Thursday, September 20, 2012

0.40 beta: mobi support, image render and more

Hello guys,

It's been a hell of a week, almost an update a day with new features and bug fixes, and here we are, 0.40 beta finally!

If you've been following the progress of Fabrik Reader(hopefully!) for the past week, then probably you've known almost everything that we've add since 0.30. Because I want you to have new features ASAP, so I've been updating frequently rather than waiting for all the features to be completed and publish a new major version.

Any way, let me give you a list about what's new in 0.40 beta since 0.30, and here it is:

1. Add mobi file support, as many people has asked for. Though I haven't tested it thoroughly since I don't have many mobi books. So if you had any problem with your mobi book, just let me know.

2. Now the render engine can render images in your epub books, just like the screenshots on the left. So now you can see what it's like for Alice to be at the mad tea party :) Image render for mobi is harder and I'm still working on it, so you probably have to wait for a while.

3. Optimize book opening speed. Some people are complaining about that it's taking too long to open a book. Well I agree that the algorithm is not 100% optimized. But the main reason that it's kind of slow is because I'm trying to load everything when you open a book so that when you're reading it would be butter smooth. And another reason is that my render engine requires some parsing to be done on the original book format. Any way, what I have done now to optimize book opening speed is to cache the intermediate result of the first time you open a book, and reuse it after that. So now it's would only be slow the first time you open a book, and it's much faster when you open it again. The cache files is stored in your sdcard, so you don't have to worry that they'll eat up your valuable internal memory.

4. You now have an option(in settings of course) to automatically import your books in your dropbox data folder(default to be /App/Fabrik, and you can change that in settings as many of you already know) during synchronization. That means just put your new file in your dropbox Fabrik folder, and after synchronization you'll see them in Fabrik. But if you have many books, please be careful with this, it might take a while to download them all.

5. Bug fixes and small UI adjustments as always.

Finally let me give you a hint about what's coming next. Since I just got my brand new nexus 7 today(yeah!), you can expect a full tablet optimized UI redesign for the next major release. I'm talking about a brand new bookshelf and the long expected two column reading view. So... Stay tuned! Enjoy!

P.S. a personal request: if you like Fabrik Reader, please share it on your social network so more people can find out about it. I'm not good at marketing stuff, so I'm really counting on you here! You can also help me by telling your friends, commenting, following me on g+ or twitter... any way to show your support is very much appreciated. I need it to keep me going. After all, who wants to build an app that nobody is using, right? Thank you very much!

11 comments:

  1. Hi Eric ,

    Thanks for your work on Fabrik! Just found it the other day and already I'm impressed.

    Got a feature request: I'm a sucker for justified te xt on smaller devices, do you think you could tackle that and/or hyphenation at some point?

    Keep up the good work!

    Thorsten

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    1. Hi Thorsten,

      Glad you like my app! Justified text is already on schedule. It'll be available in the next major release(0.50 beta).

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  2. Is there any chance you can make it work on the Nook Simple Touch? I might be able to help if needed (I'm a software developer with some Android experience ...)

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    1. Sorry, I want to make the android version good enough first. It's still beta :)

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    2. I understand ... good luck. I will check back from time to time to see if it is compatible with Nook (as this is my main reading device).

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  3. Hi Eric

    Loving the app, but is there any chance of adding a way of organising your books? I'm thinking a search option and some filters, such as 'Never Read', 'Reading' and 'Read'. Nothing too complicated (I know the point is to keep it simple), but it's hard to find your books when you have a large library.

    Thanks
    Danny

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    Replies
    1. That's a good idea. I'll add search option first cause that's a simple.

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    2. Great, thanks. Let me know if you need someone to test (I have 400+ books in my library, so it should be a good test).

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  4. Sorry about that. I've nheard no other user complaining about this. Are you sure the Dropbox official app is working correctly on your phone?

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  5. Just downloaded you ereader and it seems really nice. A questikn / request, do you have any plans for Adobe DRM epub format support?

    Keep up the good work!

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    Replies
    1. Actually I've been trying to figure out a way to support Adobe DRM, but I did NOT find any way other than buying licence from Adobe, and that'll cost something like 7500$/year... And I can't really afford that right now... But if any of you guys know any other alternatives, please let me know!

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