nickel replacement

[sven]

Hi all,
As promised a few days ago in this thread https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=195514, I provide some pictures of my nickel replacing Java application on my Kobo Touch. The idea for this application is based on the work by Michael Zucchi (http://a-hackers-craic.blogspot.be/search/label/kobo)

The first one is the Home Screen.

The upper part of the screen shows a list of recently read books. The lower part contains icons for several "Applets", e.g. Calendar, News, Mail or Reader.

The Calendar can be displayed in a month, week or day view. One can switch through the different views by tapping on the icons at the right part of the menu bar. With a swipe to the left or to the right one can go a month, a week or a day back or forward.


By a long tap one can create a new event, by a normal tap on an existing event one can modify the details of the event.

The events are stored in a file in XCAL (XML iCal)format. I hope to implement in future a synch mechanism for my thunderbird calendar at home.

The Reading Applet shows the existing book categories as a tag cloud considering the number of books in a particular category. Currently the category structure is file system based, that means each category is a directory in file system. That makes it easy to manipulate categories and add or remove books.

After a tap on a category, a list of the books in that category is diplayed to select the book to read (I haven´t finished this work yet).

The News Applet displays my favorite online news. A separate application crawls the news webpages and compiles an ePub (without advertisements and pictures).


The Weather Applet is inspired by the great work of KevinShort https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=194376


As it can be seen on the pictures the User Interface is not consistent yet, some menu items are displayed as icons some as text. I am to date not sure what will be the best solution.
Also one can notice a lot of ghosting on the pictures, but this will be fixed in the future. All in all, there is still much room for improvement and a lot of work to be done.

Any feedback is appreciated whether the community might be interested in my replacement of nickel or whether further developement is for my purpose only (then I do not have to clean up and comment the code )

[ikarus9999]

Looks great.
Is there already an installer available? I'd love to try it.

[enotar]

Me too with 2.2.1
That's great
Thank you

[sven]

Unfortunately, there is no installer available yet. I installed the Java Runtime Environment manually. Also, from my point of view there are still too many flaws in the app to distribute it now. Hopefully, at least the calendar app is getting mature enough in the coming days to release it to the public. A lot of data is still hard coded and only configurable by changing the code.

[enotar]

😒Too bad

[Zurga]

I would really like to try the calendar app!

[notzed]

Why not drop the source somewhere like I did - maybe someone can help improve it? As you probably saw, I wasn't too worried about the shitty code, but that didn't really matter for an experiment.

Did you actually use anything from my code or just get some ideas on how to get started? Did you port some other widget toolkit?

I got stuck on wifi and suspend/resume lost interest, and had other stuff to occupy my time - but did you get those worked out?

(I'm the zucchi mentioned above if it isn't clear, I only found this through a referer stat on blogger).

[sven]

Hi all.

I have released the code on http://code.google.com/p/koper/. At the download section there is also a precompiled package available, and the required Java Runtime Environment for ARM. Please follow the instructions on the related wiki page to install and run Koper.

The code is still pretty messy, but I will work on it. Do not hesitate to tell me if my approach for the "framework" is absolutely nonsens. I am still looking for the best and easiest way.

In the next couple of days I try to compile my ideas for future improvements (there is a lot of room for this). If you have any suggestions please tell me. I do not believe that my Kobo Touch will ever compete with the stylish iPads of my business partners, but it can do a pretty good job in providing what I need.

Regards,

Sven

[notzed]

Any particular reason you removed all the namespaces from the code?

[sven]

No, there is no particular reason. When I started coding I did put everything in the default package. As I already mentioned, the code is quite messy and needs to be cleaned up. I will work on it in the coming days.

[notzed]

Ok no worries. I'll keep an eye out.

If you restore the namespace for the readerz stuff it would make code sharing a bit easier - i don't have any grand plans, but with 4-8 weeks leave coming up I might revisit it.

[sven]

One quick question: Does the installation procedure work as described?

[KevinShort]

Confirmed working on my Kobo Glo, the instructions you posted for installing are good.



Pressing the light button takes me back to the home screen. The touch screen needs
calibrating, though. Touching news opens the calendar, and touching notes opens the
news. Also, the graphics are noticeably low resolution on the Glo's display.

I've been able to read the Glo's touch screen perfectly fine with a Python script,
so I'm not sure why koper isn't able to read it correctly.

But nice work on what you've done so far!

[Koboyashi]

Originally Posted by KevinShort

... I've been able to read the Glo's touch screen perfectly fine with a Python script, ...

Please, could you post or PM that Python script? Maybe one could implement a button into your weather app to restart nickel.

[sven]

@KevinShort:
Thank you for your feedback. I am a bit surprised that there is an offset on the touchscreen of the Glo. I guess your script reads the /dev/input/event1 as my app does. Since I don't have an Glo, I am relying on my virtual Kobo only, and there it works fine, at least on my PC. Nevertheless, I will have a look into it.

By the way, how many keys does the Glo have? Do you have the keycodes available? The Touch has two keys: HOME (102) and POWER (116).

Regarding the resolution of the icons you are totally right. I drafted the icons only black&white 180x180 pixel each. On your Glo they are scaled up by around 25%. That makes the icons looking more coarse than on the Touch. But as you also might have noticed, I am not nominated to be the best icon designer of the world. That's for sure I would be grateful, if anybody in the community would like to contribute some neat icons (250x250, up to 16 levels of gray)