Hi,
I've just purchased MapleRead SE earlier today. Mostly out of curiosity, because so many users have been praising MapleRead, but also to reward your obviously hard and passionate work with at least this small purchase price.
Congratulations on an outstanding reading app! For now, I'll be sticking to Marvin as my main e-reader, although it has one monumental flaw (among many lesser ones) that MapleRead does not have: no annotations syncing.
First off, the thing I like most about MapleRead:
terrific themes treatment. I love all the parchment backgrounds, and whatnot. An
unlimited amount of user-defined themes, etc. Just great. For many years, I begged Marvin's developer to give us an unlimited amount of user-defined themes, but nope. The only thing we got was an increase from 3 to 5 themes in Marvin 3, but no user-customizable background pictures, etc.
As of right now, I still prefer Marvin, despite its many flaws, over MapleRead (or Hyphen, which is another worthy competitor, though I'd rank it at #3 currently). Below is a listing of what I find to be MapleRead's biggest flaws as of this moment. If you could fix these issues later on, I'll be very grateful.
- Multiple highlight colors are a must. Three priority levels are no adequate replacement.
- The killer feature (for me) in Marvin 3 is the customization of headers and footers. Alas, it's buggy there, too (displaying phantom pages instead of actual page numbers, i. e., screen flips and/or ADE-style page numbers), but at least it's customizable.
- In MapleRead, the headers and footers are placed inelegantly and inefficiently on the screen, especially compared to Marvin. Please see the two screenshots attached to this post, displaying the same book. It would be hard to deny that Marvin uses the screen real estate more efficiently, right? No matter what I tried in MapleRead, the header still leaves too much space above it, and the footer too much space below it, so that quite a lot of screen real estate seems to be wasted. Also, in MapleRead, the header and footer seem to merge with the book text – are not distinctly set apart from it, the way they are in Marvin.
- Highlights are corrupted upon exporting them. This is a flaw shared with Marvin, Hyphen, and likely all other e-readers out there. I understand that this is very tough for app developers to get right, but there's no way around it, if it's to be done properly. Right now, highlights are corrupted in that they do not preserve basic and fundamental text formatting features such as paragraph breaks, italics or bold. I tried it with your Alice test e-book, and upon exporting a highlight from it that contains italics or multiple paragraphs, everything gets converted to plain-text and merged into a single paragraph. That's just unacceptable, if you need to deal with literature on a scholarly level, as I do.
- Please allow us to add our own fonts.
