MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - 903 How to extract a ZIP archive on Pocketbook 903

review · 01-08-2011, 05:18 AM

OK, I will try my best to explain, please feel free if still something doesn't seem to make sense to you.

Lonetech is working on getting an SDK up an running as the official one probably won't be released in the next weeks (the earliest being March 2011). An SDK is a so called SoftwareDevelopmentKit. So basically a way for the writer of a program to give some output on the screen etc. Those programs will be translated (technical term: compiled) from a human readable language (so called programming language like C or C++) to the language the processor of the device speaks. Now, I will probably wait until the official SDK is published before I do some serious programming. However, what I will do in the meantime is to use the programs which are already on the device and put them together in a meaningful way (this is called script). You don't need a SDK for writing a script as it just uses the programs which are already available on the device and makes them useful to the end user. The best illustration is my unzip.app. There is a build-in functionality of the 903 to unzip zip files. I used simply that functionality and just defined where the program should look for the input file and where it should put the content of the zip file. With scripts I'm fairly limited. E.g. I won't be able to have any direct output on the screen. The news reader would be designed in the way that you set the parameters for the RSS feed on your computer, you upload the app to the device and once you run it it will gather the news, process them and create an output file (as in a script we can't directly talk to the screen) like a pdf or an epub etc.

Coming to penstrokes. This is directly related to the SDK. I will try to translate what Lonetech said in less technical terms (although I do appreciate that he did use technical terms): There are different ways to talk to the screen and to interface with the touchscreen. Most programmers usually don't talk directly to the screen but use the functions which are provided by the company (with their SDK). Now, LoneTech discovered that there are two ways how the 903 talks to the screen. One is called gtk-directfb which is the easiest way to get the annotations software called Xournal to work on the 903. However, this particular way to talk to the screen might not allow penstrokes. You can see this in all programs which use this method. As far as I'm aware of the browser is the only program which does this. The other programs use a different method to get the touchscreen information and obviously, like you have pointed out, those programs support penstrokes.

Hope this clarifies it a bit.

01-08-2011, 05:18 AM	#18
review Addict Posts: 315 Karma: 6448 Join Date: Nov 2010 Device: 903	OK, I will try my best to explain, please feel free if still something doesn't seem to make sense to you. Lonetech is working on getting an SDK up an running as the official one probably won't be released in the next weeks (the earliest being March 2011). An SDK is a so called SoftwareDevelopmentKit. So basically a way for the writer of a program to give some output on the screen etc. Those programs will be translated (technical term: compiled) from a human readable language (so called programming language like C or C++) to the language the processor of the device speaks. Now, I will probably wait until the official SDK is published before I do some serious programming. However, what I will do in the meantime is to use the programs which are already on the device and put them together in a meaningful way (this is called script). You don't need a SDK for writing a script as it just uses the programs which are already available on the device and makes them useful to the end user. The best illustration is my unzip.app. There is a build-in functionality of the 903 to unzip zip files. I used simply that functionality and just defined where the program should look for the input file and where it should put the content of the zip file. With scripts I'm fairly limited. E.g. I won't be able to have any direct output on the screen. The news reader would be designed in the way that you set the parameters for the RSS feed on your computer, you upload the app to the device and once you run it it will gather the news, process them and create an output file (as in a script we can't directly talk to the screen) like a pdf or an epub etc. Coming to penstrokes. This is directly related to the SDK. I will try to translate what Lonetech said in less technical terms (although I do appreciate that he did use technical terms): There are different ways to talk to the screen and to interface with the touchscreen. Most programmers usually don't talk directly to the screen but use the functions which are provided by the company (with their SDK). Now, LoneTech discovered that there are two ways how the 903 talks to the screen. One is called gtk-directfb which is the easiest way to get the annotations software called Xournal to work on the 903. However, this particular way to talk to the screen might not allow penstrokes. You can see this in all programs which use this method. As far as I'm aware of the browser is the only program which does this. The other programs use a different method to get the touchscreen information and obviously, like you have pointed out, those programs support penstrokes. Hope this clarifies it a bit. Last edited by review; 01-08-2011 at 05:30 AM.