Some recent calibre changes might be of interest to owners of Sony readers.
1) [0.7.25] Collection sorting. By default, Sony collections built from series are sorted by series index, while other collections are sorted by title_sort. You can change this behavior using the tweak sony_collection_sorting_rules. The tweak permits you to specify a metadata field, including custom fields, used to sort a collection. For example, you could sort non-series collections by author instead of title, or by creating a special composite custom column you could sort non-series collections such as genre by title within series (if there is a series).
This thread provides information on this tweak, along with several other ideas that might be of interest.
2) [0.7.35] The sony driver no longer stores pre-built thumbnails when sending books. The newer Sonys such as the 650 can use thumbnails when displaying books and periodicals. For a few releases, the Sony driver has built and stored these thumbnails. The problem is that the older devices do not know what to do with them and do not clean them up. Over time as they collected, disconnecting the reader would slow down. On my 300, it got to the point where disconnecting took 45 seconds. I manually deleted the thumbnails, and now disconnecting takes the normal 2 to 3 seconds.
The thumbnails in main memory are in 'database/thumbnail/...'. For cards, they are in 'Sony Reader/database/thumbnail/...'.
3) [0.7.35] Special collections. When viewing by author, the 650 (and possibly 350) sort the titles by date instead of by title. In addition, when sorting by title, the 650 appears to do article stripping, for example sorting 'The Hobbit' under 'H' instead of 'T'. We couldn't find a way of changing either of these behaviors.
To work around these problems, it is now possible to build two special collections, 'all by author' and 'all by title'. The author collection is sorted by author_sort, then title_sort for the same author. The title collections is sorted by title_sort, then author_sort if titles are equal. In both cases, changes made by using the 'device_db' plugboard are respected.
Building these collections is specified in the Sony device plugin. To build the all by author collection, add 'aba:collection name' (no quotes) to the collections box. Choose whatever collection name you wish. To add the all by title collection, add 'abt:collection name' to the collections box.
This thread discusses the problems that led to the addition of this tweak.
4) [0.7.36] Changing collection names. For quite some time there has been a tweak sony_collection_renaming_rules used to combine collections and to give them special names. The names were of the form 'collection_value (collection name)'. For example, for a custom genre column, the name might have been 'Fiction (Genre)'.
A second tweak, sony_collection_name_template, has been added to give more control over how the name is generated. Continuing the genre example, you can now indicate that it should be 'Genre: Fiction' or '[Genre] Fiction' or other possibilities. Because of this, you can now group like values together, for example all the genres then all the tags. As you can build collections for (almost) any metadata field, grouping in this way will assist with organization. For example, the person suggesting the feature makes collections from authors and series and wanted the values separated.
This enhancement request provides some rationale for the tweak.
5) [0.7.36] Ability to make special 'all-books' collections sorted by an arbitrary column. Using this feature, you can make 'all-books' collections sorted by any calibre metadata field, such as published date, publisher, or any custom column. To create such a collection, add 'abs:name' into the collections box in device customization. The 'abs' means 'all by something'. The 'name' is the collection name. If the name is a metadata column key (including custom columns), then you are done. If the name is not a key, then you must add the sorting column information to the sony_collection_sorting_rules tweak.