Fabrik Reader 2.0: Here we go!

Hey guys,

I bet you all miss me :)

It's been three month since I last blogged here. I have to admit that I'm really really lazy when it comes to blogging and social networking and stuff. But, I've been really busy coding and designing, so after some really hard work, here it is, a brand new Fabrik Reader 2.0.

Now, first impression:

Hope you like it :) And please ignore the HTC brand, they didn't pay me... It's just that I have an one x, so obviously my screenshots can be perfectly aligned with an one x photo.

The UI redesign is just an appetizer. The biggest change in version 2.0 is a brand new render engine, which can handle CSS. So now your epub books will look much much better than 1.x. And if you don't like the style that comes with your book, you can choose to override it with two pre-defined styles: Web and Old Fashioned, which is basically left aligned modern web style and old fashioned print book like style (see the screenshots below). BTW, you got page number instead of percentage under each page now!

Feeling good, huh? Let's bring up even more good stuff: tagging your books! In version 2.0, you can give your books tags, and you can later filter your books by the tags you defined. So you never have to worry about how to organize your massive book collection. See those nice little tags in the dropdown navigation menu?

Also in version 2.0, a new reading theme has been added, and it is even more easy on your eyes. Page turn animation and text selection have also been optimized.

Unfortunately, I have to admit that it's not all great news. Begin from Fabrik Reader 2.0, I decided to drop support for Android version 2.x and 3.x. According to the statistics on Google Play, only 5% users are using Fabrik Reader on Android 2.x and 3.x, and the number is decreasing every month. So I think it's time to stop supporting the old android, it's simply too much work to maintain the backward compatibility. Besides, this new render engine is kind of hungry for resources, I don't think it can run smoothly on old devices any way.

There is also some unresolved issues with this new version. First, the css support is not perfect, only a subset of css 2 is supported. Second, the book rendering takes too much time and cpu resources, which means if you keep opening books, it could drain your battery. I'm still working on it and trying to figure out ways to optimize things. 

That's pretty much what I have to say about this new version. Oh, just one more thing, I'm pretty sure there is going to be bugs, since so much code has been changed. So, if you see anything wield, any book that can't  be opened, or have any other thought at all, please let me know!

Widget! Widget!

Hi guys,

A new version has been uploaded today, and now two widgets are available! The first one is for android > 3.0 users, which according to flurry is the majority of Fabrik Reader users. And it looks like this:

Personally I would like to stack it in another direction, but I didn't find any way to do that so... 

And this little 1x1 book cover widget here, is for everybody:

So basically now you can create kind of "a short cut" for any of your books in your "desktop". Hope you like them :)

I think I'll create more widgets in the future, but right now I really want to focus on the new render engine (btw in this update I also fixed a major bug in the current render engine which will cause missing paragraph). It's definitely what's coming next, but it'll take some time. It's like writing a tiny web browser, you don't need to know anything about programming to understand that it's not an easy job to do. So please be patient, and I'll move as fast as I can!

Thank you for your support, and enjoy!

Brand new Icon, and translation!

Hi guys,

Today I've also done some re-designed of the icon, and here it is:

So what do you think? Better or worse than the one we're using now? Let me know!

Also I've finally put together all the texts that needed to be translated in order to get Fabrik Reader localized. And this is the part that I'm going to need your help! I've already got Fabrik Reader translated into Chinese, and it shouldn't take you more than 30 minutes. So if you want to help translate Fabrik into your own language(THANKS!!!), please keep reading.

This is the link of the market description: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/20743875/market.txt I'm sure you know how to translate that :)

This is the link to the resource file to be translated: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/20743875/strings.txt

You can open it with any text editor. And when you do, just translate what's between the <string> tags, like:

<string ....>THIS IS THE PART THAT NEED TO BE TRANSLATED</string>

For example, the 4th line in the file is:

<string name="menu_recent">Recent</string>

If you're translating it into Chinese, you should get:

<string name="menu_recent">最近</string>

Just one more thing that you should know, sometimes you'll see this: %1$s, that's just a place holder for the actual value, and you should put it in the right position. For example, in the following line:

<string name="dialog_opening_book">Opening book \'%1$s\'...</string>

It means that Opening book 'the-actual-book-name'...

And that's all! After you're done, just put the file in your Dropbox public folder and comment the link below. Thank you again!!!

Oh, just one more thing, you could try to come up with a name for Fabrik Reader in your own language if you like! Just comment and explain the name to me. Let me explain the name Fabrik Reader here first. It's really simple actually: I wanted you to have the feeling that you're reading a book made of Fabric, just like what the Chinese people are doing in the old times, well, at least the rich ones are :) So what do you have in mind? Let me know!

BTW, bookmark/widgets are also under way. So stay tuned! An update should hit the market very soon!

Back with a Poll! What do you want most in the next version?

Hi guys, long time no see!

I know it's been a while since the last update, and I'm sorry about that. I've been caught up by another project that will finally come to end very soon. So I'll be back to my favorite project ASAP!

In the meantime, I'm been doing some thinking about what to bring to you guys next. There is so much to do(I really want to make a GREAT product here!), but I'm developing this all by myself, so...

I want to make sure that I always deliver what matters most. And that's why I created a little poll on the Fabrik Reader facebook page (please please like it first!). But before you go there and cast your holy vote, please allow me to explain the options in detail here:

(If you want bookmark, or widgets, consider it's done! They will be the first to be delivered in the next version!)

1. Fabrik Reader Social Network:
    This is my personal favorite! I've always wanted to have a socialized ebook reading experience. That means while you're reading something cool, you can leave some comments and talk about it with other people who also enjoy it. You can also share what you're reading, what you plan to read. You can see what other people have read, or is reading right now. You can follow the people that have sharp opinions, or have the same taste of books as you do, and talk to them, get book recommendations from them. You can find out trending books and what others are saying about them. You can... Isn't that fantastic? Like a book club in your pocket (I know it's a cheesy line...).

2. OPDS support.
    Not much to say about this one.

3. Google Drive Support.
    I know I've been promising this for a long time... It's just that the Google Drive SDK is really hard to use compare to Dropbox...

4. Better Render Engine.
    For now Fabrik Reader doesn't really support things like html tag format or css. So I think a better render engine would be good. After all, it's an ebook reader, is it not?

5. iOS Fabrik Reader.
    I know most of you are probably hard core Android guys, but the Dropbox sync feature will be more shiny with multiple platform support. So how many of you guys want to see Fabrik Reader on iOS?

6. Other
    Please comment if you have any other thoughts!

v1.3: having a big library? Sorting by title, author or recently read!

Hi guys,

Today Fabrik 1.3 is out there, and this time it's for the people who has a big library. Because now you can sort your books by title, author or the most recent time that you read it!

Before this version, you are already sorting books by recent. Now if you are on android >= 3.0, you'll see a dropdown list next to the icon, and from there you can choose to sort books by title and author. If you are still on android 2.x(time to upgrade your phone, pal, and I think I've already said that before...), you can press menu button and you'll see a sort option. Books will be sorted alphabetically if you choose sort by title, and a nice little bookmark will show up as a separator between books starts with different letters. If you choose sort by author, your books will be grouped by authors and authors will be sorted alphabetically. This way your books from a single series will be grouped together (because they share the same author apparently).

Another improvements is that now Fabrik Reader honours the metadata in your books, both epub and mobi format. So it'll show the actual book title instead of the file name. Also you now have an option to use system backlight settings if you don't want to adjust screen brightness manually.

That's it for 1.3. Another things that you should know about, Fabrik Reader is now on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/fabrikreader. Please go ahead and like it (I'm pretty sure you actually do ;) Your likes will help promoting Fabrik Reader, and it's all of you great users that make me going further and further. So, thank you! And Enjoy!

v1.1, text selection and dictionary integration (finally!)

Hi guys,

    Long time no see! A lot things has happened since my last post, and we're almost crossing 10,000 downloads now, and it's only been a month from the 0.1 beta release. What a month!

    It's been a while since we have a major version update. Today, I think it's time to do just that. So here it is, version 1.1, with the hardest feature I've ever done since 0.1 beta: text selection. And when you got text selection, it also means you got the long waited dictionary integration as well.

    Trust me, text selection is easier said than done. It's mainly because Fabrik use its own text render engine, which means I cannot simply use the text selection feature that comes with android. I had to re-implement the whole stuff (and maybe I don't need to? please let me know if you got a better idea). And that's a lot of calculation, a lot of scenario to consider and a lot of code. It's more or less working now, but definitely not stable. Yet I really want you guys to have this feature as soon as it's available (buggy than nothing I think). So please consider this feature experimental, and let me know if you saw any bug so I can improve it.

    Text selection looks like the screenshots above, when you long hold on a word, it gets highlighted, and you got two handles to drag around to change the selected area. And as you can see, a popup panel with three buttons will show up when you select some text. The first button is the search button, which will try to search whatever you selected. And if you got ColorDict (a nice free dictionary app) installed on your device, the search button will bring up ColorDict, otherwise it'll just start googling. The share button is for sharing, obviously. If you read some great paragraph that you wanted to share with your friends, just select them and client the share button. The last button will copy whatever you selected to clipboard, I'm sure you know how that works.

    Alright, let's stop here. I really need to head out and get some fresh air now. Enjoy your quality reading time!

   

Crossing 5000 downloads, and checking in!

Hi guys,

    As many of you might notice, Fabrik Reader is already out of beta, and just crossed 5000 downloads yesterday! I want to thank you all for your great support! I definitely won't go this far without it.

    There are a few things I like to say, so here I go:

    As you might notice, I haven't been rolling out updates in the past few days. The reason is really simple: I got some days off and came back to my folks' place to spend some time with them. And I only got an old laptop here so no way I can keep developing on that. Everything will be back on track once I got back home.

    About the ads, I know some people don't like that, and my reasons is also simple: some extra cash will definitely support me better and keep me going forward so you guys will have a better app to use. And again, I promise that there will NEVER be ads in the reading view, so even if you want to keep using it for free, the distractions by ads should be minimum.

    Some people want to see page number instead of percentage. Here I want to explain to you a little bit about why that's very difficult. You see that page number is actually related to your screen size/font/font size/line spacing, and the only way to know how much content can be shown on a page is to render it(or at least do the calculation of rendering in the background). So let's say you jump to 40% of your book, if you want to know the page number you're on right now, we have to render all the 40% of the book in the background just to know how much pages they are, and if you change font/font size/line spacing, the calculation will have to be done all over again. That kind of calculate is just too heavy for a mobile device. I'm still trying to figure out other ways of doing this, and until I do, I think we have to stick with percentage.

    The last thing I want to say is, if you encounter any issue, crash when reading, book files that does not render correctly, etc. Please send me an email with as many details as possible, like what device you are using, your android version, the book file that you are having trouble with. So I can fix them for you effectively.

   As always, enjoy!