1.7 announced

[Shaggy]

Karel has announced over on the iRex forums that 1.7 is expected to be out in July. It sounds mostly like a small bugfix update.

http://forum.irexnet.com/viewtopic.p...ghlight=#18299

[yingwu]

good news. Thanks for all and the tabs are appealing

[junkyardwillie]

Tabs definitely seem interesting. Plastic Logic showed something that looked like tabs on their device which seemed pretty cool to jump through various docs. I'd be interested in seeing how its incorporated. If you could have a PDF and a notepad open at the same time and switch back and forth between them in tabs that might be pretty interesting. Glad to see they are producing updates for this device and expanding the current capabilities rather than just abandoning it and coming out with a new device. A for effort for Irex

[ThR]

It will be interesting to see what will happen with the tabs when shutting down the device. Will they come up again with their last status or do we have to reopen all documents?

[HarryT]

Reopen them would be my guess.

[Shaggy]

Current behavior is that you have to re-open documents. I'm not sure what they'll do with tabs, but probably the same thing.

They've said before that they are planning on having documents re-open automatically, but that it would not get implemented until they finish the rest of the power management. I assume once they do that, the tabs will come back up as well.

[HarryT]

That was an option on the iLiad, if I recall correctly. It was a useful feature.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

That was an option on the iLiad, if I recall correctly. It was a useful feature.

Yes it was, although it didn't have it originally. They added it in one of the more recent updates (2.10 or 2.11 maybe?). It's a little more complicated on the DR because you don't have just one document that would need to be re-opened, but potentially multiple documents.

[yingwu]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

Yes it was, although it didn't have it originally. They added it in one of the more recent updates (2.10 or 2.11 maybe?). It's a little more complicated on the DR because you don't have just one document that would need to be re-opened, but potentially multiple documents.

As my understanding, why is it difficult to open multiple documents?

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by yingwu

As my understanding, why is it difficult to open multiple documents?

I didn't mean it was difficult, just more involved than tracking the last state of one document. I was just making a relative comparison between one versus many, not a statement that many is necessarily hard to do.

My guess though, is that what they're really planning on is that once the final power management function is in place, you will no longer do a cold shutdown of the device. There will be a suspend-to-flash that will basically put it into a "hibernate" mode when not in use for long periods of time. When you push the button to "turn it back on", it just needs to recover the device from flash and continue. In that scenario, they don't really need to do anything special for adding a "re-open" feature. It'll be automatic as part of recovering from hibernation.

Solving the problem that way would mean that they don't need to worry about tracking which documents you have open and restoring them at all. It would be the default behavior based on recovering from flash.

That's how a lot of small electronic devices work, you never really shut them down completely, they just go into a "deep sleep", "hibernate", or whatever you want to call it, state.

[omro]

I don't see how it would be hard. When you have multiple documents open and you tell the DR to shut down, when you open any of those 4 documents once you turn the DR on again, it reopens them back where they were closed.

I still do not see why they can't implement a small record of the 4 documents or less that are open when the DR closes and tell the DR to reopen those 4 or less documents when it starts again, and the existing software will put the documents back where they were when they were closed.

It can't be that difficult.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by omro

It can't be that difficult.

It's probably not. But once they release the second power mode it won't need to do anything. Reopening documents would be automatic.

From a business perspective they're deciding between spending some time/labor implementing reopening now, or spending 0 time/labor to do it later. Obviously, 0 wins when it comes to cost.

IMO, if they will automatically get that functionality later, I'd rather them spend their resources working on other priorities.

[yingwu]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

It's probably not. But once they release the second power mode it won't need to do anything. Reopening documents would be automatic.

From a business perspective they're deciding between spending some time/labor implementing reopening now, or spending 0 time/labor to do it later. Obviously, 0 wins when it comes to cost.

IMO, if they will automatically get that functionality later, I'd rather them spend their resources working on other priorities.

Shaggy, just like what you have said that trying to mount an SD card with an ext3 filesystem is not difficult, here, reopening the original 4 files only means maybe less than 100 lines of additional codes. They could do this extremely easily.

At that time, when I said that trying the ext3 filesystem is usefulness, you said "Getting the DR to recognize an ext3 SD card should be pretty minimal effort." and "It's not like someone is spending weeks writing code to support ext3 instead of DJVU". OK, now, you prefer them to spend several months to finish the power management, but seems not to agree they could spend only one week to let the DR reopen the opened files. Thus, just like what you asked me, "Why not both??"!!!!!!!!!!

BTW, I have not seen any way to use EXT3 in the SD card.

[yingwu]

Of course, I consider a full power management is extremely useful. That is what all of us are waiting for!!

[Shaggy]

Doing both in the case of developing ext3 + DJVU means that when you're done you have two useful features. Doing both in the case of reopening documents + power management means that when you're done, the time spent is redundant. Any effort they spend now implementing code for reopening documents will be wasted time since the next power mode should make that code unnecessary.