[jacob_qurika]

@ilovejedd. Thanks for the feedback and for trying Qurika! It's very useful to hear what the pain points of the app are.

I recognize that the "preparing" delay is not ideal. What I can say about it is this. In the long term, it will be much less of an issue. Why? Because I can precompute (precompute the precomputation, if you will) on the server side and cache the results. The "preparing" will show up every now and then when the caches get busted due to font changes, but only for as long as it takes to rebuild the caches. Also I can just throw more computing power on the problem to speed it up (expensive though).

Given the recent improvements in mobile processors, might it not be possible to do this locally now?

That is not going to speed it up. The server is always going to be faster than the device. On the device though we don't have to front load the computation, so we could hide that computation cost over the course of reading the book. But all said and done, given that the issue is mitigable, I think this is the right design choice, though a tough one to make. Paying that upfront cost (which will get better as I engineer the solutions) when you download a book, or change a font, this just frees up the device so much more, which in turn makes for a better reading experience, and that is what I have decided to prioritize.

Qurika seems even heavier on resources than games if it has to offload work to a server.

Interpreting the precomputation requirement as Qurika being more resource heavy is not quite accurate. The precomputation is a solution to a specific technical problem. Admittedly one that Qurika faces but not any other reader app (that I know of). It relates to producing textures from html into a custom 3D OpenGL context. But solving that problem actually makes the rest of the app in some ways *less* resource heavy relative to a normal reader app - we don't have to render html anymore.

Also, how do you add non-Calibre OPDS feeds? It seems it's hard-coded to Calibre.

Actually right now Qurika only supports Calibre OPDS feeds. I build a prototype for a more general version but there were issues with the navigation UI, and so turned the feature off. I'll update the post to correct the mistake. I apologize for the slip up.

@DuckieTigger Thanks! I'm glad you liked some of the changes!

The swipe up and down to thumb through feels backwards.

I've had people go both ways on this, which makes it tough to decide what to do. In the end I decided to go with the way it is because it mirrors the way webpages and pretty much all scrolling works these days. You swipe up on the content to move it forward. However you if you are dragging the scroll bar you drag it *down* to move forward. In Qurika the tab corresponds to the scroll bar, so you drag it down to move forward. And, as per standard UI, swiping up on the content should move the book forward, which is what Qurika does.

you don't need to be online to open Qurika and read the already downloaded books.

I'd love to take credit for that, but Qurika still needs you to be signed in to read. It keeps you logged in though for quite a while, so you should not have to log in very frequently, ideally just once per device. Oh, I think I know why you thought you were not logged in. I no longer display the little icon on the top right with the first three characters of the email that brought up the user menu. I merged that menu with the "..." menu.