Kindle firmware 5.8.7 (11/30/2016)

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by tkavan

FWIW that doesn't happen on my Paperwhite (5.8.7). I left the search window open for 15-20 seconds and it just stayed there.

It's intermittent -- but once it starts happening it's a bugger to stop it.

It may well be an Oasis-specific problem: I've never seen it on any other reader (but then I don't have anything else running a comparable firmware version.)

I'll see if it happens on my new/warranty-replacement Oasis when it turns up (it turns out they don't like being dropped in the middle of the road and having a car run over them, WHAT A CON they were supposed to fly up in the air if that happened 'cos of all the aerospace composite wossnames: thank goodness for the extended warranty's drops cover).

[tkavan]

Originally Posted by NullNix

WHAT A CON they were supposed to fly up in the air if that happened 'cos of all the aerospace composite wossnames: thank goodness for the extended warranty's drops cover).

Yeah, you can't trust aything these days!

[Atunah]

Originally Posted by NullNix

It's intermittent -- but once it starts happening it's a bugger to stop it.

It may well be an Oasis-specific problem: I've never seen it on any other reader (but then I don't have anything else running a comparable firmware version.)

I'll see if it happens on my new/warranty-replacement Oasis when it turns up (it turns out they don't like being dropped in the middle of the road and having a car run over them, WHAT A CON they were supposed to fly up in the air if that happened 'cos of all the aerospace composite wossnames: thank goodness for the extended warranty's drops cover).

I haven't seen this on my Oasis. Not on any of the firmware updates. I am at the latest now and I use search a lot for various things.

[barryem]

Me too. I have the latest updates on my Voyage and Paperwhites and I use search all the time to help remember who characters are. It's been working just fine for me.

Barry

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by shamanNS

Because (unmodified) Georgia look waaay to thin on E-ink display. Just like Garamond and Charis SIL (which publishers just love to embedd... I wander if they even bothered to test books on eInk device...).

I always wondered why so many publishers embed Charis SIL in their books. It looks awful on e-ink displays. When coded in a specific way, some e-readers even disallow you from selecting a different font.

The first thing I do in each e-book I buy is to rip out any embedded fonts, if they are not used for special characters.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Barty

Current trend in UI design is to use thin fonts, no separation lines, low contrast. Look at all the web sites that use gray text on white background. Because black text is too harsh or something. Never mind that most computer monitors are crappy lcds with poor contrast so the text is already gray to begin with. Designers (or the people who pay them) seem to assume everybody has 25 year old 20/20 eyes and large, hi res, good quality monitors they themselves use.

I've ranted about that in the Vent and Rant thread not too long ago. I've actually ranted against the web designer in one of my previous companies.

"Dude, you're using a €1500 color calibrated Eizo monitor that shows you every single 0-255 step in each color. You're not yet 30, and you have 120% vision. So you can read light gray text on a white background. I get that. Most people have €100 TN-LCD-screens, and not perfect eyesight."

His reaction basically was: "So what? This is how modern websites should look, and thus I shall design them like that. If you can't read it, tough luck."

Combine that with the huge sticky headers, the combination of huge titles, pictures and banners with tiny body text, and you have a receipt for disaster.

There's also the tendency to put "accessibility features" in a category by itself rather than designing UI that suits a continuum of needs. You either have perfect eyesight or you're legally blind. I fall in between and it frustrates me to no end dealing with modern GUI.

Exactly. My old laptop has a 15.4 inch screen, 1280x800 (98 dpi), and it ran Windows 7. I used that screen at 100%, set the font type to Verdana 10 instead of Tahoma 8, and all is fine. I've been doing this since 1995.

Enter my new laptop. It has a 15.6 inch 1920x1080 screen which I refuse to believe is workable for normal people, as it's 134 dpi. You have to have perfect eyesight to use that. So, I set it to 150%, which basically comes down to 1280x720 @ 15.6 inch, or 94 dpi. However, on Windows 10, I can't set the font to Verdana anymore, and the default Segoe UI is very thin. Add the bloated "let's add huge amounts of white space" GUI of modern programs into that, and you get a computer that is very hard to work with.

I'm not even mentioning newer versions of Office, with tiny grey context menu's that don't even upscale when you set the font to a larger size. Those menu's are hard to read at 150% already on this laptop, let alone at 100%... and if you have a laptop with a TN-screen, you're just totally *****ed.

[johnnyb]

I guess I'm the only one who wishes for more elegant print-like fonts
Athelas is a really great font on all types of screens and I hope that Amazon will implement it at some point...

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by Atunah

I haven't seen this on my Oasis. Not on any of the firmware updates. I am at the latest now and I use search a lot for various things.

Weird! I assumed this was a general bug, since I have almost no customization on my Kindle at all: it's not jailbroken, all I'm doing is using dozens of collections and a lot of pobis and personal documents, and surely other people here are doing that to a far greater extent than I am.

Ah well, it's all history now. Let's see if the new one has the same problem. (I did a firmware update only a day or two ago. Firmware 5.8.7 comes with a new drop-it-in-the-road feature! )

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by NullNix

Weird! I assumed this was a general bug, since I have almost no customization on my Kindle at all: it's not jailbroken, all I'm doing is using dozens of collections and a lot of pobis and personal documents, and surely other people here are doing that to a far greater extent than I am.

Just a guess, but perhaps some bad internal coding in one of your books is causing the Kindle's indexer to crash and be restarted over and over. There is a simple way to dump the internal logs of the Kindle to see what is going wrong if the problem recurs after you set up your new device.

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by jhowell

Just a guess, but perhaps some bad internal coding in one of your books is causing the Kindle's indexer to crash and be restarted over and over. There is a simple way to dump the internal logs of the Kindle to see what is going wrong if the problem recurs after you set up your new device.

When the search system *does* work, it claims that no books are awaiting indexing, and battery life is not plummeting as I'd expect in that situation.

But, we'll see

[Atunah]

Originally Posted by NullNix

Weird! I assumed this was a general bug, since I have almost no customization on my Kindle at all: it's not jailbroken, all I'm doing is using dozens of collections and a lot of pobis and personal documents, and surely other people here are doing that to a far greater extent than I am.

Ah well, it's all history now. Let's see if the new one has the same problem. (I did a firmware update only a day or two ago. Firmware 5.8.7 comes with a new drop-it-in-the-road feature! )

Hopefully your replacement wont have those issues. I don't do any jail thingie on any of my devices, I use them in exactly the way I bought them. I have no skills on that front, nor do I want or need to.
But I do use lots of collections. I have over 3000 books and 45 collections. Most of my books are directly from Amazon, I say 99%. A handful of others are there as docs and some recipes I send with send to kindle. Don't know what a pobis is.

My Oasis is quite snappy, considering how much I have on it and how many collections I have. Only thing that takes a bit is adding things to collections with a lot of books in it. Like my "read" collection which has over a 1000 in it. Even though they are all in the cloud. Just a few seconds though.

I remember searching on my K1 with having lots of books on it and the SD card and it would take 5-8 minutes each time. Those were the days.

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by Atunah

But I do use lots of collections. I have over 3000 books and 45 collections. Most of my books are directly from Amazon, I say 99%. A handful of others are there as docs and some recipes I send with send to kindle. Don't know what a pobis is.

Sorry: pobi -> geek for 'periodical'. Amazon's rather neglected original-.mobi-only newspaper/magazine feature.

Originally Posted by Atunah

My Oasis is quite snappy, considering how much I have on it and how many collections I have. Only thing that takes a bit is adding things to collections with a lot of books in it. Like my "read" collection which has over a 1000 in it. Even though they are all in the cloud. Just a few seconds though.

I remember searching on my K1 with having lots of books on it and the SD card and it would take 5-8 minutes each time. Those were the days.

Oh yeah, the new indexer in, what, 5.6 was it? 5.7? has had a huge positive effect on performance. Plus it's just nippier in general.

[Atunah]

Originally Posted by NullNix

Sorry: pobi -> geek for 'periodical'. Amazon's rather neglected original-.mobi-only newspaper/magazine feature.

Ah thanks. I still get my readers digest in the original format for my e-innk kindles. I had the tablet one for a while but I don't like reading on tablets. So I kept the simple one. I get a german newspaper from time to time also on my e-ink.

[mathil]

Originally Posted by johnnyb

I guess I'm the only one who wishes for more elegant print-like fonts
Athelas is a really great font on all types of screens and I hope that Amazon will implement it at some point...

It's not just you it's the main reason my PW gets so little use - if I didn't read Japanese books on it I wouldn't use it at all.

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by NullNix

I'll see if it happens on my new/warranty-replacement Oasis when it turns up (it turns out they don't like being dropped in the middle of the road and having a car run over them, WHAT A CON they were supposed to fly up in the air if that happened 'cos of all the aerospace composite wossnames: thank goodness for the extended warranty's drops cover).

It still happens, and it happened after I stuck only one book on it (and after it had indexed), so it's definitely not an indexer problem.

I've never had it happen at the top level, only while inside a book.