iLiad Quick switching between book and notes

[petteri]

Hi,
I'm not aware of very quick method of switching between a book and a notes page.
Use case is like this i'm reading a mobipocket (or other format book) and i want to make some notes and drawing based on what i'm reading. I'd like to quickly to switch to a notes page and back. And do it again and again...
Currently it closes the book, opens a notes section or last notes with double click, takes too much time, i forget details about my notes, then back to the book, wait it to load, do it again and loose time...

Do you know if there is hack or extension that would enable [alt+tab] kind of switching between two open application on iLiad? Do you think it would be possible to implement? I haven't gotten my root access yet and haven't had time or change to study about possibilities yet... I'm really novice about programming anyways, so i'm not propably able to do this anyway :-(

Thanks for your feedback,

Petteri

[jharker]

It is certainly possible to implement, as far as I know, and is definitely one of the changes that is planned to be incorporated in iLiad OS one of these days. However, it's going to be a while (months) before it comes up in the development timeline. If you (or someone) wants to take a crack at it, that would be awesome. Currently that is my personal #1 most-wished-for feature.

If anyone is interested in working on this I would suggest first looking at the contentLister source code. The contentLister is designed to close one program before opening another. Presumably this behavior could be changed to allow several programs to be open at once.

We had a few discussions of how the UI for multi-mode could be implemented to make it as intuitive as possible... here's one, but I think there was another one too...

Another issue that might need to be addressed is memory. The iLiad doesn't have a ton of RAM, and I know that iPDF will take as much memory as it can to store pre-rendered pages. There might need to be a way to limit how much memory each program is allowed to use.

Anyway, as far as I know this feature does not yet exist, but it would be really nice to see.

[hansel]

Some more notes...
- I believe contenLister has code to open a document in a viewer that is already running.
- memory usage is a main concern. A default Iliad that runs out of memory just crashes (or reboots). We will need to enable swapping to avoid this.
- Ipdf sets a memory limit for itself (in main.cc): 50 MB (which is almost everything). This can be changed...

Personally I think that the Iliad's main GUI (contenLister) should be rewritten. [Preferably in Lua which would make the amount of code much smaller and flexible ]. However I think that the task of developing it in a reliable way will be much to big...

[haven]

I read the above and was thinking to myself, ouch, 50Mb, that's really tiny. Then I remembered that the original Borland Turbo Pascal had an entire Pascal compiler that was lightning quick ( a couple seconds to compile ten thousand lines) PLUS a very full-featured Wordstar clone editor running in 32 KILOBYTES. <laughs out loud> A little memory-resident editor oughta be feasible somehow :-)

[nekokami]

Here's another thread from way back that covered this: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14766

This would be one of my top priorities for development. I'm too slow at coding to contribute there, but I can throw some hours of testing at this if that would help.

I'm going to keep looking through old threads. I really thought someone had come up with a workaround that involved redefining existing controls in start.sh or something.

Actually, I think it was this thread: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14766

Edit: or maybe this one: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14366

[mand]

Originally Posted by jharker

Currently that is my personal #1 most-wished-for feature.

Me too.