CalibreBox - New Cloud-Based App

[Hofferic]

Exciting times!

I am done with my exams for the semester and by way of celebrating with you I just pushed the next update!

Changes include:

• Grid view in main list
• Optional pull to reload
• Showing all formats for a book on the details page outside the download dialog
• Send to Kindle functionality using the Kindle app
• Swiping from book to book in details (optional behaviour)
• Identifiers are now shown (and linked) in the detail view
• Detecting and recovering from corrupt databases instead of crashing every time you try to open them
• misc. other crash fixes

The identifiers currently supported is based on a substantial subset of the default and thrid-party metadata plugins which provide identifiers. Support currently includes:

• Straight URL identifiers
• ISBN Identifiers
• Amazon (com, fr, de, uk, it, es, jp, br, asin)
• Adlibris (no, se)
• Barnes & Noble
• Bool (nl)
• Douban
• Edelweiss
• FantasticFiction, FFAdultsOnly
• FictionDB
• Google Books
• Goodreads
• Kobo Books
• Martinus (sk)
• Ozon

[EDIT]
I also put in an easteregg based on big recent news

[nqk]

1) The grid view is nice. Please add option to define number of columns. On Oneplus One, it shows 3 columns (with spaces) while on LG G3 it shows 4 columns (with less spaces). I personally prefer 4 columns on 5.5" display. I haven't seen how it may look on tablet. Cool it still is.

2) Can you add option for defaul tap/long tap actions on list view/grid view? (Open details, Download, Open, Download and Open, Delete (yes.... why not delete local files?))

[Hofferic]

Originally Posted by nqk

1) The grid view is nice. Please add option to define number of columns. On Oneplus One, it shows 3 columns (with spaces) while on LG G3 it shows 4 columns (with less spaces). I personally prefer 4 columns on 5.5" display. I haven't seen how it may look on tablet. Cool it still is.

2) Can you add option for defaul tap/long tap actions on list view/grid view? (Open details, Download, Open, Download and Open, Delete (yes.... why not delete local files?))

1. I will have to look into setting the scale of the cover images dynamically, but it should be possible. I will put it on my "nice to have" pile with things like themeing
2. I'd have to shuffle quite a bit of stuff around to enable downloading directly from the main activity (it is currently tied to data generated upon opening the detail activity) but i have already thought of building something like this in the future. Deleting all (known) local copies of a book entry is currently planned for the next update (now that the local books db is more reliable after some fixes I just have to figure out the UI and some basic logic )

[Hofferic]

The new version includes many small performance improvements (really, mostly tiny).

Some bugs have been fixed. Most visibly the "hidden" bottom toolbar no longer occludes ads, which caused the tiny amount of money they generate for each impression to be invalidated . But some other bugs included showing wrong data when swiping between books in details, especially "empty" books.

There are now long-press actions for books in the main list. In the process of untangling the download managing code I also made some stability improvements and added more user-facing status information.

You can also now set the number of columns to show in the grid view. Be aware that tiny previews will hide the rating bar (that may be fixed/replaced in a future version) and huge previews will cause more data usage as they will download larger images to preserve visual fidelity.

Options for both of those can be accessed by long-clicking the "layout toggle" button (or, on first setup, any book item).

Additionally the Floating Action Button Menu in details is now more stable and has a nicer, much more performant animation with the labels being displayed upon long-click. Many other animations may also perform slightly better.

So, two big things and a lot of tiny stuff, hope you enjoy and fling any requests in my direction. I may not include them, but I am kind of out of ideas myself and am always grateful for new good ideas!

[Hofferic]

And once again there is an update

There is a ton of general under the covers work for performance you hopefully won't ever notics like getting smaller images, loading pre-scaled bitmaps, caching more things in smaller sizes, using hardware layers for animations, building strings more efficiently, making layouts simpler and so on. Lots of technical stuff that should result in better performance (on my test device I dropped from 150MB RAM use when load-testing to 70-80MB, with 40MB RAM use in normal use and jumped from an average 30fps to a smooth 60fps in the book list!).

Then there are several bug fixes for obscure bugs reported by users. Some odd stuff and thankfully rather rare (at least in the reports). Also, the slide-in snickbar notifications no longer block floating action buttons or the bottom toolbar.

And THEN there are the features, because summer holidays:

You can now share a Dropbox link to a bokk in a specific format both from the download menu and as a long-click option.
Filters will keep theis set values when they are disabled.
You can now filter not only for "downloaded" but also "not downloaded".
You can now filter for "last modified" dates which is kind of useless but for the next.
You get offered to filter for books changed by he last library update after updating!

And for Pro users:
Custom column filters can now be applied not only as upper or lower bounds but also as value ranges.
Several custom column filters can be set at once!

I really hope you all like this update as much as I liked the changes this brought to my sifting through ebooks at the lake, because that is most of my motivation to work on this when the wheather is nice outside!

[jillmess]

New version installed but now it can't find my library. Just sits at the 'Pick a remote library' screen with the indicator going round. I have cleared cache and data, uninstalled, rebooted and reinstalled but still the same

[nqk]

Hofferic, I can't search anymore.

[Hofferic]

Originally Posted by jillmess

New version installed but now it can't find my library. Just sits at the 'Pick a remote library' screen with the indicator going round. I have cleared cache and data, uninstalled, rebooted and reinstalled but still the same

That is odd. I could replicate this, I really should start testing "obvious" crash fixes before pushing them. I will revert the change that (hopefully, else this will take some work) caused this and push a fix to google as soon as I can!

Originally Posted by nqk

Hofferic, I can't search anymore.

I just tested the released version and sure enough same bug for me. But the debug version I use on my phone does not seem to have this problem.
I'll recompile from source using some less agressive code shrinking and test more thuroughly before pushing the next update. I hope to have this fixed within the hour.

To both of you thanks for raising these issues immediately, at least the library one could have gone unnoticed by me for a week or five!

[Hofferic]

I just pushed the bugfix version 1.9.0.1
It should get rid of both of these bugs, at least it did in local testing.
The problem for the search was indeed overeager optimization by the compiler, caused by changes I made quite a while back, which I never realized were overly agresive because I dont use the "release" build. I liked them because they shaved .5 MB of the app size. That will teach me to just flip on "optimizing" settings in my build chain

[jillmess]

Thanks for the quick fix - library access all ok.

[fuinha]

Hi,
I would like to buy the full version, unfortunately I'm using Onyx Inkbook, which does not have access to Google Play . Is there any way to buy it? Amazon app store maybe? BTW good job, I really like your app.

[Hofferic]

Honestly I will have too look into that. I was planning to refactor the in-app billing code to improve performance a bit but to be honest the google pay in-app billing was a pain to set up. I really don't like touching it too much as by now more than half the reported crashes are caused by something in the IAB-library going wonky. But I cant easily change it without possibly breaking existing pro licenses, which would be BAD.

If amazon in-app billing is nicer to set up I may however publish on amazon as the more painful parts of it are hopefully universal (generating/verifying license keys on the fly keeping them tied to an account but NOT a device etc...)

Also I am curious how you got the app on your device without access to google play, I never published it anywhere else . I am of course happy for everyone who likes and uses it, it makes the free time spent seem more reasonable (not that this has stopped me before) but still...

[chaley]

Originally Posted by Hofferic

Also I am curious how you got the app on your device without access to google play, I never published it anywhere else . I am of course happy for everyone who likes and uses it, it makes the free time spent seem more reasonable (not that this has stopped me before) but still...

FWIW: Calibre Companion (CC) has APKs available all over the web. Most are people who pretend to be stores, giving the same APK found on Google Play, which works for our Demo version and should work for your app as well. It isn't clear how they get the APK, but clearly they do, and they do within days of a new release. Some people try to sell it, which of course is a total ripoff because it isn't licensed. And *many* others offer pirated versions that have been modified to remove any license checks. Our estimates are that between 30% and 50% of CC users are running pirated copies.

@fuinha: I am not accusing you of piracy.

[Hofferic]

Ah okay, that makes sense. And as fuinha is asking for a way to purchase my app outside of Google Play, I would asume that they are neither using a cracked version nor interested in doing so. Except for the fact that I now know why so few apps use In-App billing for pro versions and why many apps are not available from Amazon. But hey, gradle flavours and all (after some heavy refactoring) may make this rather painless. Apart from implementing IAB again.

So the answer stands firmly at maybe. I will look into it and hopefully update the thread when I am sure either way.

[Hofferic]

Okay, my decision was swift and the path ahead is fraught with danger... Or something

I have started tearing the In-App purchase logic out of the application lifecycle and am now done with the google half. I also set up my buildchain to do automatic double releases, compiling the app for both amazon and google. Now I only have to do the actual billing implementation using amazons API, test the thing locally (urgh), and if everything works wait for amazon to do their testing (double urgh).

And before that I will have to complete the current changes and test those, most importantly android M compatibility. I may or may not get this done quickly, but there is a bug in the current developer preview that I will have to work around, not knowing if it will still exist in the final version. But with the heavy refactoring I did, first for M support and now splitting the app into amazon/google versions, it would be a LOT of work releasing only pat of these changes. So the uupdate needs to wait until this platform bug is fixed or worked around. Also, I will have to make sure i can easily trace errors and crashes to a codebase before publishing this. See, I can learn from my mistakes

Long rant short: As long as nothing goes terribly wrong a release on amazon is coming, but it might take a while because it will be bundled into the android marshmallow update, which currently depends on things out of my control for now.