Future Eslick Improvements Thread!

[melvin]

Considering how many individual threads there are concerning improvements to the Eslick firmware as well as hardware, I think it is important to consolidate all these ideas into one thread that the developers can track easily. It is clear they are very active in the forums so I believe it is safe to say that your ideas will not go unnoticed. I am aware that you can send your ideas to Christina but I am sure she must receive many of the same suggestions, so listing your ideas publicly will help with dealing with duplicates. Feel free to add your ideas to this thread, here are some of my concerns:

Bug fixes:
- Battery life: I'm sure this goes without saying. I know they addressed the power leak in the upcoming firmware but more efficient CPU usage will further improve battery life.
- Reflow needs to be improved - a lot of the pdf files I view using reflow have all the whitespace characters removed resulting in all the text being appended together.
- The device forgets which page you are currently on when you turn it off.

Features:
- Some long words at the end of a line will be split into two, at the syllable, and then hyphenated, but when you reflow the text the formatting changes and then the hyphenated word may end up in the middle of the sentence and would look like "im-possible", for example. An improvement to this would be to have your reflow algorithm automatically parse each word currently displayed on screen, and combine hyphenated words.
- A reflowed page can span several pages. It should be able to remember which reflowed page you currently are on as well as a little icon in the top bar area to let us know visually where we currently are.
- Include some simple games such as "sudoku" (the sony prs-505 has this game although it was hacked to include it) or some word games such as "text twist" or "popcap bookworm".
- Text-to-speech - It would even be better if you could have the device reading the text to you while it highlighted each word as it was read, to help you follow along.
- Perhaps maybe you can release the source code to the linux operating system you are using or even an SDK, to allow users to modify the code or even create add-ons, add features or even create simple games using a simple scripting language. (The sony prs-505 can parse xml files and execute javascript)
- Add a dictionary function. Sometimes I may come across a word I am unfamiliar with. It would be nice to be able to select the word and look up a definition. It would be even better if we could manually enter a word to look up in the dictionary.
- A search function
- A virtual keyboard for the above dictionary/search functions (I remember one of the foxit staff mentioning they have a virtual keyboard prototype for searching already)
- More supported file formats. I personally don't need it but I'm sure others would be interested in it: epub, mobi, lit, rtf, doc, lrf, lrx, bbeb and as for music: aac, ogg, wav and wma. (All non-DRM of course :D) Oh and picture files as well.
- Bookmarks! And not built in bookmarks that pdf files have but on-the-fly bookmarks that we can set on the device itself!
- Organization of books by author, date, title, etc

Hardware:
- We desperately need a cover to protect the device. I know you can get a cover for the bookeen cybook (since it is the same hardware) but it is ridiculously expensive (for me it would be $50 for cover + $25 for shipping + customs + exchange rate = are you kidding me?).
- I do realize that foxit doesn't make the hardware (it's made by Netronix - their ebook road map looks pretty cool. Might be a good indication of the future eslick lineup - http://www.netronixinc.com/product_e-book.htm) so I'm not sure if they'll be able to do anything in regards to hardware revisions but:
- I hate the button placements. I would prefer them to be on the surface rather than on the sides. Even though they are recessed, I still find myself accidentally pressing them.
- The front joystick needs to be improved. I find myself constantly pressing two directions at once. Sometimes when I press the down button, I feel two "clicks" instead of one and I end up two pages back rather than one page forward. I think part of the problem is that the buttons aren't debounced properly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debounce#Contact_bounce).


That's all I can think of for now. What else did I miss?

[dracodoc]

I believe they already fixed the problem of remember location when turned off, maybe even the bookmark for reflowed pdf.
Besides, I think lrf is a proprietary format by Sony, it's impossible for eslick to support it. epub is in their list.
They are looking for case, including hard case. I'm looking forward a hard one.
I heard the second batch of eslick have better button feel.

[Jux__]

English dictionary would be my #1 wish, because English is foreign language to me and I mostly read books in English.

[Gamblor]

Originally Posted by melvin

- Add a dictionary function. Sometimes I may come across a word I am unfamiliar with. It would be nice to be able to select the word and look up a definition. It would be even better if we could manually enter a word to look up in the dictionary.

Originally Posted by Jux__

English dictionary would be my #1 wish, because English is foreign language to me and I mostly read books in English.

This would be my number 1 wish as well that is a great suggestion I hope Foxit take notice.

I find myself reading older books and finding a lot of words not commonly used today where I'm lost to their meaning. I can envision the advantage to having an ereader that can query a internal dictionary database to lookup meanings on the fly and get results within a modal window without leaving your current book/page.

I hope one day the eslick could:
1. Highlight a word and lookup its meaning.
2. Manage/Customise that dictionary and add new entries (for example - import corporate dictionaries, foreign dictionaries, medical dictionaries etc.
3. referenced navigation by having the ability to quickly follow and come back to in-text references and figures etc(more of a file format solution I’d imagine)( Would be handy to have while reading in reflow).

[marty]

A word search function would be immediately useful!

[christina]

Thanks all. Please feel free to write down your ideas...

[gazzar]

Just got my eSlick. I am pretty happy with it's build quality, the display, and the landscape mode. I tried some books generated by the feedbooks website customised to the eSlick's screen size and they are very easy to read.

I was hoping to use it to read scientific papers as well as books. It looks like I'll have to wait for another firmware update if I want to read scientific papers though. As stevil and melvin have mentioned, reflow removes all the spaces of all the pdf documents I have tried to read. stevil may be correct that this is something to do with LaTeX, the most common tool for producing pdf format scientific papers and books. If the developers want more examples of pdfs that exhibit this problem, typical examples of these pdfs can be found on http://arxiv.org/. I'm hoping that the developers are still working on fixing this issue.

So here's my current wishlist:
Settable options to allow one to change the default "Zoom To" and "Landscape" options from "Fit Page" to something else. Currently, the combination "Landscape" and "Fit Content Width" are the only viable way to attempt to read scientific papers. These are usually formatted as 2-column Letter-sized or A4-sized pages, so having support for reading these one column at a time would be excellent if a practical way could be found to do it - there would need to be a way to zoom to the left column and when the bottom is reached, to jump to the top of the right column. This might be difficult to achieve. There is currently no good zoom level for reading these documents - at 400% in Landscape or 200% in Portrait it cuts off either the left of right side of the left or right columns and the panning doesn't allow a full column width worth of text to be read. At 200% in Landscape, it's too small to read comfortably. happynut's request elsewhere in the forum to be able to pan in small customizable increments would improve this situation.
One other minor thing I don't think others have requested: In the file selection menu, trying to scroll up when at the top or down when at the bottom of the list doesn't wrap around to the bottom or top of the file list, respectively. Allowing this would make file selection faster.
Also, although it's definitely not a high priority, I'll add my vote for a word search function. Even with a clumsy soft keyboard I think it would be useful in very long documents.

[theagent]

I ordered one a few weeks ago. Pretty much the only thing i'm interested in is reading technical books, textbooks, and scientific papers. So I'm thinking about canceling my order. I don't think this issue will be addressed anytime soon.

[christina]

Thanks gazzar. What you are talking about is in the range of our developers' discussing list.

[Hexar]

Strange.. I posted in this thread yesterday, and today my message has vanished. Anyhow - I'd love to see native Cyrillic support for .txt files. If other Netronix-based devices can offer this, I don't see why eSlick can't.