo = bar - x; and in landscape it's foo = bar; foo -= x; ). So I suspect that once these incongruities are ironed out there will be very few places where it's actually different. As far as I know, iRex is still working on a modular viewer base that will eventually replace iPDF. Does anyone know if that's still in the works? And whether it will be open-sourced? Okay, that's all for now, I have to get back to work! So far so good! Let's see those patches!