yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] fortunz:
Calibre's makers have a subforum at mobileread. They may have suggestions if no one here knows what to do.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] filar:
Damn good work!

Hi Jim. I just installed version 1.1. I'm impressed. The latest additions totally rock. Especially the shortcut screen -- I mapped this to "Tap middle", and the menu to "Long tap". Excellent design and usability.

And I saw that pressing the volume keys on the HD2 no longer disturbs Freda when rotated, as long as you manually click on the volume screen to make it go away. Nice work. (If you just wait for it to disappear, then Freda disappears as well and has gone from Full Screen to Window Mode when shown. But this is a very small issue.)

The most visible remaining issue now is the low resolution icon. I wanted to help with this, and installed some software to make a few high-resolution icons that you might use (if good enough), but the latest weeks have just been packed. Maybe some time later, if nobody else has the inspiration. :)

(I'm glad you have not prioritized the icon, as the new features are just great!)

Regards, and really thanks,

Fred
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Raudi1:
I also like the improvement, especially the rotation. But when I tried out the new improvements and played with the options I managed to crash Freda several times. But the reading works better than before apart from the problem with the converted PDF and the spaces which was solved easily.

But I noticed two other problems:

1. When I Go to the home screen and Manila changes the orientation to portrait and I switch to another program and then go back to Freda, it isn't in fullscreen anymore.

2. You can't specify the long tap action. Whan you try to set it, you can only select Opens menu. I also took a look at the setting file, but there was no long tap at all.

It (probably) isn't a bug, but when I changed the sofkey action to Menu, it didn't change the text on the buttons(it stays <</>>). It's a bit misleading because you don't see at one glance that it opens the menu.

And when I'm already writing about the softkey menu, it wouldn't be bad to have different options for the left and right ones, because the only difference at the moment is the direction in that you can change the page. Perhaps you could change one softkey to the shortcuts.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] stuntdouble:
After a couple nights testing there's only a few minor remarks i'll make.

-When pressing the side buttons to change volume levels (by accident or other), Freda minimises itself and returns to the windows home screen and takes it out of full screen, instead of returning to what I was reading.

-The font setting isn't being saved and keeps returning to the top font in my list. Have to select correct font each time.

-The "library" list sometimes has about 5 blank rows at the top of the list. I was thinking that perhaps it was trying to show some other unsupported files making these blank spaces, but all I had in the folder were a few epub files and they were all being displayed.

Other than these points I'm loving the new version.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Raudi1:
I also noticed that the library doesn't automatically refreshes after you have selected a folder. I think it would be better to let it update automatically.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Jim Chapman:
I'll take a look - please send me a note as to what options you were playing with, and please also send me your log file (\program files\freda\logfile.txt).

It's an unavoidable consequence of how Manila works - Manila does not play nicely with other applications, if those applications are in 'fullscreen mode'. So when Freda moves into the background, it has to switch out of full screen mode. I'm still looking at whether there is a way to handle this better ...

That's by design. I want to reserve one gesture that is never customisable, so that you can always get to the settings menu, no matter how deranged your setup may be.

I'm open to suggestions as to what the button labels should be, and what would make a logical division of menu items between the left and right buttons.

Thanks for using Freda,

Jim
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Jim Chapman:
But if the folder had 500 items in it, you wouldn't want that, because every time you touched a control, the device would freeze for 30 seconds. So the 'auto update' function would have to depend on how many files there were in the folder. And just counting the files takes a while ...

I agree I could make this screen behave more intelligently, at the expense of making it more complex. The code would have to deal with different special cases (and ideally, it would refresh the list box progressively). To be honest, I am not sure it's the best place to put my efforts, given that I have people asking me to implement full-blown library management, and if I'm going to do that, any time spent on developing the 'find file' screen is just throwaway effort.

Thanks,

Jim
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Jim Chapman:
Yes this is not nice - but it's the only work-around I could find because of problems with Manila. Basically, unless Freda minimises itself under these circumstances, it can end up partially displayed (and partially obscured by elements of Manila). I'm still trying to devise the right way to deal with this - because, I agree, the current solution is sometimes annoying.

Odd - I haven't managed to make these things happen with my setup. If you can send me further details as/when they happen, I'll have a think and see if I can work out what is going on.

Thanks,

Jim
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] stuntdouble:
I reflashed my rom earlier and it now seems to be working the way it should. I guess it just didnt like the font I had in it before or something. It's now remembering it fine.

As for the other minor problem with the blank lines, i'll attach a screenshot to show what I mean. It happens when I search sub-folders in library view.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Jim Chapman:
Synch Calibre with Freda

Folks,

I have been looking at ways to get Calibre's library to sync with Freda, and I think I have an approach that may work (basically, use the 'file/folder syncrhonisation' feature of ActiveSync, or some other tool like EasySync). See this post for details.

I myself am not a hardcore Calibre user - but I know many of you are, and I'd be interested to have your feedback as to whether this setup works. Certainly it worked for me as a one-off, but maybe it isn't suitable for regular use ...

Thanks,

Jim
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] freskile:
I use Blacksone and I've recently started to using Freda. I have three errors to repport

1- I wanted to test Freada with an epub file and used one from the Xanny ROM. When I try to open the file I receive the following error message.

"Sorry: Freha has experienced a problem and jas to close. Tap OK to continue."

When I tap, the program just exits. I do not know the ebook is DRM-free, but i suppose it is so since included in the ROM. Anyway, I think the current functioning is not proper. Whatever problem the program encounters, it must return to the main menu instead of exiting.

2- I use a txt ebook about 620 kb of size: esas.txt. I occasionaly get out of memory "out of memory" error when I want to open this file. I cleared my RAM, closed Manila, and managed to open the file. Still, i remember having recived the same error message once while I reading the book. There seems to an inefficiency i memory management of the program.

I attach the epub ebook, and the log files.

3- In the Application Sttings -> Colours -> Foreground, i clicked left of the "ok" by mistake and a small window appeared with title Help and the following content

"Cannot open Help. The file cannot be found."

Even I click OK, this window never closes. I have to go Task manager to use "end Task"

Thank you for the program.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] stuntdouble:
I just tried that epub file you posted on my HD as I don't think Jim has a blackstone device. Anyways, it worked fine in Freda 1.1 for me. No errors at all. I guess it's your rom that is making your device low on memory as well.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Jim Chapman:
Looking at the log file, I think you might not be using the most recent version of Freda. You can check the initial 'splash' screen; if it is not showing Version 1.1 (build 799), you should download the latest version from http://www.turnip.demon.co.uk/jim/freda.

That may well fix some of your problems

Indeed - and the fact that it isn't doing that does suggest that there is a serious error (for example, unrecoverable 'out of memory' or a problem in the GDI/DirectDraw DLL).

Well I am open to your suggestions about how to improve memory management efficiency, but I think I am already doing everything I reasonably can (load/unload data structures on demand, cache and reuse bitmap handles, compress 'word datastructures' ... ). If your custom ROM is putting a lot of DLLs into user memory, it may be causing problems (because the WinCe5 memory management architecture imposes some huge inefficiencies there).

Weird. I can get that 'Help' screen to come up by tapping there, but it dismisses just fine when I tap the [x] at top right. And it seems to work OK on the MSDevStudio test images too, and on my three test devices.

Can some other forum users check this one out please, and let me know whether it's a general problem on other devices.

Thanks for using Freda,

Jim
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] stuntdouble:
Just tried this. I'd never clicked it before because the "?" icon is invisible for me and I never saw it there. Now i've clicked it, the window with "Cannot open Help. The file cannot be found." in it pops up. Then if I click the "ok" area of that popup window it shows the help file properly.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] freskile:
You are right. Tha cab file had the same title, i.e. Freda6.CAB, so I thought I had the latest version. Now I installed v1.1 and it opened the epub file wihout any problem.

But in the opened file, the are many wrong characters such as Â at the end of each sentence ın the fırst pages. Also, there are so much empty space in the pages; some pages have only one sentence. When I open the same file using Manila's e-reader tab, it works perfect. No character error, echh file has a full text content,...

The "?" icon is also invisible for me, maybe it is better this way since I still has the same problem in the new version, that is if I click the "ok" nothing happens :(
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] stuntdouble:
Try another font. Perhaps the one you are using doesn't have all the characters mapped.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Jim Chapman:
I don't change the file name when I add versions, because I don't want to break links to it. If you want to be automatically notified when updated versions of Freda become available, install AppToDate; from v1.1 onwards, Freda is compatible with it.

Sounds like an encoding problem. To fix it, go to the Options>Book Properties screen and adjust the Encoding option. Probably it says 'Encoding per book file' at the moment; try switching that to 'Device Default' or 'UTF-8'.

That empty space is probably the result of 'vertical margin' layout directives in the book file, or perhaps spurious blank lines. To suppress these, on the Options>Book Properties screen set the options 'Max Margin'=0% and 'Ignore consecutive line breaks'=[ticked].

Please let me know if that does not fix the problem.

Thanks,

Jim
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] freskile:
Setting encoding to UTF-8 solved the encoding problem. Sorry to ask trivial questions..

Setting Max margin to "No margin" also solved the empty space problem.

One more question: In the options->applications settings->Folders I can only add one folder. Is it possible to add more folders? If not, is it possible to be implemented since ortherwise I have to transfer ebook files from SD to device, or vice versa.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Nicovince:
i'll try it :) thx a lot :)
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Jim Chapman:
Not a problem. With the job of developer goes the job of support tech ;)

That's not implemented - and it would not be trivial to do (since it would break the logic of the 'Library' screen in a rather fundamental way).

I see why you need it, and it's a reasonable thing to need. But actually implementing it will have to wait until I get round to building full-featured library-management into Freda. That is not going to happen in the next few weeks, though it is on my roadmap for the more distant future.

Thanks for using Freda,

Jim
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Raudi1:
Wouldn't it be possible to go into fullscreen mode again, when it changes the rotation after it has regained focus? That way it wouldn't matter what manila does.

Then it would be better to take it out of the options or at least make it just a label, so you can see it isn't customizable. Otherwise some people like me could think it is a bug.

And when you are at it you could also make it customizable over the settings file. ;)

You have to make an app that satisfies the needs of most the people and that isn't easy because everybody wants something different. So I will probably take a look at your source tomorrow and implement the changes I want myself. They are mostly just one or two lines of code needed to be added or changed, so it shouldn't take long.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Jim Chapman:
Yes I have been looking into how to implement that fix. It turns out to be surprisingly tricky to pick up the 'regain focus' situation in a reliable way. Depending on the particular situation, you get some combination of resize, repaint and gotfocus events, in a not entirely predictable order. And sometimes you don't even get the gotfocus event. It is difficult to handle all this in a way that doesn't mean I end up repaginating and repainting twice. That's one of the reasons why my code has to set a timer, and use it to repeatedly check whether the app has moved to the foreground since the last timer tick.

I expect I will figure it out at some stage - but you are most welcome to have a go.

Or alternatively I could mention it in the manual. Which is what I did :) . I admit it is a somewhat obscure behaviour (I did think of making it a label actually, but it looked really ugly).

Sure - you are free to do that. That is, after all, the point of open source code!

Thanks for using Freda,

Jim
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Jim Chapman:
Fullscreen on returning from background

Folks,

I have, I think, a fix for the problem that when you put Freda into the background, it has to drop into Windowed (i.e. not Full-screen) mode, when it returns to the foreground.

I have tested it on the devices I have access to, and it seems to work. But I'm concerned that it might have undesirable side-effects on UI behviour on some platforms, so if anyone would like to test it out, I would appreciate it.

I've put the CAB file at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3478831/Freda_1_1_800.CAB

Please let me know how it works.

Thanks,

Jim
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] stuntdouble:
Tested on my Touch HD (Blackstone) and with this latest build the program minimises (after it was in full screen mode) but closes itself after I try to bring it back into foreground focus.

I tested it in windowed mode doing the same thing and that resumed ok.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] filar:
Just tested...

Hi Jim.

Just tested the Freda_1_1_800.cab on my HD2 (Leo) with the latest official ROM.

Having 270deg rotation on, fullscreen.

A. Pressing volume button and tapping on the volume screen to get rid of it . Everything is perfect.

B. Leaving the volume screen to disappear by itself. Freda disappears when the volume screen disappears. Seing Freda in the task manager and trying to switch to it, but it then crashes and disappears from the task list. I picked up the last entry from the log file (the previous lines were just info about fonts and chapters being loaded):

"21.02.10 11:45: Form1_GotFocus failed to MoveTo page ref (1, 0)"

I guess this is the exact same behaviour as reported by stuntdouble on his HD (Blackstone).

Regards,

Fred
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] stuntdouble:
Sounds the same but mine was in portrait mode.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Raudi1:
I finally got the sourcecode to work properly (thanks to the help of Jim Chapman) and have made 2 changes so far:

1. A clock next to the page number(really helpful in my opinion)

2. Library refreshes automatically

If you are interested in my "improved" version of Freda, just post a reply in this thread. Then I can upload my version, or perhaps Jim will add the changes to the official version.

Now I will look into the fullscreen issue, a battery percentage and perhaps a few other minor things.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] stuntdouble:
The clock and battery sound like useful ideas. I'd be interested in taking it for a spin. Perhaps a collaboration with all you clever devs could be fruitful.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] ajhvdb:
The way you are doing it now is ok. But please don't publish your MODs. Just send them to Jim and he will decide when/or to include it or publish your exe+source on his page. My 2 cents :)
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Raudi1:
I agree that having several versions of an app floating around isn't a good thing. That way you would have to decide which App to use, because they have different improvements. For now I will use it for myself and fix the bugs.(Just found one that crashes Freda, because the time tries to update even when there is no book open and no time to update) If someone is still interested in the time, just drop me a pm

edit: Solved the problem with the crash now. Will now stop developing for now and start testing for other bugs (in other words: reading a book ;) )
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] fortunz:
The clock is a good idea, but should it ever make it's way into the official version, I'd REALLY like to be able to turn it off in preferences somewhere.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] bluenote73:
Personally I like to keep as much screen real estate for actual reading as possible...
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Raudi1:
I only have it next to the page number anyway. So no extra space is wasted because it's just blank screen there anyway.

If possible I'd like the page number and time to show only for a few seconds after a page turn, because I'd also like to have as much text on the screen as possible, but I also want to know how far I've read, the time and the battery.

When I've got time I'll look into it, but the next weeks are probably going to be busy.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] rat_2665:
Clock and battery percentage next to the page number without taking up room for reading would be nice (similar to the S60-ZXReader), also backlight control in the settings (useful for night reading profil).
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] dgen:
Uber app ^^
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Jim Chapman:
Thanks for the bug reports. I've spotted the problem and (I sincerely hope) fixed it. This CAB should work:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3478831/Freda_1_1_801.CAB

Please let me know of any problems with it ...

Thanks,

Jim
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] stuntdouble:
That one works fine for me now Jim. It now doesn't crash and comes back to full screen once the program is re-selected. Nice job.

Any chance of a higher res Freda "F" icon? I believe someone offered to make one earlier in the thread. The current one looks pretty jagged on my HD screen.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] filar:
I just tested Freda_1_1_801.cab, and it seems much better. No crashes or going from fullscreen to windowed mode when using volume buttons, start button or home button. Very good. I tested a lot of times, and a few of these times the Freda window was replaced by the home screen, but I could not see a pattern to when this happened. Anyhow, I just had to select Freda in the task manager and continue reading.

A note regarding the discussion about page number, clock and so on: I just love the "Show Page # as Line" option. This lets me use 99.5% of the screen area for text, but still shows roughly where I am. Perhaps an option could be to display a little window with the current and max page number and current time (perhaps also battery status) for a second after turning a page? Just a small rectangle at the bottom of the screen, perhaps fading away?

This program is getting better and better! Thanks, Jim.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] pox67:
I'll throw in my vote for a clock next to the page number at the bottom of my screen. It can be optional for those who don't want it there. I could see the battery level also being useful.

I often read at lunch time and have to flip back to the home screen to check the time.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] stuntdouble:
Just noticed that in the latest build my bookshelf won't display any of my ebooks. Anyone else's not working in v1.1 build 801 or is it just me?
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] bluenote73:
Hey stuntdouble

I haven't installed the latest iteration yet, but on occasion jim has had to make changes that break books previously loaded to the bookshelf. In that case (and I don't know that he has had to do that for this build), then the fix is simply to clear your temp files and reload the book. Try the 'clear temp files' option, and if that doesn't work then try clearing the temp directory under the program files/freda dir may do the trick.

That assumes though, that it was this kind of change that produced the behaviour you're seeing in the first place, which I can't confirm for you.

Cory
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] stuntdouble:
This worked nicely, thx. Completely forgot about that option.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] pongster:
I'm loving the speed of 1.1!
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] bluenote73:
If you don't use freda in full screen mode, and you enable the time on your top bar, you won't have to switch out of freda.

Same for the guys asking for battery displays. Just a thought.

Jim -

Every version just gets better and better. I love the page # display as line which I just discovered. With one thing and another it seems like I'm opening books anew alot, and it's a real hassle to try and figure out where I was. At least with the line display I always know now. [because I don't normally have the page #'s displayed].

It seems like the fullscreen - repaginate/grab focus thing is juuuust about licked. Freda seems to do what its supposed to do for me, although from fullscreen-landscape, if I press my home key to return to my today screen, if I try to rotate my screen back to portrait (which would be natural...) then Freda seems to grab focus (or, something about freda's state ends up being returned to focus on the rotate..). The same thing happens if I press the home key, then select freda and send the "minimize" command. Still kind of hard to use anything with freda in the background, but its a lot closer.

thanks
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Gandhi70:
does freda support:

- storing the position of several open books at once?

- full text search (passages) over the whole book?
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Jim Chapman:
Yes, for the 20 most recently opened books. You can also save bookmarks (if you want to keep track of multiple locations within any one book).

Not yet.

Jim
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Raudi1:
But you will waste a lot of screen and it won't look good or even distract you while reading, depending on the colors of windows and freda.

The only compromise I would accept, would be to hide the softkeys. On the new 6.5.x Roms the taskbar won't take much space and depending on the theme, it would look ok too.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] juicecultus:
nice software, good job mr Jim. Could someone please guide me to find the best pdf to epub converter
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] stuntdouble:
Try this:

http://calibre-ebook.com/download