Touch Kobo Touch Firmware 2.0

[latepaul]

Originally Posted by dannyproy

As I mentioned earlier in the thread the (cumbersome) solution I found was to factory reset and take out any SD card so no books are on the kobo, then plugin the kobo and upgrade to 2.0 . Once done, insert your SD card again to add your books back on to the library. It seems 2.0 is not great with upgrading side loaded ebpub libraries and works best generating a new library from fresh.

Thanks for the reply. I don't have an SD card. The first time I installed 2.0 I did so from a factory reset. This latest time I didn't but then I did hit the reboot problem with at least one of the epubs first time around.

I'll try another factory reset and reload some books and see what happens.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by PeterT

@Magphil: 2.02 is NOT an official release....

Even still, 2.02 seems to have solved a few of the problems with 2.0 and while it may be beta, it's better and worth installing over 2.0.

[taming]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Even still, 2.02 seems to have solved a few of the problems with 2.0 and while it may be beta, it's better and worth installing over 2.0.

The 2.0.2 folks found and posted the link to is not a beta. It was meant for use outside of North America. The betas are not put on the Kobo site.

As an aside: John, unless something has changed, you still don't actually have a Kobo, right? And you are recommending something you can't actually try yourself?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by taming

The 2.0.2 folks found and posted the link to is not a beta. It was meant for use outside of North America. The betas are not put on the Kobo site.

So why then is 2.0.2 not released to North America when it works better then 2.0?

[taming]

I think Kobo would be really, really dumb to have a long list of fixes and release interim builds as they are addressed one at a time. Can you imagine 10 or so rollouts in a short period of time? Why would they do that? And can you imagine the s-storm here when the next release addressed only one of the issues people are so focused on.

I am going to repeat the edit I made to my previous post:

As an aside: John, unless something has changed, you still don't actually have a Kobo, right? And you are recommending something you can't actually try yourself?

[Suzanna]

Originally Posted by latepaul

Thanks for the reply. I don't have an SD card. The first time I installed 2.0 I did so from a factory reset. This latest time I didn't but then I did hit the reboot problem with at least one of the epubs first time around.

I'll try another factory reset and reload some books and see what happens.

I have the same problem, and like you I don't use an SD Card and had just done a factory reset as well. I don't want to go through that again - not if they're updating the firmware and I might have to factory reset yet again - so for now I'm reading on my Kobo Original. I miss my KTouch!

[taming]

@Suzanna What happens in beta, stays in beta (until after the release), but I can say we've had 3 updates already, each of them either totally fixing something or making significant progress on an issue.

EDIT: Folks should probably know that at some point, the external beta process stops. Usually we have a list of issues we think are still outstanding. We are occasionally surprised by a new feature or by a messed up old one .

[Suzanna]

I keep checking in here for the new firmware - can't wait!

[RareBird]

It's good to know that betas are being released for testing and progress is being made. I've had no major issues with the second release of 2.0 yet and hope it stays that way but a more stable firmware is always a good thing.

[taming]

Originally Posted by Suzanna

I keep checking in here for the new firmware - can't wait!

Don't hold your breath--the fact that we are testing does not mean a release is imminent--just means it is being actively worked on.

[Kop]

I do hope that fix will be made available really soon! Please.

Today, after update to 2.0.0 my Kobo Touch device now crashes every single time I try to read an EPUB book that is written in Finnish. All other books do work ok.

I have tried re-downloading the problematic books, but this makes no difference.

Needless to say, but those books were working just fine before the update.

[latepaul]

The factory reset worked - so thanks for that.

I've realised that Kobo Touch does have mobi support and tested it with a single file and it seems to work. What are people's experiences with that. Given that most of my books were originally mobi, might I be better off using that until the issues with epubs are fixed?

[taming]

Originally Posted by Kop

I do hope that fix will be made available really soon! Please.

Today, after update to 2.0.0 my Kobo Touch device now crashes every single time I try to read an EPUB book that is written in Finnish. All other books do work ok.

I have tried re-downloading the problematic books, but this makes no difference.

Needless to say, but those books were working just fine before the update.

What font are you using? If Georgia, you may want to try Times Roman, Ryumen, or Gothic MB10. The full diacritical set is (temporarily) missing in 2.0.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

That means you can now use my enhanced Charis SIL (with smallcaps).

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?a9av9mnbl5fxtae

Is that the one from earlier in the thread? If so, I'd been using it since it had been posted, but couldn't find the post again to thank you. The only problem I've had with it is that italics come up as bolded, but they don't with the original Charis SIL. I double-checked to make sure I had the files named correctly on the Kobo, and the italicised one is the italicised one, so I'm putting this down to a Kobo problem.

[register512]

Once again, it seems like we've picked up a few nice features, but implemented in a "not really ready for prime time" fashion. Maybe it's better for KEpubs, and maybe it's better for people who don't use an SD card, but I wish for once that things would actually work the way they're advertised.

To wit -- wonderul new feature -- shelves. However, if you upgrade the software, your shortlist disappears. Yes, it has now been (sort of) re-implemented as a shelf, which makes sense, given the shelf paradigm. However, you would think that people would realize that installing an upgrade should take the existing Shortlist and convert it to a shelf. Instead, installing the upgrade trashes the Shortlist, and leaves you to have to re-create it. This can be a royal pain, especially if you have several hundred books on your KT.

This brings us to problem 2 with shelves. To enable shelves correctly, you basically have to factory reset your KT. After reading forums, you discover that there is now this "feature?" that says you are logged in to your KT (a somewhat novel concept). To get shelves to work you have to log out. Once you log out, your KT returns to "fresh out of the box" mode, so you have to connect to the desktop app, and start the setup process again. Of course, all this really does is waste storage space on the KT by adding advertisements, bits of locked books, and other garbage. Once you've re-set it, the KT loses contact with the SD card, so much of your library disappears. Fortunately, popping the card out and back in seems to clear the problem. Now we can proceed to re-building the Shortlist as a shelf.

And thus we come to problem 3 with shelves. Open the shelf, click on Add Books, and we get presented with a list of everything on the KT, as you would expect. The list is presented in ascending alphabetical order by Title. OK, I know the content of my shortlist by author, since I think of it as "the new one by so-and-so". No problem, we'll just re-order the list, since we can change list orders everywhere else on the KT. But...guess what? There is no way to change the order of the list, so now we have to try to remember the title of each new book to add to the list.

Oh, and now we come to problem 4. There is no way to easily jump through the list of books, except to use the search feature, which means having to type in at least partial names or titles. In other lists, there is this rather nice little double-ended arrow at the bottom of the screen. You can click on one end or the other of the arrow to move by a single screen. Or, you can click in the middle of the arrow to jump into the middle of the sorted list. Therefore, you can fairly easily get to the "M"s, or the "L"s. However, if what you want is to find a book to add to a shelf, it's pretty much page at a time.

This brings up problem 5. When you do try to use the search feature, clicking the Go button often causes a near-reset to occur. I realize that you're only supposed to click on the suggested search item, but the overall slow speed of the process tends to lead one to click on anything that seems to say "press me". And yes, adding a group of books to a shelf seems to take way longer than it should.

In closing, I'll touch on one more "feature". Font tuning is quite nice, and the new presentation engine is way nicer for presenting pages with drop-caps, and other font tweaks. However, I wish a way had been found to do this without losing the performance gains in page turns. I really liked the fact that page turns and "dead tap" problems had been nicely fixed in the latter 1.9 releases. However, there is a noticeable slow-down in page turns with the new font features.

All in all, some nice new stuff, but the user interface needs some real work, and some more thought should have gone into managing the transition. As with too many other software vendors, we get new features (with new bugs) but the old bugs don't get addressed.

And for the record, I couldn't give a rat's ass about Facebook connectivity, or publishing my reading results to any where. I consider those "features" to be an invasion of my privacy, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see someone raise a complaint to the Canadian Privacy Commissioner to ensure that these "features" are either removed, or turned off by default. I would much prefer to see them not even installed except by specific request from the user.

Norm