Quote:
Originally Posted by jimnutt
A couple more feature suggestions: 1) A way to sort the book list by last read date and 2) an option to go directly to the last book being read when started up. Because of the way windows mobile will close apps in the background on occasion it would be nice to be able to get quickly back to the book (and place in the book obviously) you were reading on restart.
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Thanks for the thoughts. I've been working on the program, and have developed both these features. Re (1), I'm implementing a new 'bookshelf' functionality. The idea is that a book can be in one of two places:
- it can be in your bookshelf, which is a repository of all the books you have actually opened recently (probably I will limit its size to 50)
- or it can be in your library, which represents all the books you have access to from some source or other. Right now, that is 'all the book files in a certain folder' (and in the settings screen, you specify which folder to search, and whether to search subfolders). There's nothing to stop you having multiple libraries (and you can switch between them by using the settings screen to tell Freda to look in a different folder). The 'library' concept could be extended to include web-sites or any other places that you might get books from.
The Bookshelf displays your recently-opened books, sorted with the most-recently-read at the top, and showing thumbnail cover images etc. Behind the scenes, the bookshelf keeps track of various per-book settings (whether to use a different code-page/encoding, whether to override style-sheet settings for margin, indent, justification etc. for that book).
The Library just shows file name, location and type. This will make it possible for the library to open rather faster, even if it contains many thousands of books (my library does), because Freda won't have to open the book files (or any other files) in order to populate the library screen.
I have added an option to 'on startup, open the first book in the bookshelf'.
I'm currently tidying up a gazillion small bugs and formatting nasties, but I should have a new release 'real soon now'. Possibly by the weekend (but if not, it will be mid/late-December, as I am travelling for a while after that).
Cheers,
Jim