Quote:
Originally Posted by Athropos
I think his point is that he doesn't know how many pages he has to go through to find the next author, so he can't simply add X pages to the current one.
And a binary search is just a workaround, the actual solution would be indeed to have at a first level a list of authors, and then choosing one of the authors would bring you to the corresponding books. Isn't that possible?
|
Given the number of authors I have on my Kobo, searching is a lot faster than scrolling through a list of authors stored over how ever many pages it takes to hold 349 authors. Looking for a specific book? Enter the title or series. Looking for the Grantville Gazette? Type in gr and there's the link by series name and a list of all 50 volumes. Looking for Grantville Gazette volume 39? Enter 39 in the search field and there are two books. Granville Gazette volume 39, and Possession in Death (In Death series #39).
Why tap and swipe when you can search? Why scroll through a list of authors when search is much more efficient?
When using the search bar, it takes me a maximum of 4 taps to get to library search mode (reading a book so tap the middle of the screen, tap the upper right hand menu, tap the search bar, tap library radio button. From library and home page, two taps. Add 3-4 taps for the author or book name and one more to select the results. So a maximum of 9 taps and I've scrolling through a list of the author's books on my ereader -- if they have more than one page of results -- or reading the ebook I was looking for.
As for the binary search? In my opinion, his statement about the number of swipes/taps to locate an author was based on a very poor methodology when even a simple binary search would locate the desired result with a lot fewer taps/swipes. If I have the library sorted by author, it's more efficient to jump ahead multiple pages rather than swiping past every page to locate a specific author. Using his example of having to swipe by 30 pages of Agatha Christie books, if you know you have about 30 pages of a specific author, jumping ahead 30 pages and correcting, if needed, by swiping is a lot more efficient than swiping through those 30 pages.
As for the non-Latin alphabet author names, I either Anglicize them (Толстой to Tolstoy for example) or simply jump to the end of the ebook list when sorted by author (a back swipe from the first page works quite well) since they tend to sort to the end of the listing. I have very few of those so not a big worry for me.
A lot of his other complaints are equally paltry. A sort by language? How many of Kobo's customers are panting for that feature? Unable to directly open file by browsing on his SDcard? If the book is accessible to your Kobo, it's in the database. If he's still unhappy, he can check out Koreader or Coolreader. Be prepared to enjoy being a beta tester as neither is ready for prime time. A query language for searching the database? Again, a feature that very few people are going to be waiting for.
Items such as his lack of knowledge about simple items such as newly added books being shown at the start of the recently read listing or being able to tap on the page number/total display to bring up a goto page number entry screen suggests to me that François has spent more time whinging about what he wants and less time learning how to efficiently use features his Kobo does offer.
Regards,
David