biinngg / iphoneebooks Goto Github PK

Great app!  The only suggestion I have is that when chapter numbers are 
listed, they are listed like this:
1
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
2
20
21
22
etc...

Can you make the ordering normal (1, 2, 3, etc...) instead so we don't 
have to put 01, 02, 03 to keep the order straight?  Thank you!

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Load an ebook via copybookdir.sh onto your iphone (either .txt or .html)
2. Open the ebook with Books.app

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
I expect to see quotation marks in the text. For example:
In the file: "It was a bad plan", said George.
In Books.app: It was a bad plan, said George.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
Version .9 on an Intel Mac Mini running 10.4

Please provide any additional information below.
Thanks for the great app!

no RTF or PDF support

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Install summerboard
2. Have black background in books app
3.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

Black top bar. Instead, I believe summerboard makes it semi-opaque.  As a 
result, menu can be 
seen when auto-hid.  Not a big problem, but worth noting.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
Newest

Please provide any additional information below.

Probably a ways off, but some kind of built-in weDict linking or other 
dictionary functionality would be fantastic.

To look words up now I use Dock to switch (and Books remembers now --  
thanks!!) to weDict, type the word in, and when done return via Dock to 
Books. Some sort of built-in method that eliminated the typing in step and 
using Dock to change apps would be great.

I'm not sure how this could be implimented without being more annoying 
than useful -- do other e-readers have this capability? Seems like if 
would be fairly trivial to allow selecting and copying a word if Apple 
ever decides to include cut and paste functionality...

Before your program I'd never read a book on a handheld (and never missed 
it), but now Books is the most used program on my iPhone. Thanks for the 
great work.

On of the subtle things that makes the ebook reading experience feel
different from a real book is how often you experience the cover.

At the moment, you get a "Loading..." transparent overlay when opening a
book, where with a real book, you'd see the cover.

It would feel more like a real book if there was an option to have the
cover splashed, rather than the first page of the book, under the
"Loading..." transparent overlay when opening a book.

Also an option to display the cover for a few seconds when entering the app
when it is set to open directly to a bookmarked page in a previously opened
book.

I think interface details like this would make ebook reading more comfortable.

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Open up chapter and see everything fine.
2. see a loading icon swirling around.
3. Screen goes blank.
4. I touch the screen to scroll and see the first page of text.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
That's all I get.  I can try to scroll and the screen tries to move, but I
don't get anything.  The screen will move like I'm trying to scroll on the
top and the bottom, but won't show the next part of the text.  I've been
using the product up to now just fine with the same files.  Even files
downloaded from manybooks.net won't scroll now.


What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
0.9.9

Please provide any additional information below.
I guess I'll try and figure out how to go back to 0.9.5 for now.  I'm not a
programmer so have no idea what would cause this.  I've tried to uninstall
and reinstall the app with and without a restart.  No change.

[deleted issue]

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Open a book of some length.
2. Either tap the scroll arrows in the footer or tap the lower part of the page 
to scroll. 
3. Try to locate where you were in the text. 

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
The scrolling is very rapid, and I lose my place in the text. I would like to 
request the addition of 
various (slower) scrolling speeds as a preference where users can choose a rate 
of scrolling 
that they can follow visually to keep their place. I would also benefit from 
easing on the scrolling 
so that it started and ended more slowly.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
Books.app 0.9.9
iPhone 1.0.2

Please provide any additional information below.

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Install Books.app
2. install ebooks in txt file in /var/root/Media/Ebooks/
3. Open Books.app

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
Expect to see the books file, but instead I see nothing

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
1.00

Please provide any additional information below.

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. With v.9 installed via Installer.app all I get is a white screen them crash 
-worked fine before 
the update
2.
3.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?


What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?


Please provide any additional information below.

I remember a certain word or phrase in a chapter but I don't know which
one.  It would be nice to be able to run a search for it.  I know this is
quite an add-on so maybe 2.0 or something.

It would be very convenient if PalmOS type ebooks were supported natively
by Books.app.  

While it's possible to convert some of the book types back to HTML or text,
there's a (relatively) large body of websites that offer the Palm formats
for download.  Native readers are available for Palm (of course), WinCE,
Blackberry, and various desktop OS's.  It really is the closest thing to a
"universal" ebook format, aside perhaps from HTML and plain text.

Several distinct formats are found for the Palm, all unfortunately sharing
the same PDB file extension used for all PalmOS data files.  The oldest and
most basic is the simple PalmDOC.  Other common forms include the open
source Plucker and the proprietary iSilo format.

Decode functionality for PalmDOC and Plucker formats is already available
in GPL-2 licensed code.  Integrating this code should be straight forward.
 Barriers to fully supporting these formats include the fact that both
support embedded images (not yet supported by Books.app's display code),
and that the Plucker format is an archive file which can contain multiple
distinct pages linked together with HTML href's.  A stopgap method of
supporting the formats would be to concatenate all pages and strip images
until Books.app can provide the necessary support.

Note that this issue is half request for feature, and half intent-to-code.
 I've only just got my toolchain setup, but I intend to work towards
implementing these file formats starting immediately.

Can you please include an option to not have any books or folders marked 
as new? As of now, all I can do is mark them all new and the only way to 
get rid of the blue dot is to click on the file.  Other than that, this is 
one of the best third party apps for iPhone, thank you!

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Copy a large unicode .txt file to /var/root/Media/EBooks. I used a 4MB 
plain txt file.
2. Try to open it with books.app
3. Observe the phone freezes (on my iphone it never opens)

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

Opens the txt file reasonably fast. Within a few seconds. 

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?

Books 0.5.2 on iPhone 1.0.1 + installer.app

Please provide any additional information below.

Note: small txt files, like those 100KB ones, work wonderfully. Could the 
author please consider better algorithm handling long text files? Such as 
read more data as you scroll. Do not try to render the entire file at the 
beginning. That way the program will be way more "scalable".

Also I think most people will use txt files. They are simple and great. 
Formatted books maybe nicer, but you need to wait for others to create the 
book for you. With txt you can easily create your own. I used to save 
technical documents and casual nobels as txt and read them on my Symbian 
phone. It's a very good way to use spare time.

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. If there is a dash at the end of a line there appears to be a hyphen 
after the dash.
2. If there is a dash at the start of a line the previous character (last 
character of line above) is missing.
3.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?


What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
1.0, reading Tarzan.

Please provide any additional information below.
Perhaps a full justification problem? Html file is fine, resizing text to 
move dashes from ends of lines fixes the problem. Tried to attach a 
screenshot that shows both behaviours, but got a server error with file  
attached.

Version 0.6 of the application.

An HTML file with an wide image cuts off text.

The image link was relative and wider than the display. Text looks like it is 
roughly that wide, but 
scrolling to the right only displays a white area.

<img src="Spin-cover.jpg" alt="" width="492" height="800" />

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Open a book of some length.
2. Either tap the scroll arrows in the footer or tap the lower part of the page 
to scroll. 
3. Try to locate where you were in the text. 

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
The scrolling is very rapid, and I lose my place in the text. I would like to 
request the addition of 
various (slower) scrolling speeds as a preference where users can choose a rate 
of scrolling 
that they can follow visually to keep their place. I would also benefit from 
easing on the scrolling 
so that it started and ended more slowly.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
Books.app 0.9.9
iPhone 1.0.2

Please provide any additional information below.

. perform an svn checkout of the source code needed for the toolchain
. obtain the iphone filesystem contents for firmware version 1.0.2
. build the toolchain
. perform an svn checkout of the source code for iphonebooks
. attempt a build

the following changes need be made to get through toolchain related issues:
. UIKit/UIViewHeartbeat.h:
       NSObject import is referenced as "NSObject.h" as opposed to
<Foundation/NSObject.h>
. UIKit/UIKeyboardInputProtocol.h
       did not exist, added per version listed here:
http://code.google.com/p/mobileterminal/wiki/BuildingFromVt100
. UIKit/UIKeyboardImpl.h
        was modified as specified on that page as well, to dot i's and
cross t's

EBookView.m still presents with compile errors, a subset listed below:
/usr/local/lib/gcc/arm-apple-darwin/4.0.1/../../../../arm-apple-darwin/include/U
IKit/UIWebView.h:12:
error: parse error before '<' token
/usr/local/lib/gcc/arm-apple-darwin/4.0.1/../../../../arm-apple-darwin/include/U
IKit/UIWebView.h:17:
error: parse error before 'WebView'
/usr/local/lib/gcc/arm-apple-darwin/4.0.1/../../../../arm-apple-darwin/include/U
IKit/UIWebView.h:32:
error: parse error before 'UITextLoupe'
/usr/local/lib/gcc/arm-apple-darwin/4.0.1/../../../../arm-apple-darwin/include/U
IKit/UIWebView.h:36:
error: parse error before 'UIAutoscrollTimer'
/usr/local/lib/gcc/arm-apple-darwin/4.0.1/../../../../arm-apple-darwin/include/U
IKit/UIWebView.h:38:
error: parse error before 'UITextTraits'
/usr/local/lib/gcc/arm-apple-darwin/4.0.1/../../../../arm-apple-darwin/include/U
IKit/UIWebView.h:44:
error: cannot find protocol declaration for 'UIFormControl'
/usr/local/lib/gcc/arm-apple-darwin/4.0.1/../../../../arm-apple-darwin/include/U
IKit/UIWebView.h:45:
error: parse error before 'UIInformalDelegate'
/usr/local/lib/gcc/arm-apple-darwin/4.0.1/../../../../arm-apple-darwin/include/U
IKit/UIWebView.h:63:
error: parse error before 'WebPDFView'
/usr/local/lib/gcc/arm-apple-darwin/4.0.1/../../../../arm-apple-darwin/include/U
IKit/UIWebView.h:65:
error: parse error before '}' token
/usr/local/lib/gcc/arm-apple-darwin/4.0.1/../../../../arm-apple-darwin/include/U
IKit/UIWebView.h:79:
error: parse error before ':' token

Sometimes books.app forgets my reading position. This is inconvenient for long 
books. I have to 
make hundreds of scrolls to get to the position where i was at. Jump feature 
could largely solve this 
problem. for example, I know I was at about 60% of the book, so I jump to 60% 
and then make a few 
scrolls to find the exact spot.

Or, I have a book that I already read half of it on PC. Now I want to quickly 
scroll to 50%.

So, please consider adding the feature that allows me to jump to a certain 
percentage.

Thanks!

Things like Night\Day presets would be welcomed a lot. Should be relatively
easy to implement... 
Thanks a lot. Great app. 

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Take example of any available html book in russian. I tried changing 
encoding, but was unable to make it look anything like russian characters

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
Correctly rendered russian text.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
1.1 on Iphone 1.0.2

Please provide any additional information below.

roosterspice,
I've been waiting for iphone ebook reader for a long time and finaly you 
got one that I can start using right now. Thank you!!!
And I thought I would just mention one existing ebook reader for PocketPC 
platform: Haali Reader: http://haali.cs.msu.ru/pocketpc/
It's an open source project, so you might use some of his ideas from here: 
http://haali.cs.msu.ru/pocketpc/files/TextViewNG.zip
Do not take me wrong, I am not suggesting to develop Haali Reader for 
iphone, I am just trying to help. And may be you will find it usefull.
Regards,
WeakMIPS

It'd be great if Books.app could auto-scroll, at a user-adjustable rate.  Maybe 
a two-finger flick to 
increase/decrease the speed?

IMG tags with a space in the image name do not work

Version 1.2

I would love to be able to make notes at particular parts of the book.   
Annotations of sorts.

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. get free books in html from http://www.baen.com/library/
2. load a chapter
3. try to use "next" chapter link

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
I would expect to get the next chapter, instead the nav tools come up

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
.71, iPhone 1.0.2

Please provide any additional information below.
Baen's commercial books are available in DRM free html as well

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Open Books and read a document.
2. Change applications with Dock.
3. Return to books via Dock or Springboard.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
When one returns to Books, the place in the document is lost.  Should be 
kept.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
1.0

Please provide any additional information below.
Sounds like the same problem as changing applications when an SMS comes in.

You might be interested in some of the interface mockups I've posted:

http://blog.wilsonet.com/archives/2007/08/16/reading-at-160ppi/

I was pleasantly surprised when I saw a mention of your app on Mac NN — I'd
been designing just such a thing in my free time. An ebook reader is a
pretty logical application given the iPhone's characteristics.

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Install a group of files in .txt format via scp -r
2. Boot Books.app
3. Open individual chapter file:  Blank screen.  No text.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
Should see the text.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
Books.app v.0.4.2.  Mac OS X.4.10.  iPhone firmware 1.0.1

Please provide any additional information below.
Is there a certain text format I should use?  I am outputting from
TextEdit.  Is there a CHMOD step I need.  Phone has been jailbroken, etc.

[deleted issue]

Example: making a list of movies, they are listed in a single continuous 
sentence instead of a verticle list.

Great program!

I was giving more thought to the issue about links. I was wondering if the 
links appeared to be 
dissabled since the screen is waiting for a tap to open the navigation bar on 
the top. Is it possible 
that this is the problem? What would happen if you keep the top navigational 
bar always available? 
Will it allow html links to work?

jcarr

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Open Books and read a document. SMS msg comes in.  Click View instead of
Ignore.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
When one returns to Books, the place in the document is lost.  Should be kept.

If the Ignore button is chosen, when I return to Books, the place is kept.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
Version 0.95 of Books.  On Intel OS X.

Please provide any additional information below.


THought you might find this interesting. Both as a problem and as a workaround.

Thanks for this awesome program.

ROger

All my ebooks are in pdf format and this program would be amazing if you 
added support for it.

Two important (for me) things that I would like to see in future releases:
1. Landscape format
2. One touch page scrolling

Few more comments:
Also I do not understand why it's necessary to load whole chapter/book at 
once. In my opinion it would be better to load several pages (or may be 
even just one) when reader is opened and than keep adding pages (on 
background) while reading. You actually see only one page at the time.
Also I would like to have ability to setup the font size somewhere in 
preferences and use it for whole book. I do not need to change the font 
size on every page.

Any way, great work on keeping upgrading the app. I thought I would share 
my thoughts

WeakMIPS

Thanks for this extremely well-written app!

I'm the developer of MobileFinder.  If you have any need to help users
access the filesystem, or would like users to be able to double-click files
in MobileFinder and have them open up in Books.app, see:

http://mobilestudio.googlecode.com

It presents a one-line method to retreive arguments from MobileFinder and
other MobileStudio-aware apps.

If this doesn't look helpful, feel free to disregard this issue.  Again,
great job on Books.app!

Self explanatory.  Zach, you're such a lazy bastard, why haven't you done this 
yet, huh huh huh?

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Open the attached test.txt with books.app
2. Compare books.app display with the actual content of the file
3. A few characters are missing when they are at the end of lines. I marked 
them in red in 
original.png

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

All characters are correctly shown

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?

0.8, iphone 1.0.2

Please provide any additional information below.

Attachments:

* booktest.png: screenshot from iphone

* original.png: original content of the txt file. Those characters missing in 
books.app are marked 
red.

* test.txt.zip: zipped test.txt file

Note:

1. Not all line-end chars are missing. Only on some lines.

2. If you change font size in books.app, different chars are missing.

With the new ability to view jpg's... an option to hide "cover.jpg" would be 
nice, since it's now 
showing up in the chapters lists.


Other things with cover.jpg, it would be nice to see, or have the option to 
see, it used as a splash 
screen whenever there's a pause.

For instance, during the "Loading..." transparent overlay, would it be possible 
to display 
cover.jpg as the background during loading?  

I'd also love an option to splash the cover.jpg of the current book whenever 
Book.app first opens 
and was previously in a book folder rather than the main folder.  Sorta of like 
each time you "pick 
up the book" you first see the cover for a second or two before you open it to 
your bookmarked 
page.  I find that seeing the cover repeatedly is something I really miss when 
reading ebooks 
rather than paper.

Thanks for a great app.  This is the app I needed to finally retire my PDA and 
only carry the 
iPhone!

Any chance of a widescreen view?

in v0.4 after loading a chapter (txt format) the program shows it from the 
end of it so I need to scroll all a way to the top

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Click from main list to open chapter.
2. HTML page opens with links in blue and underlined.
3. Click on links but do not work. It doesn't link to the next page.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
Instead of linking to another page or media it stays in current page.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
Latest as of 9/12/07

Please provide any additional information below.

Low priority enhancement.

Allow the option of icon (aka cover.jpg/png) view rather than the list view.

Something like springboard, displaying the book covers. You may want to go
with a 3x4 layout rather than a 4x5 to get better size buttons.


- Sorting options: date added / viewed / alphabetical

- Missing cover behavior:
You could use a generic icon with title text over it, but I think that a
better option would be to pop up a warning "Not all books have cover
images, reverting to list view".  You'd be able to see in the current list
view which books are missing covers.



// Off topic comments

Please publish the size or aspect ratio for the cover splash display area.

I love the new cover splash.  I just wish the "Loading..." overlay was more
transparent, and the cover splash also happened when opening a preloaded
book when loading doesn't occur (basically, any time the Book.app is first
entered from the home screen).

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Brushing the color change button ie black to white or vice versa
2. Brushing the font size buttons.


What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
Latest Version on the iphone firmware 1.0.2

Please provide any additional information below.

Occasionally I hit the font size and invert color buttons by accident and I
have to wait a while (sometimes up to 3-5 min) for the  unintended effect.
 Is there way to turn off the buttons in the bottom bar leaving only the
page up page down buttons.  I have turned off the chapter navigation
buttons but i didnt see a way to turn off the other buttons.

The program works flawlessly for me otherwise, I really enjoy it and I use
it every day.

Thanks
-Eric Krispin

When you increase the font size for HTML, it is possible to have it do a 
word wrap instead of having the text get pushed off the right side of the 
screen?  As of now, I have to keep the smallest font size or I can't read 
the end of each line.  Thanks again for a good program!

When in full text view, there is no progress bar. Shame, shame. It is
essential.

(Submitting this as an issue for now as I can't figure out any way to
create a new Wiki page.  Feel free to close this and turn it into a Wiki
page if you like.)

Reading the entirety of a document in at start has its limitations.  It's
slow for one, and opening a document larger than available RAM is
impossible.  Many multi-chapter Plucker books are tens of megabytes large.

Certainly, the end-user fix of breaking stuff up into individual files can
work around this, but that's tough with pre-existing Plucker or PalmDOC files.

As we're in the process of adding support for additional file types, I
wonder if this wouldn't be a good time to tackle this issue in a well
defined manner and be done with it?

All Palm file formats are chunked into multiple records.  Most readers on
the Palm display these files one record at a time as that's all they can do
with the limited resources those devices provide.  

Displaying a single scrollbar of file position becomes a little difficult
when things are split up like this.  In the case of PalmDOC, there's a
field in the header that gives the total number of bytes in the entire file
BEFORE it was compressed.  That should make the scrollbar easy enough. 
Additionally, pretty much all PalmDOC files use a fixed record size of 4096
bytes.  The spec allows for more or less (and the last record is usually
less), but the docs I've read suggest that few if any records were ever
programmed to deal with more than 4096 so it's a de-facto limitation.

Plucker's not quite so nice, unfortunately.  There's a total count of
records in the file, and then the header of each record lists the total
number of uncompressed bytes in the record.  Plucker uses one database
record to contain an entire page, up to the Palm's maximum of 64KB per
record.  Single pages larger than that have a continuation pointer to the
next record in the chain.  In the Plucker reader on PalmOS, the scrollbar
runs to the end at the end of a 64KB record, and there's a link to the next
page.  Scrolling past the end of a multi-record page will automatically
jump to the next part, but the scrollbar starts over at the top.  Not good...


Would it make sense at this point to define some sort of format API?  Not
anything as fancy as a plugin structure, but just some defined protocol of
how to access a particular file format.

I'm cooking up a little Objective-C protocol now to describe things, but
input is of course welcome.

Need a way to bookmark where I'm at.  

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Hebrew text will not display properly 

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
Instead of seeing Hebrew characters, the program displays garbled text

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
iPhone 1.0.2, latest Books.app, on Automatic text encoding (I tried the other 
ones just in case and 
none of them worked)

Please provide any additional information below.