Kobo page fitting

[ShellShock]

Originally Posted by davidfor

All the above means that adding features to an existing code base is not as simple as it might seem.

I think you have over-stated your case. Kobo seems to be perfectly capable of adding new, peripheral, features that I personally have no interest in (social media etc), but ignore these enhancements that would greatly improve the core reading experience for a lot of people.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Anak

David, I don't disagree with your comment. I only missed the word flexibility in the first entry of the list.

Sorry, I can't work out how "flexibility" fits in.

This is imo what Kobo should keep more in mind and give users more control to enable or disable options or features. As I and others have mentioned earlier, other ereader manufactures have implemented similar features but in a more customizable way.

My point wasn't that Kobo shouldn't add the customization, it is that it a lot harder to do and takes more time than everyone seems to think.

And a very important point I missed was maintenance. Every added feature increases the code complexity, increases the likelihood of bugs. makes fixing bugs or adding more features harder. You don't add something without a good reason.

I don't know either but I do know that he touched a chord as it is one of the most popular kobo patches available.
To hire or not to hire but this should tell Kobo that something needs to be done with the amount of screen space the header/footer hijacks from the actual screen space available for reading.
And yes, showing book information in a header and footer can be useful but is not a necessity.
The patch "proved" that reducing (not hiding!) the margins of the footer did not encumber the readability of the displayed footer text.

Kobo know that people want these changes. But, they have to make a business decision about what changes to make. And it needs to be consistent with what they have and are planning. If they add all the options that get suggested here, there would be a hundred configuration screens that would confuse the general user and never be used.

True. But there are many little tweaks available for more experienced users by modifying the kobo.conf configuration file.
The question is: Why are these tweaks not accessable through the GUI? And no, I don't mean every single one of them, but the most useful should be accessable through the GUI.

The Reading settings section of the GUI should enable/disable:

• Online Wikipedia Lookup
• Phrase Translation
• Thesaurus
• Book Specific Statistics
• Use Full Book Page Numbers

Just to name a few. No technical features or features for developers only.

Because they don't all work. The last time I tried the Wikipedia lookup, give a badly formatted page in a tiny font that doesn't navigate properly. If you use the full book page numbers, the in book reading stats doesn't show the chapters properly. The book specific stats has info on that shouldn't be on that page. And the info would make more sense on the details page of the book. Some of the others are options to aide in testing. And of the function you list, only one of them would be an actual option. The others are all things that should get added to a menu or screen somewhere and are just there from then on.

There are also licensing issues. Maybe they had a problem with licensing access to the function and haven't been able to enable them properly.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by ShellShock

I think you have over-stated your case. Kobo seems to be perfectly capable of adding new, peripheral, features that I personally have no interest in (social media etc), but ignore these enhancements that would greatly improve the core reading experience for a lot of people.

No, I think I am understating the case. But, we are also talking about two different things. Adding a separate feature like Pocked would have relatively little affect on the existing code. It will reuse libraries but most of the code written will be new. It might mean changes to the existing libraries, but can have surprisingly little impact on it.

Adding something like the desired options for the header and footer of the reading page is changing the existing code base. That need someone to go through the existing code, find all references to the current header and footer, make sure they use parameters, make sure that anything that interacts with them is handling that correctly, make sure that anything that interacts with this also works.