Suggestions: Windows software reader opds ebook reader/library?

[Apache]

Originally Posted by Kaysclie

I have calibre running on my windows 7 laptop. Can I also run it on my Surface Pro running windows 10?...meaning that I would have calibre on both machines. Or would that cause a problem?? I have Freda on my Surface Pro.

I have been running Calibre on y Surface Pro for at least 3 years and have not had any problems. The only problem you might have would be keeping both libraries synced.
Apache

Originally Posted by Apache

I have been running Calibre on y Surface Pro for at least 3 years and have not had any problems. The only problem you might have would be keeping both libraries synced.
Apache

Why not do something like put the library files on Onedrive (or Dropbox, or Google Drive), and point Calibre to that, regardless which machine you're running it on? From Calibre's POV, it's just syncing to the local copy of Onedrive anyway. I've been doing that for a while and not having any syncing problems, although I have heard a few stories of Onedrive sync issues from other Calibre users.

Advantage of this approach is the cloud drive software that you use handles (most of) the syncing for you.

[Apache]

I keep a backup copy of my library on the cloud and multiple HDs, but I prefer to have my main copy on my Surface.
Apache

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Jim Chapman

(disclaimer: I am the developer of the Freda app)

Would you mind adding a respect CSS option? I sometimes want to read as the CSS dictates so I'd like ot have all the overrides off so I can do so. This is a highly common problem with most reading software and if you could allow an option to shut off the overrides, it would really fix this problem. Thanks.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Would you mind adding a respect CSS option? I sometimes want to read as the CSS dictates so I'd like ot have all the overrides off so I can do so. This is a highly common problem with most reading software and if you could allow an option to shut off the overrides, it would really fix this problem. Thanks.

+1. I like Freda and this would make it even better. I wish every Android app would add this too. I emailed the devs of Moon+ and FB reader recently, and ask them to do this. Moon+ replied and said added to our feature request list, no reply from FB.

[Jim Chapman]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Would you mind adding a respect CSS option? I sometimes want to read as the CSS dictates so I'd like ot have all the overrides off so I can do so.

Honestly, the biggest problem with Freda right now is that it's not very good at even recognising what the CSS dictates. I've actually been working on this quite intensively in the past months, and there will be an update later this year, so that Freda can render a book in the way the CSS describes. Probably not EPUB3-xhtml in all its gory horror (I simply refuse to implement scripting!), and some advanced features (Flexbox, I am looking at you!) may not be complete - but it will be a significant step forward. As part of that exercise, I expect to implement three options for removing Freda's overrides:
1) respect CSS layout
2) respect CSS fonts and sizes
3) respect CSS color scheme
Comments (in line, or to jim@turnipsoft.co.uk) will be welcome.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Jim Chapman

Honestly, the biggest problem with Freda right now is that it's not very good at even recognising what the CSS dictates. I've actually been working on this quite intensively in the past months, and there will be an update later this year, so that Freda can render a book in the way the CSS describes. Probably not EPUB3-xhtml in all its gory horror (I simply refuse to implement scripting!), and some advanced features (Flexbox, I am looking at you!) may not be complete - but it will be a significant step forward. As part of that exercise, I expect to implement three options for removing Freda's overrides:
1) respect CSS layout
2) respect CSS fonts and sizes
3) respect CSS color scheme
Comments (in line, or to jim@turnipsoft.co.uk) will be welcome.

Thanks. Respecting CSS will be a very welcome change. That's the biggest issue I have with most eBook reading software. I don't mind the overrides as long as I can turn them off if I want. Being able to turn the overrides on or off individually would be good.

Originally Posted by Jim Chapman

Comments (in line, or to jim@turnipsoft.co.uk) will be welcome.

Jim those options sound perfect and would be much appreciated.

Really the main other thing I'd request in Freda+ would be what I mentioned earlier: a slightly simpler UI for adding a note to a selected passage. Is that possible?

[Jim Chapman]

Originally Posted by maximus83

Really the main other thing I'd request in Freda+ would be what I mentioned earlier: a slightly simpler UI for adding a note to a selected passage. Is that possible?

I have been thinking about this, and I do see the need. As for what I would have to change in Freda - I think what you need is an 'add a note' function that works like the existing 'add bookmark' button, except that once it's added the bookmark, it pops up the 'edit bookmark details' dialog box, so you can immediately add 'note' text without having to tap on the bookmark first. And, indeed, that dialog box should allow more space for text entry. I have a few options for how to do this:
1) Change the behaviour of the 'add bookmark' button so it always works this way
2) Add a new 'add note' button which has this behaviour
3) Add yet another setting to control the behaviour of the 'add bookmark' button ('edit bookmark right after creating it? yes/no')
4) Default the behaviour to 'whatever you did last time' - so if the last time you opened a bookmark you added text to it right afterwards, the next time you add a bookmark, the 'edit' window will pop up right away; if not, it won't.

My thoughts on these options:
1 = inconvenient for people who just want to bookmark text
2 = another item on various menus (taking one menu over the 'no more than six items' limit, and requiring a load of tedious UI coding to fix the layout, and to add a new menu icon and label)
3 = yet another setting, and another source of confusion. It is not very discoverable.
4 = probably does what you want, but it is gratuitously obscure behaviour and may be confusing. Also it is not very discoverable.

So I am dithering about what to do. Input is welcome.

Thanks Jim.

For my part, if I use a function a fairly often (like adding a note), I'd want to get to it in as few clicks as possible. Which would suggest if other users feel that way, maybe having it immediately available in its own UI, versus having to click through a couple of steps to get to it.

Here's something that I've noticed some of the other 'players' in the ereader field do: the UI for adding a note doesn't even appear at all until you've selected some text. Then it'll appear in a little popup menu that will offer typical options: Highlight | Note | Share | etc. A few apps that I see doing some version this:

* Kindle for PC/Android, and Kindle e-ink
* Google Play cloud reader and android
* Logos Bible software
* FB reader on Android
* Adobe Digital Editions for PC

So, I would ask for: relatively immediate access to the note function, and some kind of popup menu on selection event (versus dedicated buttons in the UI), if that's possible to do without too much hassle.

ETA, attached an image from an Android app that does the contextual popup menu on selection.

[HarryT]

That's right.

On the Kindle you hold and drag a selection over the desired text. That gives you a pop-up menu amongst whose selections are "Highlight" (which just highlights the text) and "Note" which highlights and adds an annotation. It's a nice interface.

[Jim Chapman]

Yep. The Freda context menu popup for selected text is broadly similar - see below:


And you can see the problem - with a Window having the minimum allowed width, the screen is too narrow to display another menu option for 'note'. This is not impossible to deal with, but it does mean that adding an extra item is not trivial.

Originally Posted by Jim Chapman

Yep. The Freda context menu popup for selected text is broadly similar - see below:


And you can see the problem - with a Window having the minimum allowed width, the screen is too narrow to display another menu option for 'note'. This is not impossible to deal with, but it does mean that adding an extra item is not trivial.

Understood Jim. I know (from firsthand), devs always hate it when people say stuff like: Oh, that should be TRIVIAL to add.

One way I've seen of handling this problem effectively (too many UI buttons on the popup menu), is the way Logos Bible software does it in their Android app. They have twice as many options on that popup menu as any app I've seen.

What they do is actually make it so you can scroll right on the popup menu for more options. They put what they believe are the most popular options so that they are always immediately visible. Kindle basically does similar.

Note: my model for doing this is definitely the Logos app. If you have an android or apple mobile device handy, you can install their app for free, for example here. It should be possible to load a free book or two on there if they don't already have one, although be aware, they have their own specialized book format because they morphologically tag every word, so it has to be one of their books, they don't take epubs or mobis, I believe. If you highlight some text on a small screen, you'll see that popup menu that scrolls right to see all their various selections.

I don't know how hard that would be to implement in Freda+. But IMHO, something like that would be the way to get 'direct' access to a note and other buttons on that popup menu.

FWIW, here's a screen of Logos android app with text selected, as displayed on a standard ~ 3" wide smartphone. You can see that the next item on the popup menu, "Note", is partially cut off and user has to touch the menu and swipe left in order to see the remaining menu items on the right. This fairly recent UI approach they added for handling this in the Android app is, for me, a super intuitive and space-efficient way to handle a menu that contains several context-sensitive tasks a user can do, but without it getting busy or overwhelming.

Here's the full line-up of items on this menu, including those not shown:

Copy | Info | Search | Share | Highlight | Note | Clipping | Visual Copy



If that makes sense, here would be my specific asks/suggestions for the Freda+ app selection task menu:

1. Move the 'bookmark' task into its own separate UI, rather than taking room on this menu. A standard approach to this I've seen in several apps I listed earlier, is the user can directly touch-and-hold at some position on the page--like upper right corner--to bookmark. This has 2 advantages: makes a very common user task even MORE quickly accessible, and frees space on this popup menu.

2. Go to a scrollable popup menu when text is selected, similar to the Logos app.

3. Include at least these user tasks on the selection menu:

Highlight | Note | Share | Find | Copy | Read
*The Read item was added because I see it's already in Freda, and I assume still needed since you provide that user-selectable text for TTY support.


Thoughts on the feasibility of all that?

[Jim Chapman]

Originally Posted by maximus83

Thoughts on the feasibility of all that?

Well, firstly, a big thankyou for all the thought and research that you're investing in the question. I do appreciate it, and I am now rather anxious that I am going to sound ungrateful, when I start offering objections to your proposals. And 'ungrateful' is absolutely not what I am feeling!

But it's not an easy problem to solve, and perhaps my biggest constraint is that I am trying to make Freda work with the same UI design on phones, tablets, and desktop machines. That does tie my hands a bit - because the proper UI for an 'overflowing' menu is different, depending on whether the user is working with touch or mouse+keyboard (scrolling a menu sideways using a mouse is tricky; the app really needs to display a [...] affordance that opens up a vertical list of overflow menu items when tapped).

So far, I have managed to avoid tackling this problem, by making sure that none of Freda's menus overflow. Adding new menu behaviour is, of course, feasible ... but it would mean a significant amount of re-writing of Freda's code, which I'd need to do once for Android, and again for Windows, and I would then need to test on a depressingly large number of different devices. And all this development work would be just for one specific use-case; I would prefer to find a different answer.

By the way, to the 'custom gesture to add a bookmark' point - if you want to do that in Freda, it's already possible (from the 'settings' page, choose the 'controls' link; on the little diagram of the screen layout, tap (for instance) the top-right icon, and from the menu select 'bookmark this page'; tap the check-mark then OK, and now a tap at the top right of the page will add a bookmark.