Bluefire reader app

[FredipusRex]

Originally Posted by Micah

Stanza might get fixed? Thats great. Where did you hear that?
-Micah

It was fixed this morning. Must not have been a difficult thing to do, as I doubt they started work on it before this week...

[artbatista]

Yes indeed. I installed Stanza 3.2 on a ios5 iphone4 and ipad2

Looks good so far.

[am_mread]

Originally Posted by Barty

Btw, you know how Stanza manages to let you choose any font in the system? I have not seen any other app of any type that does this.

I was just about to ask this same question. Is there anyway to get Baskerville to be available in Bluefire? Or as Barty says just allow access to all of the fonts in the system?

Thanks!

[soondai]

Originally Posted by Micah

Stanza might get fixed? Thats great. Where did you hear that?
-Micah

Hey, Micah, Stanza was updated, but it was also made pretty clear that this would be the final update. So it is very unlikely to work on ios6 (and may break again well before that).

Though I have deleted Bluefire for now, I'll be back (please have a dictionary and functional links waiting for me ). Kidding aside, you have a good product and I hope this gives you time to make it into a great one, so it'll be an easy choice for the masses when this whole process repeats itself down the road.

Thanks for your hard work and for being so open with everyone here on the boards.

[Insalata]

The book I'm reading has quite a lot of formatting, and Stanza's doesn't seem to show Bluefire does much better at the thing that's most important to me: displaying the book.

I still have a weakness for animated page turns, like the one in Blio (originally from Eucalyptus); I'd like it to be able to connect to Stanza; being able to pick a font and set the background colour would be nice; and it would be handy to be able to change tags and have more control over the way books are sorted, but in the end, displaying the text is more important to me. At the moment, Bluefire is doing best, with Blio and iBooks for occasional use.

[Barty]

Originally Posted by Insalata

The book I'm reading has quite a lot of formatting, and Stanza's doesn't seem to show Bluefire does much better at the thing that's most important to me: displaying the book.

I still have a weakness for animated page turns, like the one in Blio (originally from Eucalyptus); I'd like it to be able to connect to Stanza; being able to pick a font and set the background colour would be nice; and it would be handy to be able to change tags and have more control over the way books are sorted, but in the end, displaying the text is more important to me. At the moment, Bluefire is doing best, with Blio and iBooks for occasional use.

Stanza is actually capable of showing most if not all the formatting. The problem is it overrides too much of the book's formatting. This can be fixed if you have a jail broken device by editing the CSS template. Essentially you just take out most of the !important tags and allow the book's formatting to take precedence.

[Insalata]

Thank you. I didn't know you could do that. It's not enough to get me to jailbreak - but it adds a bit to that side of the balance.

[Micah]

Originally Posted by soondai

Hey, Micah, Stanza was updated, but it was also made pretty clear that this would be the final update. So it is very unlikely to work on ios6 (and may break again well before that).

Though I have deleted Bluefire for now, I'll be back (please have a dictionary and functional links waiting for me ). Kidding aside, you have a good product and I hope this gives you time to make it into a great one, so it'll be an easy choice for the masses when this whole process repeats itself down the road.

Thanks for your hard work and for being so open with everyone here on the boards.

We'll be here waiting, and we'll have those features when you return.
-Micah

[Micah]

Originally Posted by Insalata

The book I'm reading has quite a lot of formatting, and Stanza's doesn't seem to show Bluefire does much better at the thing that's most important to me: displaying the book.

I still have a weakness for animated page turns, like the one in Blio (originally from Eucalyptus); I'd like it to be able to connect to Stanza; being able to pick a font and set the background colour would be nice; and it would be handy to be able to change tags and have more control over the way books are sorted, but in the end, displaying the text is more important to me. At the moment, Bluefire is doing best, with Blio and iBooks for occasional use.

We do have some font choices, more coming soon. Also you can set the background color, either by choosing a theme or customizing it. Working on Collections features now among other features (e.g. swipe screen for brightness). Update coming very soon will include much improved PDF reading, and improved image rendering in EPUB.

[lorindas]

I'm back to using Stanza but since it's been updated. However I'm also keeping the Bluefire app. Hopefully by the time Stanza inevitably dies again most of the improvements suggested here will have been implemented in Bluefire.

Also is there any chance that Bluefire in the future will be able to support formats besides epub? One of the nice things about Stanza is that is supports multiple formats; mobi, lit, ect. It's nice to be able to transfer books without having to convert to epub.

BTW Micah, just wanted to say thanks for your willingness to engage with us here and to incorporate our suggestions into the product.

[Micah]

Originally Posted by lorindas

I'm back to using Stanza but since it's been updated. However I'm also keeping the Bluefire app. Hopefully by the time Stanza inevitably dies again most of the improvements suggested here will have been implemented in Bluefire.

Also is there any chance that Bluefire in the future will be able to support formats besides epub? One of the nice things about Stanza is that is supports multiple formats; mobi, lit, ect. It's nice to be able to transfer books without having to convert to epub.

BTW Micah, just wanted to say thanks for your willingness to engage with us here and to incorporate our suggestions into the product.

Thanks for the kind comments. I do not imagine us ever supporting proprietary formats as we are strong believers in open standards. We are totally committed to EPUB as the right format for eReading, and PDF support for legacy content and ad-hoc documents. Thankfully those other formats (RIP) can easily be converted to epub.

[Valkrider]

Micah, Just FYI I have updated to iOS 5.0.1 and I still have the terrible lag problem in page turning.

[Insalata]

Originally Posted by Micah

We do have some font choices, more coming soon. Also you can set the background color, either by choosing a theme or customizing it. Working on Collections features now among other features (e.g. swipe screen for brightness). Update coming very soon will include much improved PDF reading, and improved image rendering in EPUB.

Thank you. In fact I realised that I'd already set a background colour, but I've tried out so many book apps that I got confused about which could do what .

Collections will be useful, and the screen swipe for brightness. The image and pdf rendering aren't a primary issue for me, but probably are for some.

It's funny: I would never have found Bluefire if Stanza hadn't stopped working, but I already prefer it for its better text display. Thank you for your efforts to add the extra features that will make it even better.

[Philantrop]

Originally Posted by Micah

I do not imagine us ever supporting proprietary formats as we are strong believers in open standards. We are totally committed to EPUB as the right format for eReading, and PDF support for legacy content and ad-hoc documents. Thankfully those other formats (RIP) can easily be converted to epub.

Hear, hear!

I, too, support your position with regard to proprietary formats but maybe you could consider adding support for (a subset of) the Comic Book Archive file format. It's a de-facto standard and "open" in the sense of basically being a simple archive.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Philantrop

Hear, hear!

I, too, support your position with regard to proprietary formats but maybe you could consider adding support for (a subset of) the Comic Book Archive file format. It's a de-facto standard and "open" in the sense of basically being a simple archive.

You can find out more on CBR and CBZ on our own wiki. It would be a good format to support however it needs really good image handling such as fit to screen, zoom, pan and perhaps a kind of jumping around the page to facilitate reading comic books. Most Comic book readers are fairly primitive. The wiki page talks about metadata for example.

Dale