Quote:
Originally Posted by kbs
Yes -- I've added some simple folder-browsing/cover flow in recent revisions of Trook. The code turned out to be relatively minimal, and it seemed to fit somewhat naturally in the UI, so in it went, and here is how it looks.
A little bonus if you use Calibre to manage your books -- it uses the same approach to place cover images; so if you copy your books to the Nook via Calibre, you get cover images at the same time. I'm sorry to say that I'm not able to get at the images for B&N books (sigh) as it is stashed away in a more obscure way, but one of these days...
As stangri also points out, a good library manager is something other nookdevs are actively thinking about; so [along with everyone here, actually :-) ] I'm looking forward to seeing some great ideas and apps over the coming weeks.
-kb
|
Neat!
What I'm looking for is somewhat different, however. I have 1100 books in my library in Calibre at the moment (and growing fast). Back in the days of the Sony 500 & 505, I observed that their 10 numbered buttons should make it possible to navigate to any of 1000 books in 3 button pushes, and 10K books in 4. All that is required is an appropriate hierarchical menu tree. (well... several, actually. Forex, one each for by-Title, by-Author, and by-Series.)
Coverflow browsing (by comparison) begins to lose when you have 100s of things to scroll through. So here are a couple of thoughts:
Can you write to the eInk screen as well as to the LCD? If so, it might be interesting to display the current level of an N-way hierarchy on the eInk display, and the "selection buttons" on the LCD. Then drill down another tree level per selection until the number of choices is small enough to make cover-flow reasonable — perhaps 20 or so?
Or just use the LCD, with cover-flow to scroll through the current dozen-ish choices.
In either case, it's worth noting that Calibre has recently gained the capability of writing a library index file. I'll bet that it would be possible (
e.g. "can be made possible with a bit more programming") to customize that index file to work really well in combination with Trook.
Xenophon