Quote:
Originally Posted by Faterson
Sounds reasonable.  I'd definitely first introduce a basic feature like, say, paragraph spacing, into Bluefire Reader, before messing around with EPUB 3. I mean, the logical sequence is first to get the basics right, and only then move on to advanced stuff.
But, like Micah said, his focus is apparently on his corporate customers more than on regular-Joe e-book readers. |
paragraph spacing control is on our punch list, though line spacing control is higher (we have it on Android, but not yet on iOS). It is actually quite tricky for several reasons, including issues around highlighting/text selection (as noted before, we can't use iOS API's for that due to the rendering engine).
And while it is true that we have to make a living and thus business customers are important to us, we are ABSOLUTELY dedicated to constantly improving the the reading experience for all users of Bluefire Powered apps, which we care very deeply about.
I put this list of things we did in 2012 in a prior comment, but here it is again:
Support for the new iPad Retina display
Support for the new iPhone 5 screen size
Support for iOS6
Support for multiple concurrent user accounts (Adobe ID’s and Vendor ID’s)
Single Sign-on option for Vendor ID customers
Improved PDF performance and reading experience
Support for system fonts, a feature that enables more reading settings and enhanced rendering of ePUB formatting
Online dictionary look-up
Support for external hyperlinks in ePUB and PDF titles
Streamlined highlighting (bypasses Notes panel)
Sharing via Facebook, Twitter and email
Contextual ebook text search results
Collections (iOS only)
Swipe for brightness control (iOS only)
Enhanced side-loading (iOS only)
Annotation export (this one is particularly cool)
Support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean text, including vertical writing and right-to-left page order and Japanese Typography (e.g. Ruby, Kenten, etc)
Enhanced Sign-in workflow
This was a LOT of work that cost us literally 100's of thousands to implement. And many of these features were driven only by user feedback. We still have lots of work to do, but I'm proud of what we've accomplished. Marvin is great, and has the luxury of not having to support DRM - which makes development 10X easier. We chose to support DRM so we can serve independent retailers that can only get DRM'd ebooks from pubs, and also to enable our users to check out public library books - particularly important for many users in Europe who can't use the Overdrive app.
In regards to EPUB3, it is not a "binary" thing, meaning we continue to work on improving the current app with the current renderer, but we need to be making headway on EPUB3 too. It is a big, big effort and will take many months. If we waited until we finished our current punch list, we'd be late to the game as publishers start shipping tons of EPUB3 content, and our users would be stuck without a way to read those in Bluefire Reader - and independent retailers and libraries would not be able to offer that content to mobile users AT ALL. Adobe is not adding full EPUB3 support to their ebook platform, and it is up to us to do it. We are.
I appreciate your feedback, and fair criticism. We continue to work our ass off.