Quote:
Originally Posted by Faterson
… I annotate fiction every bit as much as non-fiction.
|
Indeed I do as well. I only did not say it since I felt it unnecessary, wanted to be brief, and one point was possibly enough to convince someone who said they don't use highlighting. In fact me saying anything was possibly unneeded since the original person and most others already understand its use. Even replying to you in this case was unneeded since it doesn't really add much.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Faterson
… the "wheel" is already here: the "author sort" field. It may not be an ultra-smart wheel, a Ferrari wheel, just a creaky wooden wheel perhaps, but... it will do its job, if we only let it do its job.
|
As for replying to this, I'm not sure why I am either, perhaps only as an attempt to help keep the thread more useful for others without continued discussion of the same thing.
I'm not sure how many ePubs you have. There is quite a variety of ways that authors can be listed, and quite often, perhaps most of the time, author sort is unused, or other times sort is listed as "First Last", or includes multiple authors, also listed in a variety of ways. As said before, what I gather is perhaps Kris thought it was a good idea to once use "author sort", which the average user is possibly unaware of what that is, or sort by last name, but likely it displayed a mess to a significant amount of users. Plus there seems to be nothing in the OPF spec to say file-as needs to be "Last, First" and expecting the average person to fix all their metadata is a no go.
Marvin seems to be Kris' main app. If he doesn't already exclusively make a living from his iOS apps, that is possibly a goal so he is perhaps appealing to whatever is going to sell well, keep with iOS design principles, and offer enough features to appeal to as many users as possible without making what most people use and the most used features more complicated than necessary. To me, despite how much I like M3, I feel many of the most used features are already a bit cumbersome, perhaps not placed where it could be most accessible, or placed along with so many other options that the effort to find something, even if it takes only an additional second, is too much. I'd consider reorganizing quite a few of the settings into different screens like iOS Settings, offer a search, and possibly consider even moving some, like # of recents to the screen where it's used if it can be done in a nice way, which in that case I'm not sure since I might find an extra button on that or some other screen a bit unelegant. Other settings like Dropbox I might move to the Dropbox menu since they're not often used, it seems to me more easily used there, and would cleanup General settings. Fonts, if it were up to me, I'd choose 10-15 or so of the most screen readable fonts including a few that aren't so great but offer better Unicode coverage, remove the rest, and make adding fonts either from the web, like Google, built in to
iOS, or side loaded easier.
On and on, there's quite a bit I think could use refining. Yet overall, I am quite happy with M3. If in the future, features are removed, refined, or changed, if it helps Kris make the app more popular and sell better, I'm ok with that and would possibly choose that to some degree as well if it were my app. In any case, M3 is certainly good enough for a 3.0 and likely Kris wanted to get it out so he can again earn something from it, and continue to add features later.
What you have said is already well known, Kris is without doubt quite aware, and who knows, maybe he is still considering it, working on it, or plans it, but has not said anything since he's not sure if he can get it right and maybe doesn't plan to add it or say any more until and if it can be done as he'd like. Perhaps it seems ok to converse like this on the net, yet if you're unaware, you can be quite unpleasant as other people have mentioned, and if you did this in real life, you'd alienate colleagues and friends as perhaps have already. You've been on my ignore list for a few days, but I was curious what all the posts were about. Back you go.
If you want to continue discussing this in particular, or something else that has already been mentioned and Kris or other staff are likely already aware of but perhaps don't reply since they are aware, or possibly are busy enough with everything else, please start a new thread.
Edit: im having problems with selecting text, particularly near the margins. Maybe that's known. Also had an idea to show the section title in place of 'CONTENTS'; that seems like a good place even if a later in-app tutorial or context sensitive help might be needed to explain that and other things.
Edit 2: tried the reading journal and it is wonderful. I think colors there coild use a bit more emphasis. A long press in the journal could show the share menu, like Tweetbot. For highlighting, is the confirm to delete necessary? I'd consider it uneeded as a confirm isnt needed to highlight or perform other actions. Same perhaps with OPDS downloads which seem to sometimes confirm and others not if i recall correctly.