[DaleDe]

Here is an email from 11/24/2009

Jinke needs to make the 6" and the 5" have similar capabilities as much as possible. They are both current units but they seem to be abandoning the 6" product while the 5" gets all the attention. However, the 5" still is missing some things that are on the 6". Here is some things that need attention.

Bookshelf:

1. The 5" screen menu text is too small for many people. In this case the 6" does not scale down well. Either pump it up on the 5" or add a choice for both devices where the small is like today and the large increases the size so that the 5" device is the same font size as the small on the 6". This should make the 6" big enough to call it help for the seeing impaired.

2. The 6" shows author on a second line on FB2, Wolf formats. The should on the 5" as well and more formats should include author on the second line. There should also be a sort by author added.

3. Press and holding the number key should bring up the about screen for the eBook selected with the number. This is in addition to the about inside the eBook itself and should show the same data about the book. Whenever possible the actual title and author should be shown in the about screen. This is true for pdf, epub, doc, mobi at least. I think djvu as well. For pdb show the first 32 bytes of the file, null terminated, as the title. The <title> line from HTML should be shown. (There is also meta data in HTML for author and content.) When available also show the description. All lines need to wrap if needed, don't truncate. To make this feature even better you might consider showing the cover graphic (small version). This screen could have multiple pages if the description is long. While we are talking about this about screen a menu could be added to delete the file and perhaps other things like copy (copy the file to the other storage area) as is done in lbook.

4. When a book is started the 6" device shows a graphic in the center of the screen. Why was this dropped in the 5"?

Contents page

1. The 6" shows a graphic on the left to indicate a submenu but the 5" does not.

2. I believe the 1 entry should traverse to the entry by that name in the book, rather than back up. The exit/return key can always to used to back up. Currently there is no way to visit a toc entry unless it is the bottom one in the hierarchy.

Formats:

ADE: links should be supported on both devices on both ePUB and PDF. This is critically important to have on both devices. I believe the 9-0 keys are the wrong choice for traversing links as they are too often used to change pages. Now that bookmarking has changed I would recommend that the 4-5 keys be dedicated to this purpose. They are just about the 9-0 keys and the user will easily associate the arrow function to these keys as well. A long press of the 4 key can serve as a back key to traverse back through a stack created when you go forward following a link or even a page jump. This back functionality is long overdue and very important. A long 5 could be used to go forward in the stack for consistency but it is much less important.

5 fonts sizes takes too long to circle around back to the size you want. I suggest the 3 key perform a zoom out (go backward though the font sizes) The idea of zoom in and zoom out makes things easier to understand.

PDF: XPDF is on again off again on both the 6" and 5" as an alternate format. It should always be offered as some PDF's are images that look like text and ADE doesn't zoom well on images. Most of the time PDF reflow looks like it is only wrapping lines not paragraphs. It needs to wrap paragraphs. The lines in a paragraph should all have the same separation and be balanced in length.

DJVU: Has the traditional 3 zoom levels where the last one shift to landscape only in this case the margins reappear making the font shrink rather than get bigger. This makes this zoom level unusable on most documents and really makes DJVU useless on the smaller 5" screen. (There is a new DJVU viewer available as an addon for V3, it is better than what you have but I don't like the keymapping the programmer used.

CHM: This format is basically unusable. I have attached a small sample to show a few of the problems. CHM is the help format for Windows so compare how it looks on windows to how it looks on the device.

HTML: This format is also terrible. The same sample in html is supplied. After all CHM is compressed html. HTML has No bold or italics, no following links, no images, zoom levels are bad. It needs lots of work. Note that there are characters in the sample that should be displayed but are not in both formats.

LIT: Needs improved speed and then other items can be addressed.

DOC: More than any other format this one needs to actually honor the font size in points, rather than pixels and then the paragraphs need to wrap. It could be a major differentiator along with CHM and DJVU toward distancing yourself from the competition.

MOBI has a nasty bug in that it eats memory and then locks up. This tends to happen most often if you lock the keyboard while displaying this format. This needs fixing. At some point the link following user interface should be changed to the new format I proposed about for ADE.

I forgot one thing. The system specific files and folders should be invisible. Currently restore and many other folders clutter up the bookshelf. Preceding them with a . will make typically make them invisible in Linux and certainly should be. Only files the user needs to use should be visible.