enTourage stalled?

Originally Posted by borisb

...They actually have no interest in maintaining their existing products ......Instead, they launch new handsets with the latest OS that you have to buy - after your existing 2-3 year contract runs out, of course.

While "Apple bashing" may be popular, this is the reason that I would never change from the iPhone. When an iPhone update comes out, it is available free to download on your own. I used to have Windows Mobile phones, which were the best smartphones at the time (in my opinion), but updates were left to the providers, which for the reasons stated here, never happened....no surprise. With all due respect to borisb, I have never felt it necessary to wait for the contract to run out. I simply pay money, and get out of it that way.

Apple is definitely a shining example of a company that actively supports its customers to put off obselescence as long as possible (not that this interferes with their profit margin of course). You'll notice many of their deals, both with carriers and publishers, are such that it benefits the customer, not the carrier/publisher. I've seen quotes like "a good way to ruin a great device is to give it to let a carrier manage it". As for the contract running out, paying out the early termination fee is a cost/benefit calculation. Paying $200 to get out of a contract is a matter of financial feasibility for a person, and, at least in Canada, the contract is more for the monthly plan, not the device itself (i.e., you can buy a new device almost any time and keep the same plan, but you'll pay near full price for the device).

Originally Posted by fgruber

Check this out:
http://gizmodo.com/5733556/the-compl...froyo-upgrades

I guess we are not the only ones stuck waiting for Froyo.

Those stats simply missleading.
Here's official stats http://developer.android.com/resourc...-versions.html

Only about 10% use 1.* version...
52% allready have Froyo 2.2 and higher...

On the other hand.., having another android device (and making custom firmware for both), I must, to say that EE made a good job in bringing android to EE. Android by itself contains a lot of bugs, so it's not an easy task to create stable firmware.

Originally Posted by borisb

As for the contract running out, paying out the early termination fee is a cost/benefit calculation. Paying $200 to get out of a contract is a matter of financial feasibility for a person......

I agree. And for me, the cost/benefit calculation is simple. Whatever the cost, to get out of a contract to get the next latest/greatest, is to my benefit. I dont hesitate.

Originally Posted by alefor

I agree. And for me, the cost/benefit calculation is simple. Whatever the cost, to get out of a contract to get the next latest/greatest, is to my benefit. I dont hesitate.

Yup, everyone's decision of cost/benefit will be different and whatever suits you is fine.

But I can't help but notice that you're not from Canada, land of the 3 year, many-hundreds-of-dollars-cancellation-fee contract. (Oh, and if you do anything to your account -- move, change your plan, get a different phone, speak to a customer service rep :P -- they reset the countdown back to 3 full years.) Being held hostage by a cell phone plan is a national past time here, so some of us struggle with this issue more than you do.

What's worse, Canadian carriers all but laugh in your face if you threaten to go to one of the other carriers. They laugh because you'll be just as abused (a more colourful and accurate description would be replaced with *....) at any of the others. Call it the opposite of competition.

Interesting information about the Canadian system. Thank you both. I guess I am lucky that here in Japan, I can't understand everything they tell me (simple language barrier issue), so I just don't listen and pay the money. When I switched carriers a few years ago, I think they tried to harass me, but I just told them I don't understand. They stopped wasting time with this foreigner.

I've been thinking about annotations, and I came to the following conclusions regarding annotations and zooming:
- zooming any type of annotation in PDFs should never be an issue
- zooming some annotations in EPUBs (and PDFs in reflow) is fundamentally an unsolvable problem.

First, there are two types of annotations. The first is markup, which are things like using the Pencil tool and the second is text highlighting and linked items.

Markup is effectively in a layer above the text, exactly like writing on a transparency superimposed over a printed page. Text highlighting is things like the yellow highlighter tool in MS Word, or "attaching" a URL or a library item to some text in an ebook, appearing as an icon in the right margin.

A PDF should never have a zoom problem because a PDF page is effectively a photocopy. You can zoom in and zoom out, but all the same words (and diagrams) will appear in the same order and positioning on the page, just in larger or smaller type. For example, if I highlight "CCC DDD" in the following text (simulated with underline):

AAA BBB CCC DDD
EEE FFF GGG HHH

and I then zoom out, I simply get:

AAA BBB CCC DDD
EEE FFF GGG HHH

As long as the markup layer is zoomed the same amount, the markup will always overlay exactly the same portion of the underlying PDF at any magnification (and pan). Text highlighting (and linked items) behave the same.

In theory, Adobe/enTourage should be able to fully and perfectly support annotations and zooming in a PDF.

EPUBs (and reflowed PDFs) are fundamentally a problem because how many words you see on a page and what line they're on will vary based on screen size and zoom level. And herein lies the problem. Consider the following sample lines of text:

AAA BBB CCC DDD
EEE FFF GGG HHH

If you find something significant about "CCC DDD" you may circle it with the Pencil tool (I obviously can't represent this in a text post). As long as the page is formated as shown, the drawn circle will superimpose properly, highlighting the desired words.

Now here is where you get the problem. If you make the text larger, you might get:

AAA BBB CCC
DDD EEE FFF
GGG HHH

I ask you: how should the software "circle" the phrase "CCC DDD"? As you can immediately recognize, it cannot be done. Zooming itself isn't the problem, it's that the geography of the text on the page has changed, and it's now unclear how & where the annotation should be displayed.
I use the circle as the example as it's the clearest, but you have effectively the same problem with any other type of "squiggle" - the software doesn't know what you really intend to highlight and therefore cannot maintain your intention at a different zoom level (a human might circle both "CCC" and "DDD" independently, but one can't expect that of software).


Text highlights wouldn't be a problem, though, nor links, because these are tied to individual characters. I.e., if you had highlighted "CCC DDD", then they would still be highlighted since the highlight is a characteristic of each letter, e.g. (using underline to simulate):

AAA BBB CCC
DDD EEE FFF
GGG HHH

Similarly, if you had linked a URL to "FFF", then the link would still appear in the right margin of the line containing FFF (this is similar to the way you can attach - or "anchor" - pictures in MS Word to a word, and as the word moves in the document, the picture tags along).

So, PDFs shouldn't be a problem. They should annotate perfectly. Clearly the Reader software should "know" a PDF is being viewed, and support annotations and zooming fully correspondingly.

EPUBs (and reflowed PDFs) shouldn't be a problem if only text (character) based tools are used and the Pencil and similar markup tools are not used (or optionally disabled). However, if a markup tool is used in EPUBs, then Adobe/enTourage has no choice but to lock the annotation to a zoom level because that's the only way to ensure your squiggles overlay the same block of text.

An Addendum

Landscape implementation should really just be about swapping X & Y coordinates. And the screen height & width get swapped. Annotations are all sets of coordinates, so they simply swap X & Y, too. So unless the Adobe software simply doesn't support landscape, I really can't see why landscape hasn't been implemented a year after the eDGe went to manufacturing. And even if Adobe can't do landscape, the eink display driver itself could be told to swap X & Y coordinates coming from the Adobe software. This is really quite puzzling...

Well, circling text when you have a highlight feature available would be pretty silly, so I don't think getting the zoom to preserve that should be a priority. What should be preserved are the size of markings in a margin or in other whitespace. ie, when you write a note in the right margin while zoomed in, it should shrink with the rest of the text (and stay in the margin) when you zoom back out, rather than staying the same size and now covering up part of the text.

Zooming and shrinking the annotation itself can certainly be done - and indeed should be. For both PDFs and EPUBs.

Having the margins as a special mark-up zone partially helps solve the "what was marked up" problem as long you'll accept that the markup appears approxmiately where you put it.

For example, if you had the line:

AAA BBB CCC DDD EEE

and you wrote in the margin to the right of "EEE" something like "What does this word mean" (where you knew you were referring to "EEE"), then the software, at best, could ensure that "What does this word mean" appears in the right margin, either centered or positioned relatively to the line as you originally wrote it, on the line where "AAA BBB CCC DDD EEE" appeared. Note that the software cannot know what word you were "annotating". Was it "AAA"? Was it "CCC". Only you know it was "EEE". The line "AAA BBB CCC DDD EEE" does not have an internal line number that the software can use. It would have to choose one of the words, or record that at the time of the annotation the (nearest, centrally located) line started with the word "AAA" and ended with the word "EEE".

Now, you change the zoom. now you have the lines:

AAA BBB CCC DDD
EEE

or, "worse", it splits across a page:

AAA BBB CCC DDD
----page break ----
EEE

Now - does the annotation belong beside the first line, or the second line? You were annotating "EEE" as far as you were concerned, but the software doesn't know that.

The page break adds another problem, too. The first line is at the very bottom of the page, and the second line at the very top of the page. If you had written a long annotation (say one that spanned several lines vertically), now the software has to somehow decide how to position the annotation. That will work, maybe, if you were writing words.

But what if you instead drew a "}" or "]" type of mark? And what if that vertical line-type squiggle originally spanned mutliple lines and now you have a page break in the middle. Does the software render your vertical squiggle, which you meant to denote a range of text, on the first page, or the second page, or both?

Zooming the squiggle to match the text zoom is easily done (I should hope Adobe/enTourage can manage that part), but what about where the squiggle gets positioned?

You see, it's the "edge" cases that are the problem with markup annotations in EPUBs. A squiggle in the middle of the page in the right margin is an "easy" case.

I don't think it would be difficult to deal with that hard case at the user end. Rather than writing "What does this word mean", you could write "what does 'EEE' mean". If that note is at the bottom of the page and 'EEE' isn't there, I would figure it has to be at the top of the next page. That would be a minor annoyance, but nothing compared to having to pretend you're a Buddhist monk writing on a grain of rice, which is my current workaround for the zoom/annotation debacles.

For we academic types, PDF annotation would be AMAZINGLY helpful, as the majority of the journals are published using this format. If what Boris says is accurate, it is really frustrating that at least that functionality did not come out sooner.

If the annotation layer is written by enTourage (the reader software for PDFs and EPUB basically from Adobe), then the enTourage annotation layer should easily be able to at least handle PDF annotation completely and at least get that part out the door.

Hi dontpanic,

It has been almost a week since this post. How about that Froyo announcement?

Originally Posted by dontpanic

Wow. Happy New Year. We should have an announcement on Froyo soon. I think we are weeks and not months away, barring any show stopper bugs. We have not stopped working, but this one is a big one and we are trying to get it right. I realize that we have made some commitments that we have not met. Landscape on the Reader screen is one. I am hoping that we can give you some relief on that feature request soon.

We do try to be reasonably open and apologize if the perception is that we have fallen significantly behind on feature requests that are dear to you. I assure you that in the mean time we have satisfied many other feature requests.

TC

Yes yes inquiring minds want to know.......................