yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Exitao:
First, thanks for taking the time to respond!

My previous reader created a <bookname>.mpb file in the same directory as the book, which I knew to hold bookmarks, annotation and now assume must have also held the pagination data.

As few of us are likely to keep our books in device memory, I don't imagine that file size will become a huge issue (perhaps my imagination is limited?).

Anyway, if Freda compared file size/attributes and the settings recorded in the dat file to the file it was opening, or created some kind of hash, it might not be necessary to repaginate... as much.

Alternatively, you could just make it paginate more discretely and it could just display "paginating" where the page number displays without the page numbers until complete? Less distracting and out of site, out of mind? (For that matter, it now occurs to me that I could simply un-tick "Show page number." But then, I'd be begging for a progress bar or indicator... As it is, I'd rather not know my progress than be distracted by the pagination.)

As for the the page geometry, is it not possible for it to grab the first word of text and use it as a sort of anchor to remain the first word of text on rotation?

There was one more suggestion I forgot to include in my previous post

:

It could be my fault as I'm used to using a D-pad and the Blackstone doesn't have one, but I find myself activating the menu when I mean to be changing pages.

To prevent this, I have "Is ignored" for Tap at edge and Tap at middle.

Is it possible to increase the delay for "long tap?" Maybe a user defined delay?

Alternatively, for fullscreen mode, make it so one could disable long tap and use the page number bar to activate the menu? Or include soft keys in the page number bar? (Although it is tiny for my fingers.)

And.. speaking of tiny for my fingers, my very last suggestion:

While writing this post I was consulting the Menu and Options dialogues or screens, I observed that the tabs (e.g. Fonts, Colours, Folders &c) in Application Settings are not as touch friendly as possible.

None of those tabs has enough content to fill the screen, so is it not possible to make the selection part of the tabs bigger?

More bugs? These have probably been mentioned before, but...

1. Sometimes I've noticed the text isn't stopped by the page number bar. I'll see text overlapping the page numbers.

Also, when this happens, a line or two of text won't display.

At first I thought it was a poorly OCR'd book, until I toggled the Full Screen and the text resettled itself.

2. Freda likes to be the centre of attention. She doesn't always minimise well. Sometimes when pressing the home "virtual button" on my Blackstone, Freda's title bar and page number bar persist in displaying over top my today/Sense screen.

Finally, if you look at the time of this posting, you'll be able to compare it to a Paypal donation. If you're the type to post the names of donors, please do not post my RL name. Regards,

eX
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] fortunz:
That's a reasonable concern. Might I suggest optional additions in advanced settings? Whatever you think the best default is for most people, plus the ability for others to check a box (boxes) to always paginate for the other orientations?

I knew I remembered reading you did cache this stuff. I'll check my logs later today and post back.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] fortunz:
I was only able to find one instance of the "epub is more recent" string, and in that particular case, it actually was more recent (I was trying a trick someone else suggested using opera as a file browser to test something, and it "downloaded" the file anew before opening it).

I went ahead and finally brought my Freda installation up to the newest build (804), I was at least one build behind, and it still repaginates each time I open the same book. Close application, open it again with the setting to remember book selected (and with no change in screen orientation), initially it shows the page count below the text as if it isn't going to repaginate, but a second or two later, it begins repaginating. Rechecking the file, there are no additional "more recent" strings. I then tried closing the book while leaving the application open, again it repaginated each time I reopened it. Again no changes in orientation or window mode.

A few odd things about me: All of my titles are converted with Calibre to epub from PML. I only read in full screen mode. I have winmo6.1, using the Verizon TP2. Typically I read with the keyboard extended but manually revert the screen to portrait before opening freda (to avoid multiple repaginations), but I didn't do any manual screen orientations while testing just now -- I just did it with the keyboard closed in normal portrait mode.

My understanding from what you wrote above is that it isn't supposed to do this. I'm happy to toy around with it to identify the source of the snafu if you have suggestions for what to do. I'm also happy to email the log to you if you're interested.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Jim Chapman:
Well if you're a 'pack rat' like I am, any memory card you own will always be 99% full. I thought 16GB would be enough, but ...

Incidentally, you will actually get much swifter performance if you tell Freda to keep its (her?) temp files in device memory, rather than on the SD card. But then you will be *seriously* short of memory space.

For version 2.0 (development still ongoing) I am taking more care to get this right. The general approach is for Freda to understand which attributes will invalidate what kinds of cached information:

cached text: invalidated by encoding changes

cached on-screen sizes of words: invalidated by font style/size changes

cached word positions within line: invalidated by changes to layout and screen width

Then each of those caches gets a file of its own, keyed according to the attributes that were in force when it was created.

I'll be fiddling with this also in v2.0; my general approach to 'page numbers' will be to show a %ge of how much of the book you have read, or to show an exact page number if I have that available. And the indicator that Freda is doing background work will be a discrete little twirling baton or somesuch in the corner of the screen.

The trouble is that (in my current design at least) Freda aims to begin each chapter at the top of a new page. So in effect it's the first word of each chapter that gets anchored to the top of its page, and that constrains the position-on-page of every subsequent word in that chapter. I'm not quite ready to abandon the 'page' metaphor with Freda (some users seem quite attached to it). That said, in v2.0 I am doing some work to make it easier to switch to a metaphor that treats a book as a single column of scrollable text, so this might become an option you can control in the settings screen. We will see how complex it is to implement ...

I'll experiment with adding these optional settings.

Actually in v2 I have rebuilt this screen completely, to make it more touch friendly (and, co-incidentally, usable on phones without touch screens).

Are you using build 804? (check the build number on the initial splash screen). An earlier build of v1.1 did have this problem, but I thought I fixed it.

Yes, this is an unfortunate interaction between Freda's multi-threading model and the HTC touch-flow custom screens. It is fixed in v2.0.

Thanks for using Freda,

Jim
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] cab9211:
Hi Jim,

First of all I cannot thank you enough for putting this out. This is an amazing app and the utility of it is at par or higher than any other app on my phone at this point. Thanks again very much.

One request I had and am not sure if you have already anywhere on your list is the page change mechanism. Before getting on to epub books I was reading pdf using pdf reader, and everytime I hit the down button i would scroll just about 2-3 lines and not just go to the next page. I liked it very much because it lets my eyes focus on a small part of the screen and I believe it makes for easier reading.

Can you please advise if it is something that Freda can learn to do ?

ps: I am running on HTC Tilt.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] impreZzA:
Hey,

so first of all very nice application :)

its running like charm, but I have to ask u some questions I didnt figure out on my own.

I managed to put some of my ebooks to my library, is there any option to choose them if they are located on storage card?

My second question is:

any chance to mark the page u have ended ur reading session and where it will start the next time? Even if u closed the program completely --> It opens the page of the book I have read last right, any chance to mark pages in more than one book?

I am not quite sure if i just wasnt able to find these options :)

thank u very much!
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Exitao:
Wow! You really need to append the build number to your published files. I'm using build 324. I really need to update.

Last time I checked your site, I compared cab file sizes and they seemed to be exactly the same, so I made a wrong assumption. :o (I'm sure someone told me something about assumptions once. Sorry.

Do you keep a development log of what you fix with each update?

If you add a "things changed" page to your site, or section to this thread, we can check if our freda issue's been resolved and then check if the update fixes our problem before we come mentioning it. ...as well as letting us know we can update to stay current.

LOL, I guess I'm saying "help us to help you." :rolleyes:

I like the page metaphor. Don't abandon it, please. But I do see how repaginating with screen rotation makes it hard to stay on the same page.

Perhaps you need a bookmark or finger in the page metaphor to go with it?

Thanks for the efforts in making it touch friendly. Not having buttons is kind of crippling. I'm sure the smartphone/WinMo Standard people appreciate your efforts at a button only option too.

More questions:

I had a 519 page book stop and tell me that it was out of memory. This may be due to my outdated version, but it brings up the question of file sizes.

Is there a hard limit to a books file size? If there is a hard limit (or a mushy limit you wouldn't like us to push too much), could you include this limitation in the information page/post?

Calibre can split up epubs when it converts/publishes to mitigate this type of problem. So, it seems that if I'm going to do any mass conversions, it would be wise to know if there is an ideal target size.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Raudi1:
The page number isn't all that is relevant for the memory.

I converted a (pdf)book with calibre that contained images as background and had 15mb filesize. I didn't notice it and put it on my device and tried to open it later. Of course I got the error.

To solve the problem I just opened the epub file with a zip application and deleted the pictures in it. Then Freda could open it without problems(without the pictures it was just a few kb).
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Exitao:
In this case, I don't think there was even a cover shot. It was just text...
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Jim Chapman:
I'd recommend using AppToDate - if you install that, it will ensure that your Freda version is always current (it also takes care of a bunch of other useful apps; I recommend it).

So far, I haven't been doing so - because a lot of the time I am making changes that are either trivial or very obscure. FWIW, I don't think there are many actual 'bugs' out there now.

Areas that need sorting out include:

- The UI (particularly the 'settings' screen) is not finger-friendly

- It spends too long paginating

- The UI has various ways of telling you it's loading/paginating, and they all look cheap and nasty

- It takes too long to open a book when opening for the first time

- You get various odd display effects in FullScreen mode when interacting with HTC TouchFlow/Manila

- It doesn't work with smartphone (i.e. non-touch-screen) devices

- It has various GUI uglinesses when displaying on WinCE6 devices

- Screen rotation is not entirely reliable

- Further UI customisation settings (e.g. how long is a 'long tap'?) would be desirable

- It uses too many GDI resources (the 'Bookshelf' screen is a particular problem)

- Switching to a different 'Preset' setting will change settings that you probably didn't intend to change

- You should be able to search for multi-word strings

- Dictionary lookup should use any dictionary you specify

Major new features needed:

- RSVP / Autoscroll / 'continuously scrollable' screen

- Integration over-the-air with on-line libraries (Feedbooks, Gutenberg, custom DropBox locations)

- Porting to Windows Phone 7.

All of these things are in hand, and I probably won't release a new version until I have implemented the majority of them (because, taken together, they require a fundamental re-engineering of the code).

I think the right thing to do is to make sure that the middle word of the page (before rotation) stays somewhere on the screen (after rotation).

There is no hard limit, just a risk of running out of memory on your phone. The amount of free memory depends on the ROM, the phone model, the other programs loaded, the phase of the moon, ... . So I can't really be specific.

If the EPUB is too large for Freda to load in one go, Freda will load it one chapter at a time (and you get those messages saying that the page # is unavailable). If any one chapter is too large to load, Freda will fail in possibly ugly ways. The best advice is to keep individual chapters smaller than 300k or so (which is what Calibre does by default)

Thanks for using Freda,

Jim
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] stasys:
Nice program, unfortunately it not support embedded fonts. I wan to read my Lithuanian books, but it inserts space before and after each specifis Lithuanian letter. FBreader does job well but works only on PC:(
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] MDA_newbie:
Another Idea/suggestion voor future releases:

Is it possible to implement a library system which allow you to get access to the Gutenberg library? It would give Freda 30.000+ free ebooks on the go :D
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] fortunz:
I recently read that the most popular Android epub reader was tied into manybooks.net (which converts the gutenburg press into a number of different formats). It's a cool feature, as would be smashbooks or feedbooks integration, but I'd rate nice calibre OTA integration much higher.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Exitao:
I too think it would be nice to see font support, perhaps from a folder other than the system fonts folder.

I like constantia for reading, it's a serif cleartype font. Very nice for reading body text.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] esociarius:
Thank you very much

Dear Jim

Thank you very much for this great application. It has replaced the mobireader on my device and I use it nearly every day.

It works very smooth and stable on my HD2 with Artemis V. 8.0 - for me it is the best available reader.

Greetings from Bavaria

esociarius
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] mmp17:
While everybody is posting their wishes I'll put in mine. RTL support would make this a perfect app for me.

This is a great app as it stands now and I really appreciate it.

Thanks,

Mendel
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] THUDUK:
When do you think ver 2 will be ready for release, its applications like this one that keep windows mobile alive
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] frquixote:
I love Freda ... great reader. I am slowly converting all my eReader books to ePub since its obvious that eReader.com is dying, with Fictionwise to follow.

The only real weaknesses I see are in the area of library management. Freda would be even better if:

1) I could create an association between my ePub books and Freda so I could select the book I want from Resco File Explorer ... I don't really care for the Library and Bookshelf interfaces.

2) I could call up the book's metadata from within Freda.

3) Lastly, would like to be able to view all the books in the subdirectories below my top ebook directory and then be able to sort based on various metadata fields (at least Title, Author and Genre).

Anticipating the arrival of the new tablets and the continuing erosion of the Windows Mobile environment, are you planning on supporting tablet PC's?

Hope those wishes aren't too much.

Regards,

FrQuixote
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] fortunz:
I'm also migrating my library to epub, and I think that's a smart move. I'd recommend saving the originals though. epub seems like the bees knees today, but you never know with formats and if you want to convert again down the road, best to convert from the original.

You can, and I do (through normal file explorer). I had to dig around for a special program to adjust the file assocations, but you should be able to do it with resco file explorer, last I checked it could manipulate file associations.

I had asked for better library management in the past since I have a large library and wanted to use categories instead of having everything on one screen, but now I'm as happy as a gopher in soft dirt.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Exitao:
I believe Total Commander can set file associations too.

I'm surprised if Resco Explorer can't, as I recall it being a decent product. Check your help file or the Resco forums.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Jim Chapman:
That 'spaces around characters' problem doesn't sound like an embedded fonts issue - maybe it's just that you need to tell Freda to use a different encoding? (try different values for the Encoding option on the Options>BookProperties screen)

It's true that Freda doesn't support embedded fonts at the moment. There are 2 reasons why I've not implemented this feature:

1) it's not easy to do using the .NetCF programming environment (except by installing the new font into the system fonts folder, which raises various permissioning/security concerns)

2) the general design philosophy of Freda is that the reader (not the book author) gets to decide how the book will look on screen. My rationale for that is that the author probably did not have 'mobile phone' screen in mind as a target reading platform, so they will make decisions about layout, margins, font face and size etc., which look reasonable on larger screens but may not work on phone screens.

'embedded fonts' is on my development 'to do' list, just not very near the top. But as/when I implement it, I'll certainly want to give the reader the choice of over-riding the author's font choice anyhow.

As regards your problem with Lithuanian books, please could you email me a sample book and I will investigate - because Freda does fine with books using various non-Western encodings (Polish, Czech, Russian, Chinese). My email is home@jim-chapman.net

Thanks,

Jim
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Jim Chapman:
It's not simple to program, which is why I haven't done it up until now. For WinMo to use a font, the font file must be in the system fonts folder - so what I'd need to do is build program logic that, when you start using the font, puts it into the folder, and when you've finished with it, removes it from the folder.

Jim
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Jim Chapman:
It's on the list. I'll be asking for testers (and sample documents) in due course.

Jim
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Jim Chapman:
v2 is a pretty fundamental rewrite, and I'm not going to release it until I have something that is significantly better than v1.1 (see the feature list a couple of pages back in the thread).

Maybe a month or so from now, depending on other commitments.

You could have a 'beta' to play with now, but the only book it can read consists of the 'Lorem Ipsum' text, so it's not very interesting :)

Jim
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Jim Chapman:
v2.0 handles the GUI interaction differently, hopefully in a way that will work better for you. Basically all interaction is via a Shortcuts screen (there is no menu any more), and that is summoned by a user-configurable tap gesture (long or short).

It's not possible to do this in a way that works with all devices (because different phones use different Registry settings to control the blacklist/whitelist of applications that should be told about accelerometer changes).

For my HTC TP2 I use an application called 'G-Config' to customise the way that applications (Freda included) respond to the accelerometer.

For v2, I have implemented a rotate button on the shortcuts screen (so you can get to the orientation you want with two taps - one to bring up the shortcuts screen, and one to hit the rotate button). FWIW the WinPho7 version will support accelerometer-driven rotation, because that OS does provide a standard way to support it.

v2.0 provides only a full screen display. Displaying on-screen << and >> buttons just uses up screen real estate, so I have got rid of them (you can still configure the UI so that tapping the screen changes the page though). And if you want to see the 'title bar', you just need to go to the shortcuts screen (one tap).

Doing this in a way that is compatible with all devices is something of a project though. I will be taking a look at it, but it might take some time.

Fixed in v2. The problem in v1.1 is actually to do with how Freda's multi-threading model interacts with HTC TouchFlo/Manila, and there was no easy solution (apart from a complete re-write, which is what I did).

Thanks for the feedback, and thanks for using Freda,

Jim
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Jim Chapman:
I will do both (by making Freda capable of understanding OPDS Publication Collections and downloading books from URLs).

Jim
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Jim Chapman:
Yes, just use the Options>Application Settings/Folders tab, and tell it that the Library Folder is on the storage card.

The program is supposed to do this for all of the last 20 books you opened. So if it's not working it's a bug (in which case please tell me and I will investigate).

Thanks for using Freda,

Jim
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Exitao:
Cool. I'll just sit tight and wait for v2
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] sfinkster7:
Non-Touchscreen Win Mobile 6.5

I installed Freda on my Verizon OZONE (HTC SNAP) non-touchscreen with windows mobile 6.5 and I get the spinning indicator that the app is starting, then it just crashes out. There is no entry in running programs. It appears to install correctly just won't start up and run, any thoughts on getting this working would be greatly appreciated.
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] mmp17:
I personally prefer the current UI, where it is easy to go back and forth with a click as opposed to sliding, as I don't like the whole sliding paradigm. I tried the full screen with clicking, but to go back one has to click the top of the screen and I find that awkward. Would v2 allow for clicks on the right or left of the screen? I also like the fact that when the title bar is available I can see the time, battery state etc. This is just my preference and none of it is really a deal breaker. RTL support would certainly outweigh any of this. If you need a tester for RTL or some documents (in hebrew) I'd be more than willing to help.

Mendel
[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] dc41:
Which Dictionary?

I have both the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English dictionaries installed. But in the Freda app the "Find>in dictionary" option is still grayed out.

I followed the link on your website to SlovoEd and clicked on "Windows Mobile Software. I see both of these dictionaries there, but I'm guessing that Freda only works with the first dictionary "SlovoEd Dictionary for Windows Mobile". This that correct? Or can I change something in the registry or app settings to Freda finds one of the other two?

Thanks!