Touch Kobo Touch future firmware feature request thread

[MacEachaidh]

As I leave my KT on the default setting where it goes to sleep mode after 15 minutes of inactivity, all I generally see on my screen (unless I go specifically looking for it) is the book's cover in sleep mode, or a page of text with a footer bar that tells me which page I'm on.

That's fair enough, as far as it goes. And I'm conscious of the ideal of not gobbling up any more screen real estate.

But it would be nice to be able to add the optional display of the time, the battery's level of charge and the title of the book to the footer space where the page number/length of the book currently appear.

[filmo]

Time display is one of most requested and discussed features. The tiny amount of power to keep it always displayed at current time would add up reducing battery life. That explains clock icon on top right side of home screen. It would be nice to see clock icon on each book page in top margin. This would require top margin which is now almost non existent fixing no top margin bug. Clock icon does not belong on sleep display with IR touch functions deactivated to save power and prevent accidental touches doing strange things.

[Cottser]

Originally Posted by Danger

Well to put this on topic for the KT... More Reading Life awards... such as "Congradulations you read 5 books while walking!" or "Congradulations you walked _____ meters/Kilometers/miles while reading!" maybe even "Congradulations you read for 20 hours while walking!" Of couse those would be really easy awards for me as I read while walking to work, 20mins a day total.

As far as i know the KT doesn't have a GPS chip, accelerometer, or pedometer, so this would be a tricky one to program

[nogle]

Originally Posted by Cottser

As far as i know the KT doesn't have a GPS chip, accelerometer, or pedometer, so this would be a tricky one to program

Just a firmware upgrade needed then ;-)

[Danger]

Originally Posted by Cottser

As far as i know the KT doesn't have a GPS chip, accelerometer, or pedometer, so this would be a tricky one to program

Hadn't thought about that. Now that it's mentioned...

[MacEachaidh]

I would love to see hyperlinks creating their own localised region of the screen, that produced the expected response easily when tapped.

Like many, it seems, I'm having problems with getting my KT to recognise endnote markers; I usually get an unwanted page turn or else either the marker itself or a nearby word becomes highlighted with that selection teardrop thingy as if I wanted to look it up in the dictionary. And with books with a hyperlinked ToC that completely fills the screen it tends to be the opposite: I sometimes have trouble turning to the next page without activating one of the links, even when I try to press on blank space to the right of the ToC text.

At the moment, the behaviour of hyperlinks seems ... erratic. I don't know how precisely the touch sensitivity can be focussed with the current hardware, but if it's possible, having hyperlinks create their own activity that reliably overwrites the page turn behaviour but only in a region reasonably tightly localised, both horiontally and vertically, around the link itself ... wouldn't that seem to be the ideal solution?

[Xennex1170]

Originally Posted by Cottser

As far as i know the KT doesn't have a GPS chip, accelerometer, or pedometer, so this would be a tricky one to program

I guess it could be considered for other platforms running kobo apps though.

[The Terminator]

Originally Posted by MacEachaidh

I would love to see hyperlinks creating their own localised region of the screen, that produced the expected response easily when tapped.

Like many, it seems, I'm having problems with getting my KT to recognise endnote markers;

It seems like it depends on the book, I haven't read a lot of books that have endnotes in them but the couple that I have worked very well, even though the endnote links were small numbers in brackets. This isn't just on my device, someone else was having a lot of trouble getting endnotes to work on their Kobo so I sent them my copy of "Les Miserables" and the endnotes worked perfectly.

[MacEachaidh]

Originally Posted by The Terminator

It seems like it depends on the book, I haven't read a lot of books that have endnotes in them but the couple that I have worked very well, even though the endnote links were small numbers in brackets. This isn't just on my device, someone else was having a lot of trouble getting endnotes to work on their Kobo so I sent them my copy of "Les Miserables" and the endnotes worked perfectly.

Ahh, interesting. Thanks for the comments. ;-)

If some ebooks work in this respect and some don't, then I gather it has to be to do with the code used.

I understand that different readers interpret the same code differently (to some degree), so I guess we're still at the "Microsoft vs Netscape" level of ebook development, where code is still effectively proprietary. But it would be very helpful -- and, I imagine, in their interest -- if Kobo were to release some technical examples of how to make certain types of formatting (like endnotes!) work reliably on Kobo readers.

Wouldn't that be a good thing?

[The Terminator]

Originally Posted by MacEachaidh

Wouldn't that be a good thing?

Yep, probably a good idea, I wonder if an ePub to ePub conversion in Calibre would fix anything, that usually tidy's the code up a bit.

[Byron4120]

Here are some suggestions. 1) The manipulation of generic epubs works on the entire volume - but for k-epub the manipulation works by chapter. So for some of my books e.g. Lee Child Jack Reacher Books 1-6 (2047 pages) advancing by chapter or by TOC is quite a chore for the touch taking a long time. I assume this is due to formatting the entire book or all of the book up to the desired location. If it was by chapter the work would be minimal as only a chapter needs formatting. 2) It would be really nice if landscape mode was selectable. Either 1 or two column mode. For some books this really is more comfortable than portrait. 3) Better use of browser and importing web accessible e-books (e.g. calibre). 4) Flip the OS to Android? -

[gearspec]

THE Kobo touch is a great little piece of device and I use for almost everything.
The upgrade team is doing a great job.

Some minor changes/updates in the next release would help a lot of users I believe.

WEB Browser:

a. landscape mode for the WEB BROWSER: Its a great little device, portrait browsing would allow us to see more content on a webpage and scroll around less.
b. The keyboard should have the "." (dot) and " / " readily available
c. Kobo doesn't go to a site if the address doesn't contain "www" in it.
d. If possible, a keyboard layout like opera mobile would be very nice.
e. Many times when "go to" is press, there is no loading bar while to the page is loading, it almost feels as if its not loading anything.

Content:
a. Ability to delete a book/picture from the device.
b. Sometimes we have to zoom in to page to make it fit to the screen, to go to the next page, one has to scroll to the side and select the next page. It would be nice to have a corner of the page to tap to go to the next page even when zoomed in, the next page should also maintain zoom position of the current one.

Extras:
1. I enjoyed Chess more than Sudoku.
2. May be simple puzzle solving games like "Daymare times"

UI:
1. Bars inside the Battery like cellphones have and to have a slightly bigger battery bar.

[Jaden]

Originally Posted by gearspec

a. Ability to delete a book/picture from the device.

You can already do that, one at a time using the menu next to each book/picture in the library.

But it's slow and tedious. I prefer to do it on my computer.

[The Terminator]

Originally Posted by gearspec

THE Kobo touch is a great little piece of device and I use for almost everything.
The upgrade team is doing a great job.

Some minor changes/updates in the next release would help a lot of users I believe.

WEB Browser:

a. landscape mode for the WEB BROWSER: Its a great little device, portrait browsing would allow us to see more content on a webpage and scroll around less.
b. The keyboard should have the "." (dot) and " / " readily available
c. Kobo doesn't go to a site if the address doesn't contain "www" in it.
d. If possible, a keyboard layout like opera mobile would be very nice.
e. Many times when "go to" is press, there is no loading bar while to the page is loading, it almost feels as if its not loading anything.

Content:
a. Ability to delete a book/picture from the device.
b. Sometimes we have to zoom in to page to make it fit to the screen, to go to the next page, one has to scroll to the side and select the next page. It would be nice to have a corner of the page to tap to go to the next page even when zoomed in, the next page should also maintain zoom position of the current one.

Extras:
1. I enjoyed Chess more than Sudoku.
2. May be simple puzzle solving games like "Daymare times"

UI:
1. Bars inside the Battery like cellphones have and to have a slightly bigger battery bar.

Some Chess.com support would be cool .

[gearspec]

I used a simple HTML upload script to simulate this.
When you hit a UPLOAD button in facebook, a forum etc. through the browser, it runs the QT file explorer and you can see the folders inside the system. But the touchscreen implementation doesn't work as soon as the upload window loads(or rather it doesn't work on the upload window). What I am asking for is a simple file explorer/QT upload screen with touchscreen functionality that points to the built in storage(where the books are).

Here is a pictures of what i mean.

[Mod: Pic too big and deleted]