[Android] Wish List

[chaley]

This thread is for discussing what you would like to change in CC. Additions, deletions, and changes to existing functionality are all fair game.

Major CC releases happen every 3 to 6 months. We don't promise that we will do what you ask in these releases, but we will be guided by what users want. Having things here is also an excellent way to ensure that the ideas are not forgotten. I will try to keep this summary up-to-date

Wish list items from all sources:

• [DONE V3.4.4a]Auto-syncing of changed books. If the book file has changed in calibre, automatically resend it to CC. Optionally resend books if the metadata has changed.
• [DONE V3.4.4a]In calibre, mark books using the temporary mark feature when new is-read data from CC is synced to calibre.
• [DONE V3.4.4a]Reorder items in the grouping drawer
• [DONE V3.4.4a]Optionally show "Disconnect" in the action bar when "Connect" is in the menu.
• [DONE V3.4.4a]Group by format (extension).
• [DONE V3.4.4a]"Pick and choose" custom columns for grouping drawer instead of manual lookup name entry.
• [DONE V3.4.4a]"Pick and choose" custom columns for the sync fields instead of manual entry.
• [DONE V3.4.4a]When sorting by date, choose which sorts to display on the book list.
• [DONE V3.4.4a]Auto-sort on "Groups" (no grouping)
• [DONE V3.4.4c]Show numbers as ranges in the grouping drawer
• [DONE V3.4.4c]Optionally not show the <<>> (empty item) in the grouping drawer.
• [DONE V3.4.4d]Show the size of the book file in book details
• [DONE V3.4.4d]Allow the first-letter choice to be on a group-by-group basis.
• [DONE V3.4.4e]Scroll thumb in grouping drawer, book list, and book grid. Option to move the thumb to the left.
• [DONE V3.4.4e]Fall back to automatic in WD connection if connection to the IP/port fail
• [DONE V3.4.4f]More information in the list view, user controllable.
• [DONE V3.4.4h]Hierarchical columns in the grouping pane (Single level hierarchy)
• [DONE V3.5.1]Tapping on the cover in book details grows it to max. Tapping again reduces it to the size set in settings.
• [DONE V3.6.2]Aliases for content server connections, supporting showing descriptions instead of host/port when choosing between multiple content server offerings.
• [DONE V3.6.3a]Allow not showing the read date in book details
• [DONE V3.6.3a]Allow Series to be hierarchical
• [DONE V3.6.3a]Add "Format" as a displayable field in book details
• [DONE V3.6.3a]Desktop widget to "read" the last book read
• [DONE V3.6.3a]Ask for confirmation in the content server when "download all" will download more than 10 books.
• [DONE V3.6.3b]Option to disconnect if necessary when deleting a book in book details.
• [DONE V4.1.0]A content-server like interface to access a calibre library in the cloud.
• Optionally hide the search box.
• Long-press on group names does the same kind of search as long-press on items in the group.
• Sequencing through "match" and "not match" in the grouping drawer. The first tap on a group will be "match" (as today). Tapping the same item would change to "not match".
• Mass import of books
• Compatibility with calibre's folder/MTP device
• Remote control of calibre when connected as a wireless device
• More styling (fonts, background colors, etc)
• CC on iOS.
• Alternate connection mechanisms for wireless device, such as bluetooth PANs
• Allow connection to the wireless device driver over a cable
• Connect to a remote device as a wireless device from calibre without having to touch the device.
• Separate the cover from the metadata to improve metadata scan performance
• Investigate using Android services for networking, in hopes of eliminating the spontaneous disconnections.
• Grid view on the content server and cloud connections
• [DONE]Fix media scanner bug
• [DONE]Permit turning wifi on when attempting to connect
• [DONE]Add text to grouping drawer describing how the booklist is sorted.
• [DONE]Control over order of items in book details
• [DONE]Control over what items are shown in book details
• [DONE]Optionally sort the book list/grid when picking a group, e.g., if you pick a series switch to series sort, if you pick an author switch to title sort. Both whether to sort and the type of sort should be user specifiable.
• [DONE]Add a new sortable date: when a book was originally added to CC.
• [DONE]Optionally hide sorts that are never used.
• [DONE]Optionally hide "Group by first letters" checkbox in grouping drawer.
• [DONE]Optionally hide groups in the grouping drawer that are never used.
• [DONE]One-way syncing of read info (calibre to CC).
• [DONE]Sorting on custom columns.
• [DONE]When grouping, don't show only one first letter. Go directly to the underlying items.
• [DONE]Limit the display length of multiple authors on the book list. See https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...77#post2881177
• [DONE]The ability to lock the display in portrait or landscape.
• [DONE]Support for using the Android 4.4 (KitKat) SD card application-private folder, permitting CC to keep books on an SD card.
• [DONE]Option to remove counts from the grouping drawer. (CBH: be sure also to remove the DB lookup that gets the counts.)
• [DONE]Some way to add a display name for custom columns in the grouping drawer.
• [DONE]Better support for e-ink devices.
• [DONE]A free demo version of CC. (NB: the new demo version is fully functional but limited to 10 books on the device.)
• [WON'T DO]Editing metadata in CC and syncing to calibre, in particular tags and rating.
• [CANNOT DO]A way to unmount then mount an external SD card. [There seems to be no way to do this without rooting the device.]
• [DONE DIFFERENTLY]User-specified cover sizes. [The user can now specify one of 4 downloaded cover sizes.]
• [DONE DIFFERENTLY]CC-configurable file name templates used by both the wireless device and content server interfaces [Would require calibre's template processor in CC, which is impractical for many reasons]
• [DONE V4.1.5]Add backup/restore of CC the database
• [DONE]Add backup/restore of app settings.
• [DONE DIFFERENTLY](The reading list plugin + auto-sync books covers almost all of this)Queued sending of books, somewhat like reading list. The device connects if it notices a calibre installation, and calibre sends all queued books. [READING LIST handles much of this. Auto-connect to calibre presents a security problem, as it might connect to someone else's calibre.]

[chaley]

By kaufman from https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=235657
----
When in list view, you always show the same information. Cover on the left. Title, author, and series on the right.

This fills up the space when using small covers, but leaves a lot of empty space for normal, medium, and large ones. Perhaps you could show some extended book information when those sizes are selected.

My thought perhaps to show Rating and Publication date when using the normal or medium sized cover and to show Rating, Publication date and Tags when using the large covers.

What do you think?

Moderator Notice
I couldn't figure out how to merge the threads without Kaufman's post coming out on top.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by kaufman

When in list view, you always show the same information. Cover on the left. Title, author, and series on the right.

This fills up the space when using small covers, but leaves a lot of empty space for normal, medium, and large ones. Perhaps you could show some extended book information when those sizes are selected.

My thought perhaps to show Rating and Publication date when using the normal or medium sized cover and to show Rating, Publication date and Tags when using the large covers.

What do you think?

I have been thinking about something like this for a while. One idea I had was to add an optional third line to the list view, along with a preference indicating what should be put into it. The user could choose from the standard set of metadata items, and also could enter custom column lookup names.

Whenever I think of this I run into several issues. The first is formatting. Can the user specify the order of the items? Are they displayed one line per item or word wrapped? Or is there some more fancy layout system where the cell is divided into regions and the user can choose what goes into a region. Another is navigation: can any of them be tapped, now that we have that in book details and know how to do it? If so, should the existing author line become tappable? There are also likely to be performance issues, especially when flinging the list up and down.

Hmmm....

[kaufman]

I think the easiest way to handle this is not to do the lines completely free form, but to give a couple of options. Fixed size metadata might come two to a line, and variable size would be one to a line. Something like:

[] Rating and Publication Date
[] Publisher and Publication Date
[] Rating and Publisher
[] Tags

I would argue against making them tapable for three reasons:

1) Right now the user has a fairly big area to tap to open the details screen (which is the default use-case), but if you made all the sub-information tapable, the way to open the details screen would become a very small target.

2) From this screen, the user already has the option to open the grouping drawer and tap there.

3) It will make this screen really busy with all that underlining.

[jackie_w]

Another possible Book List idea for the future... I expect those who retain already Read books in CC may like to see at-a-glance which books are Read and which aren't. I know you can select Read/Unread by grouping but a simple one-char field (e.g. asterisk or a tick) in a fixed column (between cover and Author/Title ???) in Book List might be nice.

Plus I'll reiterate my long-standing wish to be able to 'promote' the Comments field to be the first (after cover) on the Book Details page. Having Author and Title at the top seems a waste when I can easily read that info on the cover. As for Publisher, ISBN and Languages, if I had the option, I really don't need to see them in CC at all - but that's probably just me.

[kaufman]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

Plus I'll reiterate my long-standing wish to be able to 'promote' the Comments field to be the first (after cover) on the Book Details page. Having Author and Title at the top seems a waste when I can easily read that info on the cover. As for Publisher, ISBN and Languages, if I had the option, I really don't need to see them in CC at all - but that's probably just me.

While I also don't care about Publisher and languages either, the other fields have become a lot more useful in the latest release. Being able to jump to the author or series grouping is great and jumping to the appropriate web page based on the book ID is really nice as well.

Give them a try and you might not want to banish them any more.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

Another possible Book List idea for the future... I expect those who retain already Read books in CC may like to see at-a-glance which books are Read and which aren't. I know you can select Read/Unread by grouping but a simple one-char field (e.g. asterisk or a tick) in a fixed column (between cover and Author/Title ???) in Book List might be nice.

If I did something like this (and I think it is a good idea) then I would use the same symbols that calibre uses: green check, red X and empty.

This would also play well with kaufman's proposal, somehow...

Plus I'll reiterate my long-standing wish to be able to 'promote' the Comments field to be the first (after cover) on the Book Details page. Having Author and Title at the top seems a waste when I can easily read that info on the cover. As for Publisher, ISBN and Languages, if I had the option, I really don't need to see them in CC at all - but that's probably just me.

We have had several requests to be able to reorder the items in book details. There is nothing particularly hard with producing the page in different orders. The hard part is specifying them. I think I would need something like the folders dialog where all of the fields are shown and the user can move them up and down. Because of the multiple library problem (I cannot know what custom fields are available) I think that the setup must be available only from book details so that I can look at that book to get the field names.

Another thing I can do is keep a list of *every* field specification that has ever shown up on the device. This isn't too hard given that the info is buried in the metadata that calibre sends to the device. If I did this then (I think) I would need a function that scans the DB and removes any fields that are no longer there, something that would take a while for a lot of books (around 4 to 6 books per second). Doing it this way would also allow me to change the selection boxes in settings (grouping, read syncing) from "manually type" to "select from a list". Of course, things would to south rather quickly if different libraries use the same lookup key for different column types.

[PatNY]

With the latest changes where all books suddenly had the same "Updated" date, it got me to thinking that I would love the option to sort books in the library by the "date added to CC." Any modifications to any metadata would always be ignored, and books would always show by the order they were added to the library. If a book was deleted in CC, and then got added back, it would go to the top of the list as any new book would.

While I think I would use this as my default sort most of the time, it wouldn't totally supplant the "Date Updated (CC)" sorting. I would still use that often to check that changes I make to books/metadata in Calibre on the PC had carried over correctly.

Originally Posted by chaley

We have had several requests to be able to reorder the items in book details. There is nothing particularly hard with producing the page in different orders. The hard part is specifying them. I think I would need something like the folders dialog where all of the fields are shown and the user can move them up and down.

If you do this, then it seems like it might be an easy step to put a check box next to each field so that the user can choose to hide certain ones from the details page? Like the custom metadata?

Great idea to have the wishlist thread!


--Pat

[kaufman]

Originally Posted by chaley

We have had several requests to be able to reorder the items in book details. There is nothing particularly hard with producing the page in different orders. The hard part is specifying them. I think I would need something like the folders dialog where all of the fields are shown and the user can move them up and down. Because of the multiple library problem (I cannot know what custom fields are available) (

Something you could do that would be a lot easier and only slightly less valuable could be to treat all non-standard fields as one block. Then you could have options to order/show/hide the title/author/publisher/.../custom-fields. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would work for most people and be a lot less work.

Originally Posted by PatNY

With the latest changes where all books suddenly had the same "Updated" date, it got me to thinking that I would love the option to sort books in the library by the "date added to CC."

If you are going into the sorting code, I have a request I have been sitting on. Its actually in two parts,

1) I would like the option to hide sorting type I don't use. I only ever sort by title, author or series, so I would like to suppress the other ones. This is really only helpful it you also....
2) It wold be nice to have the an option for the sorting button to just cycle through the sort types the way the Show button toggles between the different view types.

I switch back and forth a lot, and this would cut out a lot of button presses.

You could also get much of the same value by having an option to switch to Series sorting whenever the group by was changed to "series" and then switch to some user defined "default sort" whenever the user switched to a different grouping. In some ways, this is better because "series" sorting is probably what most people do when they switch to a series, and title or author is probably most used in title, author, tag or rating groupings. In fact, if you added another default sort for ungrouped, you could also handle the case where a person is loking at their entire library. I imagine that that is the most common use-case for the date related sorts.

In reading over this, I actually think I like this way better because it would allow me to move the Sort by button to the menu, since I would almost never use it any more.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by kaufman

2) It wold be nice to have the an option for the sorting button to just cycle through the sort types the way the Show button toggles between the different view types... etc

... I'm afraid I couldn't agree with you less CC is the only book app I've used (on android or eink devices) which allows me to set secondary/tertiary/etc sort fields from the device. My standard sort sequence is Author/Series[Index]/Title - OK, it currently takes 3 sort passes to get me there - but how would I achieve that at all with what you're suggesting. Now, if you were suggesting a feature to cycle around a personal set of 'saved sort sequences', I could happily vote for that, but that's probably not so easy.

[kaufman]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

... I'm afraid I couldn't agree with you less CC is the only book app I've used (on android or eink devices) which allows me to set secondary/tertiary/etc sort fields from the device. My standard sort sequence is Author/Series[Index]/Title - OK, it currently takes 3 sort passes to get me there - but how would I achieve that at all with what you're suggesting. Now, if you were suggesting a feature to cycle around a personal set of 'saved sort sequences', I could happily vote for that, but that's probably not so easy.

Two things:

1) I did ask for it as an option. I certainly don't want to force my way of doing things on everyone. I am only suggesting as easier way for me that might be useful for more people.

2) I'm trying to figure out what you are doing with your three sorts. It seems to me that unless you have a lot of books with the same title, your third sort is going to wipe out the first two. I do multiple pass sorts a lot in Calibre, but only on fields that have a few values. So, if I sort by Title and then by rating, it will show the books sorted by rating with the individual ratings in alphabetical order. It seems like you are going to end up with just a title sort.

Or did you mean you do title and then series and then author? I guess that makes more sense, but wouldn't it be easier to group by author and then do whatever other sorting you want to?

[chaley]

Originally Posted by kaufman

Or did you mean you do title and then series and then author? I guess that makes more sense, but wouldn't it be easier to group by author and then do whatever other sorting you want to?

Actually, I do similar things as jackie_w. That is one reason that CC uses a 3-level nested sort.

Example: peruse my library looking for something interesting. Using her sort (and yes, you do invert the steps), you see books by author. Inside that grouping you see the books ordered by series. Books with no series (or better for this example, the empty series) are ordered by title.

As for the ideas: as usual this requires thought. Having sorts optionally attached to grouping could make a lot of sense. Having the ability to specify compound sorts as a single operation could also make a lot of sense. It might also make sense to make sorts available as links or buttons in the grouping drawer, where you define which ones appear there (less convinced about this one). I do think that there must be a way for the user to access easily all the sort operations, but this might be different from the "common" operations directly available.

This is one that should cook for a while, perhaps attracting more comments and ideas.

[kaufman]

This is why I love this forum (and especially) Chaley. I learn all sorts of interesting things, and then my favorite program gets even better.

I hadn't thought of looking a large lists of books on the device because I do that kind of setup on my computer and then create Tags for later. I recognize that my way is the nerdy OCD method that might not appeal to everyone.

At first it seemed to me that browsing your entire library with the three level sort is skipping out on a lot of the capabilities of CC, but then I realized that that is similar to what I do on my computer in Calibre. I like it better on the big screen, but that's just my way.

Two comments:

1) As far as my requests go, I would be very happy with just the ability to attach a default sort type to each grouping method. That is probably the only thing on my list that meets the value vs effort test.

2) This is going to be very hard for you, but one thing that might be useful for people who do the Author/Series[Index]/Title three way sort would be to have a way to exclude all of the books from a series except the first one. That way if you were browsing through books looking for something to read, you would only see the standalone books or the first in the series. You don't really need to see the whole series just the first one as that is the one you will probably start with. I don't do this kind of sorting in CC, so this is an idea for Jackie and Chaley and other people who do.

[kaufman]

Could you also add "More information in list view" to the wish list?

Thanks.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by kaufman

Could you also add "More information in list view" to the wish list?

I thought it was already here.

My suspicion is that putting the "old list" in the middle of the thread confused things. To (I hope) avoid this confusion I moved it to the first post, and also put a summary there of what has been asked for in this thread. I will need to keep it up to date, but that shouldn't be too hard.