Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Feature request summary

Hi everybody,

    Since Fabrik Reader's debut on xda developer portal yesterday, I'm receiving a LOT of feature requests from all over the place, and I'm a little bit overwhelmed... Please forgive me if I cannot response to every single one of your posts as before. There is just too many of them and I really want to spend more time developing great app for you :) Thank you again for all these great ideas.

    So I thought it would be good to share with you a part of my todo list, so you know what I'm doing now and what's coming next. And here it is:

    1. More choice for background, text color. A lot people has asked for it, and I will deliver.
    2. Support more formats (chm, lib) and in particular pdf. I really want pdf myself, but it's really different from all the other formats. I'll try to get it done but no guarantees can be made at this point.
    3. Jusified text. Already done, you'll see it in a few hours.
    4. Search book by title. On going, there is a good chance that you'll see it in a few hours, too.
    5. Group books by whatever way(author, recent reading, etc). This will come, but its priority is a bit low on my list, cause I think with book title search function you should be able to find the books you want really quickly. Let's not forget the search function has voice support :)
    6. Text selection, dictionary.
    7. TTS.
    8. Auto scroll.
    9. 3D page turning animation.
    10. Some people mentioned translation, that's a really good idea, and I'll definitely ask for your help on that later. But I want to wait till the beta phase is over before doing that.

   That's really a big list isn't it? I think when I'm done with it we'll have a truly remarkable book reader :p Thank you again for your support. And please keep telling your friends about Fabrik Reader!

    p.s. Some people report issues about book rendering, that some part of their books cannot be detected. If you ever encounter an issue like this, please email me the book that you're having problem with so I can try to fix it.

27 comments:

  1. I downloaded Fabrik yesterday (because of the XDA post) and have to say I'm loving it. I like how it properly syncs with dropbox; I could never really get it to work with the other apps. Despite your long list of requests, and yes most of them are useful, do please keep in mind your original reason for creating Fabrik: keep it simple, it doesn't need to be able to solve world peace. Nice work though: I'm happy to donate but will you ever charge for the app?

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    1. I've been giving some thoughts about monetization these days, and I think I'll go with the common ad-supported/paid ad-free way. It'll come soon, hope you guys won't mind :)

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  2. Thank you for taking the time to make this reader, it shows a level of polish that is really impressive. I'm looking forward to seeing how far this project goes. If the current progress is any indication, it'll go far indeed. P.S. I believe fbreader is open source and they offer tts and pages turning animations that you might be able to look at :-)

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  3. Your app promises. But to use it I need a feature that I think will not be very difficult to implement.
    I own one of those phones that have both Internal Storage and an external SD card mounted as.
    Your program can access my dropbox folder and also the Internal Storage (which is called sdcard and is mounted as mnt/sdcard) but not the proper SD card (which is mounted under mnt/sdcard-ext). Can you please enable that option?

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    1. I think it's a problem related to your phone and(or) android version, in my old desire running 2.3 I can access the sdcard just fine. I can't access the internal memory on the desire though. Any way, I look into it. Could you tell me what phone/android version are you using? Thx.

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    2. Same issue here. Loving the reader, the best I tried so far but I can only manage to open books from internal storage.

      I have a motorola razr i and its internal storage appears as sd card. The actual sd card appears as sdcard1 but is not listed on both fabrik and moonreader. Im running jellybean btw.

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  4. Just wanted to say thank you for this reader.

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  5. Is there any chance that a future release of Fabrik Reader might be compatible with the Nook Simple Touch (rooted of course)? It's easily the best .epub reader out there - and what better device is there for it, than a dedicated eReader? Anyway, thanks again for the great app!

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    1. That's an 2.1 device, right? I'll look into it. But frankly it's not an easy thing to do. So no promise can be made at this point. And maybe you should consider get your hands on a nexus 7. I just got one myself recently, really beautiful thing and you'll love it!

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  6. Hey, i just saw this at XDA Portal and I must say, I'm amazed at how fast this loads on my Nexus 7 and how polished it already looks and feels. Anyway, I'd like to request a feature I don't see in this list... That is, the ability to set the margins on the top/bottom/left/right (singly or as a whole maybe won't matter to a lot of us). And I was wondering if you've included on the planned background choices the ability to pick flat colors? Thanks so much for this great app!

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    1. I'm actually running Fabrik on my nexus 7 too, and the margin looks ok to me... Do you think it's too wide or too narrow? I'll try to create a couple of options so please let me know what exactly what you guys want.

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  7. I've just downloaded the app and it looks great. I haven't had any problems so far, the only little thing that bothers me is the background, it really bothers my eyes. I'm glad to see it's in your list though so I will be waiting for the update and stop complaining about it.
    Keep it up, it looks very promising!

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    1. You can already change theme in v1.0! check out reading view menus.

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  8. Thank you very much for this great app. It scrolls fast and smooth! This is an Android app so everybody that uses Android has Google Drive. I would like to see Google Drive beside Dropbox. Also I have seen a bug. When deleting a book, it does not remove from Dropbox. when refreshing Fabrik, it appears back at Fabrik. Also when removing from Dropbox, and refreshing Fabrik, it appears back on Dropbox. So the solution for now was to delete on dropbox and Fabrik. Then refresh. Maybe another feature request would be to build in translate/wiki/google search for selected word(s). Thanks again for this great app.

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    1. That's actually a known bug, and if your connection to Dropbox is slow it's more noticeable. The behavior is that if you delete a book DURING synchronization, the deletion will be ignored when synchronization is done. If you wait till synchronization is over and delete and synchronize again, it should behave normally. I will try to fix this bug ASAP.

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    2. Thanks for the trick! How do you think about Google Drive? or Translate/wiki/google voor selected word(s)?

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  9. Id love to see it sync with owncloud.. that would be a big deal to me.

    Also.. great job :)
    Loving the pdf support and how incredibly well it handles them.

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  10. Hello sir, just tried your reader and it's really great. I would love to see deeper folder scanning support though. what I mean is that my books are in subfolders of my documents folder on my sdcard. It's like this: sdcard/my documents/book name folder/.epub book file.

    apparently the scanner can only look one level deep causing me to have to import each book one by one, I would love to just select the /my documents folder and import any folders or sub folders inside. is this possible? thanks again

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  11. I don't know if this has been suggest before, but I would love to see integration of more cloud storage services, such as Box.net.

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    1. I have 50GB of storage just sitting there on Box.net so I can see how this could be beneficial.

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  12. " 2. Support more formats (chm, lib) and in particular pdf. I really want pdf myself, but it's really different from all the other formats. I'll try to get it done but no guarantees can be made at this point."

    I too would appreciate the support of PDFs. It would render having Adobe Reader useless on my phone... but if you implemented support for CHM that would really be awesome as that format feels abandoned in most readers while the quantity of great books published in that format still remains large.

    4. Search and 5. Groups also sounds pleasing.

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  13. Would be great to have an option to remove the split page in landscape view. For small devices like phones, this is really annoying and i would like to read on my phone in landscape mode.
    Thanks for making this great app!

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  14. Hi Eric,

    I really enjoy using your app, but I think it could be even better :) When reading on my GNex I noticed that there is a clear difference in the black-book-background and the black background of the onscreen navigation keys. It seems that the background is still 'lit' (very very dark grey) which is not very good for battery life and reading comfort. If the background would be total black it would cost very little energy to read (just the white pixels) and it would be more comfortable (I can keep the letters/screen more dim).

    Thanks, regards!

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  16. I have 300+ books. Would be great to have one of the "alphabetical scroll bars" on the right side of the screen to jump quickly to the section we are looking for. Kinda like this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3921846/how-to-implement-alphabetic-scroll-bar-in-android

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