MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Freda Ebook Reader for Windows and Android

Jim Chapman · 05-24-2011, 08:12 AM

Just so I don't give the impression that I'm ignoring the debate ...

Freda's design is such that it should just render a floating image as non-floating. Generally, Freda should ignore tags and attributes that it does not understand.

Clearly something is broken here (Steve emailed me with further details off-forum, and it looks like a pretty significant bug in Freda's image-handling generally, albeit a bug that only pops up under certain conditions that I do not yet fully understand!). I will investigate further ...

And as it's been a while since I made any update, here is some info about the current state of Freda development:

I've been doing a pretty heavy re-factoring exercise, to improve performance and to allow a more flexible setup for book sources (to get away from the restriction of having only 3 OPDS catalogs, one DropBox and one website). From a programming perspective, that's meant a lot of pushing 'book source' logic up into an abstract base class; from a user perspective it means you can decide what book sources you want to use, and have them all appear as items on Freda's screen (with a +/- control to open/close them, rather than the tabbed 'pivot view' which is clunky to use and causes horrible performance issues). I've done also some work to make the visuals for book sources slicker - though to be honest I am still sticking to a pretty bare-bones look (just text and thumbnails, no walnut-effect panelling - though if I can get hold of some suitable background bitmaps I might add it as an option).

I'm expecting to put out one more major release before the Mango WP7.5 Operating System update (which word on the street says will be in September ... but what does the street know?). So depending on my various other commitments, you can probably hope to see Freda 2.0 some time in July.

- Jim

05-24-2011, 08:12 AM	#25
Jim Chapman Addict Posts: 309 Karma: 2025434 Join Date: Oct 2009 Device: Lumia 950 Phone	Just so I don't give the impression that I'm ignoring the debate ... Freda's design is such that it should just render a floating image as non-floating. Generally, Freda should ignore tags and attributes that it does not understand. Clearly something is broken here (Steve emailed me with further details off-forum, and it looks like a pretty significant bug in Freda's image-handling generally, albeit a bug that only pops up under certain conditions that I do not yet fully understand!). I will investigate further ... And as it's been a while since I made any update, here is some info about the current state of Freda development: I've been doing a pretty heavy re-factoring exercise, to improve performance and to allow a more flexible setup for book sources (to get away from the restriction of having only 3 OPDS catalogs, one DropBox and one website). From a programming perspective, that's meant a lot of pushing 'book source' logic up into an abstract base class; from a user perspective it means you can decide what book sources you want to use, and have them all appear as items on Freda's screen (with a +/- control to open/close them, rather than the tabbed 'pivot view' which is clunky to use and causes horrible performance issues). I've done also some work to make the visuals for book sources slicker - though to be honest I am still sticking to a pretty bare-bones look (just text and thumbnails, no walnut-effect panelling - though if I can get hold of some suitable background bitmaps I might add it as an option). I'm expecting to put out one more major release before the Mango WP7.5 Operating System update (which word on the street says will be in September ... but what does the street know?). So depending on my various other commitments, you can probably hope to see Freda 2.0 some time in July. - Jim Last edited by Jim Chapman; 05-24-2011 at 08:16 AM.