Firmware 4.8.10956

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by the.Mtn.Man

The old homepage could have as many half-a-dozen tiles reflecting recent activity, including reading stats and if you accessed anything like the games. The new home screen shows only your four most recent reads at the top with the lower half showing a fanned out preview of other books in your on-board library and a link to the Kobo bookshop at the very bottom..

On that home page which is what my H2O had when I bought it, you could have ONLY a "most recent" list of thumbnails. Though you maybe needed Calibre to turn off absolutely everything else, I forget.
ALMOST TWO THIRDS of the home screen is wasted. The Thumbnail with other books suggested in "My Books" is a total waste of space. Half the width of screen. Similarly useless is the <last selected collection> taking up same space.
Too much "white space".
The two text bits at the bottom are arrogant on Kobo's part.
I bought this, at twice the price of my phone or tablet and nearly half the price of a reasonable laptop to READ BOOKS FROM ANYWHERE.
I've never bought a book from Kobo.
My annotations are important because I use the eReader for research and and proof reading. I'd like some idea of how many, like there used to be, before I import them to laptop. I never read the annotations on the Kobo. I never use Annotations on any of my ereaders for Navigation. I make bookmarks for Navigation.
Why also no option to see all bookmarks in date order across all books?

It seems to me the only use case Kobo considers is people buying books from Kobo, then deleting as soon as read once and rely on the Cloud. I DO NOT want them to vanish from home screen when read. I might want to go back and re-read something. I want to ONLY manually dismiss from a Homescreen ordered by read.

Kobo have made MY H2O much less useful and damaged the functionality as an eReader and portable library compared with when I bought it.
Only ONE noticeable bug fix and one feature change worth while since the Firmware on it new:
1) You can turn off the annoying (for me) slide to vary light. I hardly ever use it, if I do it's at about 10%.
2) It used to drop annotations if the end point or start was at a paragraph break.

It is more useful for annotations than the Kindle, purely because it's per book and you get the whole highlight + position in chapter. The Kindle Annotation export seems to be for the entire Kindle, unless there is something I'm doing wrong.

Kobo's UI concept and idea of updates, seems now like MS, garbage.

I've designed GUIs and Highlight/Shadow GUI on mono LCD with microcontrollers with NO grey shades (1 bit per pixel). The Kobo internally seems to be RGB and the eInk panel mimics 4 bit per pixel (14 shades grey, black, white). There is a ghost issue with eInk (you can see it on the useless sketch app, the Sony PRS350 app is better!), but it doesn't prevent having what a win 3.1 EGA display on a mono screen would be like in terms of a 3D hinted GUI. (Yes I programmed on that too). The screen has to refresh ANYWAY to avoid a ghost of keyboard, Font settings etc. Let's not have excuses for Kobo's deliberately poor GUI design. I know what an eInk screen can do.

[Ansl]

Originally Posted by icanread190

The new update has rendered my Kobo Aura (original I think) essentially useless since I can't authorize it with Adobe Digital Editions to read library books.
I see in this thread the possibility of reverting to the previous version.
In simple terms (for a non tech person) can someone explain how to do this.

1. Download the fw you want for your Kobo.
2. Unzip.
3. Drop the files (3) into the .kobo directory on your device and eject safely.
4. When the reader wakes up again, opt out of automatic syncing in Settings>Syncing and updates (or patch your device to only disable fw updates, so connecting to WiFi will not undo the downgrade - the patching process is also not very complex and is outlined in another thread).

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by Ansl

4. When the reader wakes up again, opt out of automatic syncing in Settings>Syncing and updates (or patch your device to only disable fw updates, so connecting to WiFi will not undo the downgrade - the patching process is also not very complex and is outlined in another thread).

In this case step 4 probably doesn't matter, since the firmware that caused the issue has been pulled.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Ansl

4. When the reader wakes up again, opt out of automatic syncing in Settings>Syncing and updates (or patch your device to only disable fw updates, so connecting to WiFi will not undo the downgrade.

I never had automatic sync since I bought it and checked all the settings. However it actually downloaded new FW and rebooted when I used WiFi to check a phrase in a book. I definitely hadn't manually selected sync either.
I've changed the Affiliate to something non-existent to see does that help.

[ottdmk]

Originally Posted by icanread190

The new update has rendered my Kobo Aura (original I think) essentially useless since I can't authorize it with Adobe Digital Editions to read library books.
I see in this thread the possibility of reverting to the previous version.
In simple terms (for a non tech person) can someone explain how to do this.

Weird. Wonder what happened with your Aura? I updated my H2O to the latest and I'm still good as far as ADE and library loans go.

[icanread190]

Still missing a few steps for someone like me.
I have downloaded the file, and unzipped it. After unzipping there is
1. folder -upgrade
2. KoboRoot.kgz
3. manifest.md5sum
When I transfer ( i assume you mean drag and drop) do I transfer the whole folder as is, and the other two files.
When this is done does it override what is in the directory or do I have to delete the FW I don't want.
Thanks

[monic39]

Don't unzip it to your pc folder.
1. Download the file
2. connect your kobo to the computer
3. then click the downloaded file to unzip but Chose the .kobo folder to extract it in
Then do nothing else beside savely eject the kobo. Then the update/downgrade will install.
Hope this will clear it a little bit

Originally Posted by icanread190

Still missing a few steps for someone like me.
I have downloaded the file, and unzipped it. After unzipping there is
1. folder -upgrade
2. KoboRoot.kgz
3. manifest.md5sum
When I transfer ( i assume you mean drag and drop) do I transfer the whole folder as is, and the other two files.
When this is done does it override what is in the directory or do I have to delete the FW I don't want.
Thanks

[icanread190]

Thank you. Everything seems to have worked and I am able to open my library books again.

[Cootey]

Originally Posted by geek1011

On Sierra or newer, you can use Cmd+Shift+dot to toggle their visibility.

I had no idea they added this. I usually do my deep file management in the terminal, and if I want all files visible in the finder, I have script macros to release arcane mystic Unix commands into the ether, but I like this much better.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by icanread190

Thank you. Everything seems to have worked and I am able to open my library books again.

One quick suggestion. Take a look in the root directory of your Kobo's exposed storage for a directory called .adobe-digital-editions which will contain two files. You don't need to worry about the device.xml file since it will be recreated if you factory reset your ereader but do take a backup of the activation.xml file. Copying this file back into the .adobe-digital-editions directory will allow you to activate your Kobo without worrying about running out of activations.

[compurandom]

Something I've noticed repeatedly with this firmware....

In the previous firmware release (with autosync turned off), if I left wifi on overnight, by morning my battery would be half drained.

In this firmware release, I pretty much still have full charge next morning. They've fixed something that was activating the wifi (when it wasn't disabled) and draining the battery. I should turn sync back on and see if it drains or not.