MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Kobo future firmware feature request thread

ringerc · 01-23-2011, 01:22 AM

In rough order of descending personal preference:

Goto page
Ability to remove a book from "currently reading"
Speed page turning by pre-rendering the next page when a page turn is done, so it's cached in RAM and ready to display when the next page turn is requested.
Option to group books by series
Ship Calibre with the device or recommend it in the manual
Disable loading quotes, or get fresh ones occasionally. They get repetitive and annoying.
Option to override ebook formatting to enable/disable full justification - with hyphenation support, otherwise it'd look absolutely awful. This means the Kobo needs to carry hyphenation suffix databases for supported languages, but these are freely availible from the Apache FOP project, TeX, etc. Hyphenation without justification is horrible, please don't implement it. The best H&J algorithm is Knuth's as used in TeX and is extremely well documented.

More pie-in-the sky are:

A QtWebKit based browser based on QtDemoBrowser / Arora for the Kobo Wifi. Seriously. Yes, URL text entry would suck, but it'd be REALLY HANDY for reading long articles etc on the wifi. D-PAD for navigation, as is done on non-touch-screen phones. I'd love to have a bash at implementing this myself if the Qt embedded based kobo user interface app were open source or had a plugin interface. e-Ink is gorgeous for reading articles and stories, it's a shame not to have a browser to allow access to them w/o needing Calibre.
Ability to browse and search Wikipedia from locally cached copy using the above browser.

There are also a couple of things that'd really improve the user interface:

UI BUG: When the Kobo Wifi connects to a network and it detects that an update is available, there may already be another button press in the queue when the prompt asking you to update pops up. As this defaults to "ask me later" you can accidentally skip an update. There's no way to force a re-prompt within the Kobo Wifi UI, which is a pain especially if you're not easily able to use Kobo Desktop (corporate PC, unsupported platform, etc). To solve this, input should be flushed before reading the user's response to the update prompt. (filed as http://kobo.zendesk.com/requests/156556)
Queue user input and skip intermediate redraws when there's another action queued, allowing the user to move around a UI they know well without having to wait for the screen to catch up at every step. Detailed description filed as http://kobo.zendesk.com/requests/156564 .

Oh, and finally: document the use of the Linux kernel, busybox, and u-boot in the manual along with the licensing info for all the userspace components. Include a reference to where to get the source code in the manual to satisfy the conditions of the GPL/LGPL licensed components, including the kernel.

01-23-2011, 01:22 AM	#135
ringerc Enthusiast Posts: 31 Karma: 64 Join Date: Jan 2011 Location: Australia Device: Kobo	Enhancements In rough order of descending personal preference: Goto page Ability to remove a book from "currently reading" Speed page turning by pre-rendering the next page when a page turn is done, so it's cached in RAM and ready to display when the next page turn is requested. Option to group books by series Ship Calibre with the device or recommend it in the manual Disable loading quotes, or get fresh ones occasionally. They get repetitive and annoying. Option to override ebook formatting to enable/disable full justification - with hyphenation support, otherwise it'd look absolutely awful. This means the Kobo needs to carry hyphenation suffix databases for supported languages, but these are freely availible from the Apache FOP project, TeX, etc. Hyphenation without justification is horrible, please don't implement it. The best H&J algorithm is Knuth's as used in TeX and is extremely well documented. More pie-in-the sky are: A QtWebKit based browser based on QtDemoBrowser / Arora for the Kobo Wifi. Seriously. Yes, URL text entry would suck, but it'd be REALLY HANDY for reading long articles etc on the wifi. D-PAD for navigation, as is done on non-touch-screen phones. I'd love to have a bash at implementing this myself if the Qt embedded based kobo user interface app were open source or had a plugin interface. e-Ink is gorgeous for reading articles and stories, it's a shame not to have a browser to allow access to them w/o needing Calibre. Ability to browse and search Wikipedia from locally cached copy using the above browser. There are also a couple of things that'd really improve the user interface: UI BUG: When the Kobo Wifi connects to a network and it detects that an update is available, there may already be another button press in the queue when the prompt asking you to update pops up. As this defaults to "ask me later" you can accidentally skip an update. There's no way to force a re-prompt within the Kobo Wifi UI, which is a pain especially if you're not easily able to use Kobo Desktop (corporate PC, unsupported platform, etc). To solve this, input should be flushed before reading the user's response to the update prompt. (filed as http://kobo.zendesk.com/requests/156556) Queue user input and skip intermediate redraws when there's another action queued, allowing the user to move around a UI they know well without having to wait for the screen to catch up at every step. Detailed description filed as http://kobo.zendesk.com/requests/156564 . Oh, and finally: document the use of the Linux kernel, busybox, and u-boot in the manual along with the licensing info for all the userspace components. Include a reference to where to get the source code in the manual to satisfy the conditions of the GPL/LGPL licensed components, including the kernel.