Feature requests etc.

[hartvig]

Annoying blinking green light at top of Irex Digital Reader!

I haven't seen anyone else suggest this (nor figured out how to remove this...), but when the reader is turned on you have a blinking green light at the top... blinking ALL the time!

Now, seriously - I know the reader is turned on, because it responds when I press a button etc, why would I need this annoying green blinking light? I can see the need for it to blink when the battery is almost dead, to tell me that its time to charge or preserve battery, but not when the battery is fully charged.

It annoys me to no end as I keep seeing the green light at the edge of my vision when reading... I'm very happy with the Irex Digital Reader except for this constant disruption of my concentration when trying to read!

If anyone knows of a fix, please do tell! :-)

[sasilk]

Originally Posted by hartvig

Annoying blinking green light at top of Irex Digital Reader!


If anyone knows of a fix, please do tell! :-)

A small piece of tape? :-)

[Gogolo]

Or you can turn off all LEDs in the settings. But then also the button LEDs are off, what I dont like...

Gogolo

[allovertheglobe]

So the toolbar has finally become much more useful with the addition of the shortcut dropboxes & clickable lock etc. (Since they are only accessible via the stylus, I suspect this is tied to iRex no longer bothering with a non-stylus version?)

All the better. There has been some discussion on the shortage of shortcut spaces (though that is somewhat alleviated by having separate ones depending on the application used, PDF Viewer, File Browser etc.). Some have proposed cycling through the pen icon, a bit bothersome considering how many there are.

Here is my proposal (see the attached picture... on the Mobileread forum anyway, iRex's forum does not allow images )

- Have them all visible on the right side. Highlight the one currently active. Gray/Black out any one that is not currently available.

- To further optimize the space, move the "Zzz" to the battery icon where it belongs. Practically, that means switching between 4 icons depending on the power state: On Battery (active), On Battery (Zzz), Charging (active) & Charging (Zzz)

So there you go. Technically I think it should be feasible since it does not introduce any new functionality to the toolbar itself.

This would free up quite a few slots on the left side, in case there is a technical reason for the 8 slots, and not just an arbitrary one.

Comments welcome.

[omro]

Repeat from the iRex forum:

Just to confirm you have the pencil, eraser, pan and then two other pen tools the purpose of which I'm not so sure, then dictionary look up and lock and power.

I recommend having only one "pen" tool, press it once, you get pen, press it again and you get eraser, press it again and you turn the pen off. That's one spot instead of two/three.

I recommend putting zoom in and zoom out as well as pan in this right hand side area.

The rest I think are great ideas.

I totally agree with reworking the visible toolbar, the fewer things that are in the main menu the better, then it can be relegated or redesigned. The main menu itself is really poor UI. It really should be a simple list view that you can use one left or right button sensor group to navigate, having to press the lower sensors and left or right sensors to make a selection is tedious and slow and having to go into other screens to activate other features which also need multiple sensors to make a selection is also tedious and slow. I almost always navigate the menu with my stylus.

I also recommend that a button press combination be enacted that restores the toolbar to view when it is off the screen. A long menu button press for example?

[allovertheglobe]

A little more toying with Photoshop: With the release of the Leafpad text editor, and pending the off-chance of physical Keyboard connectivity, the on-screen keyboard is still the only way to enter information, and it is frankly not very legible.

So I did a test to see how it could look (see attachment in the Mobileread forum, not available on the iRex forum)

Very likely the current keyboard consists of either one big image file or several smaller ones, so it should be fairly easy to replace them using a script like the font/additional language uploaders or the FBReader content browser update/restore scripts. I can't verify it well myself since the OS folder on the internal memory is not very accessible (nobody has released a console app yet...)

I can't do much in those terms but if somebody with more programming knowledge is interested in the challenge, I'm certainly up for doing all graphic work & testing!

[omro]

Grumpy I think you're on to something there, such a small change and such a huge difference!

[Mackx]

The keyboard seems to be in: matchbox-keyboard-0.1+svnr1881.tar.gz anyone with enough time to have a go?
I see an xml-file describing the keyboard (So it is text-based not image based), but no obvious place to change the appearance.

[gaphic2]

I had a look. Check out the readme files in the tarball, there's a lot of info there on how to customize the keyboard (Azerty-keyboard for example).

The keyboard and the toolbar are both matchbox applications. More info on these via http://matchbox-project.org/.

[omro]

Well the Matchbox keyboards look better than the one on the DR.

[jbbebg]

Cap sense buttons coincidentally activation

Cap sense buttons should only act at double quick touching the button, otherwise its functionality will be ignored. So user will be able to carry the reader at the cap sense place and they will not be activated. They will be activated just in case of double click

Even the currently hold press can be replaced by triple click.

[omro]

If it were possible to use the LEDs for the buttons, without the LED at the top of the unit being on too, then your suggestion would be less distracting to implement.

[timezone]

If possible I would like to see a small notepad that can overlay a book. Sometimes lots of bookmarks, underlines or notes in a book are too difficult to keep organized. It is not possible to compile a summary of notes. With a notepad on top of a book I can then write a set of notes that can later be viewed sequentially.

Another option might be to display a note taking area whenever a bookmark is created.

[Mackx]

Originally Posted by timezone

If possible I would like to see a small notepad that can overlay a book.

I am trying to add an icon in the taskbar for leafpad, that would allow you to switch between your document and leafpad the same way as you now switch between documents.
In theory this is not that difficult. (Add some code from hello-world (ipc.c) and add the correct libraries to link against.) However I am having a fight with autoreconf to do this the proper way. When running autoreconf --install, I am getting:

configure.ac:5: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_PROG_INTLTOOL
      If this token and others are legitimate, please use m4_pattern_allow.
      See the Autoconf documentation.

Any ideas?

[ChrisAIX]

Originally Posted by sasilk

The iLiad had one little thing that the DR doesn't - the option to open to the document (and place) that you were at when you closed down.

If that could be implemented I'd be a happier munchkin. ('Happier' because I'm certainly not unhappy with the DR just as it is.)

YES - that would really be helpful.

Let's say - start the device - go to Main Menu --> last 5 opened Documents
So to say a QuickLink to the last five documents.
(Keep in mind a 16 GB SD Card holds a lot of documents and a huge directory structure. And it's really annoying to navigate through the whole directory tree after each and every re-start.

//Chris