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notzed · 01-17-2012, 06:04 PM

Hi All,

Got a touch last week - for the price the hardware is fine enough, and quite fun to play with.

The software though ... well it's pretty ordinary. Long delays at inopportune times, and limited features in strange places too. e.g. forgetting where you are in books, no bookmarks(!) or search in text files, etc. I'm using the latest firmware.

Mostly out of curiosity to start with I enabled telnet and ftp and started to poke around.

Since the hardware seemed fairly decent, I put a JVM on it (java's just my thing atm) and started hacking up some user interface software to test the input and output devices to see if it was a hardware or software issue. After working out the display driver and input devices, and writing some JNI and a basic toolkit to use them, I played with some simple gadgets: sliders, labels, buttons, and then made a paged text-only viewer prototype.

a) the touch input and buttons are almost always quite responsive: there's no reason the software shouldn't be most of the time. The touchscreen seems to have issues in some places with a non-dragged press-release, but that's fairly minor. i.e. any double-presses or missed touches are the fault of the front-end software. e.g. my paged text viewer can change about 5 pages/second from rapid button touches and because my code is so crap it's doing a lot more rendering that it needs to (obviously the screen can't keep up with this, but it remains interactive).

b) The e-ink display takes an age to update, but detaching rendering from input and processing can hide this from the application almost entirely and although it's ugly it updates in fairly interactive time and `settles down' fast enough.

c) I have occasionally had the input driver crash - requiring a hard reset - so there are still some kernel issues.

d) Opening text files takes forever - because it's paginating the whole document every time. This overhead seems unavoidable as paginating unicode text is simply expensive ... may make sense not to paginate or at least cache the results. Closing one takes ages too, but that points to shitty memory management (i.e. use memory pools).

I had bought the device to get away from the tv and computer screen and read some books again ... but it's way more fun hacking on it at the moment. Particularly since every time it sits there dumbly for what sees like an eternity after i've poked it a few times i'm reminded that I know for certain it could be a much better device.

01-17-2012, 06:04 PM	#1
notzed Member Posts: 15 Karma: 400 Join Date: Jan 2012 Device: kobo touch	software and hardware Hi All, Got a touch last week - for the price the hardware is fine enough, and quite fun to play with. The software though ... well it's pretty ordinary. Long delays at inopportune times, and limited features in strange places too. e.g. forgetting where you are in books, no bookmarks(!) or search in text files, etc. I'm using the latest firmware. Mostly out of curiosity to start with I enabled telnet and ftp and started to poke around. Since the hardware seemed fairly decent, I put a JVM on it (java's just my thing atm) and started hacking up some user interface software to test the input and output devices to see if it was a hardware or software issue. After working out the display driver and input devices, and writing some JNI and a basic toolkit to use them, I played with some simple gadgets: sliders, labels, buttons, and then made a paged text-only viewer prototype. a) the touch input and buttons are almost always quite responsive: there's no reason the software shouldn't be most of the time. The touchscreen seems to have issues in some places with a non-dragged press-release, but that's fairly minor. i.e. any double-presses or missed touches are the fault of the front-end software. e.g. my paged text viewer can change about 5 pages/second from rapid button touches and because my code is so crap it's doing a lot more rendering that it needs to (obviously the screen can't keep up with this, but it remains interactive). b) The e-ink display takes an age to update, but detaching rendering from input and processing can hide this from the application almost entirely and although it's ugly it updates in fairly interactive time and `settles down' fast enough. c) I have occasionally had the input driver crash - requiring a hard reset - so there are still some kernel issues. d) Opening text files takes forever - because it's paginating the whole document every time. This overhead seems unavoidable as paginating unicode text is simply expensive ... may make sense not to paginate or at least cache the results. Closing one takes ages too, but that points to shitty memory management (i.e. use memory pools). I had bought the device to get away from the tv and computer screen and read some books again ... but it's way more fun hacking on it at the moment. Particularly since every time it sits there dumbly for what sees like an eternity after i've poked it a few times i'm reminded that I know for certain it could be a much better device.