[IAEP] GetBook activity

[James Simmons]

Gonzalo,

I finally had a chance to try out your Get Books.  While I think there
are some good improvements over my original "Get Internet Archive
Books", especially displaying an image for selected books, it falls
short in a few places.  For example:

1).  There is no need to leave behind a Journal entry when using Get
Books.  If you look at Get IA Books you'll see that the only Journal
entries it creates are the books it downloads.  It's simple to change
your Activity to do the same thing, and it will free up some space on
the toolbar too.

2).  When you do a search using more than one word it generally does
not work.  For instance, search for "boys aviation" in my Activity and
it will return "The Big Book of Aviation For Boys" by Joseph Lewis
French.  Yours returns nothing.  Search for "sugar activities" in mine
and you'll get "Make Your Own Sugar Activities!" by James Simmons.
Yours returns a title that seems to have nothing to do with either
word.  What you want to be able to do is search for words in either
author or title and return those results containing all the words, in
any order.  Mine does that, but yours does not.

3).  Searching for "charles dickens" in yours returns lots of results
but made the Activity and Sugar itself hang.

4).  My Activity supports downloading DejaVu, PDF, and EPUB.  Yours
does not support DejaVu for the Internet Archive, which is unfortunate
because for the XO it is the best available format.  PDFs use more
memory, and EPUBs from IA are full of errors.

Supporting other OPDS services is great, but not if the child has to
open Terminal. change to root, and create a file.  You really need to
store the configuration info in a directory that is writeable by the
Activity, and provide a dialog to do the config.

If you want to test this with other OPDS catalogs, I understand that
calibre can publish such a catalog in addition to the website it
creates.  I would have tried testing like that myself if I knew the
format of the config file.

Also, I didn't think the catalog feature was that useful.  If you let
the child enter more than one search word as I described you don't
really need it.

James Simmons


On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 2:06 PM, Gonzalo Odiard <gonzalo at laptop.org> wrote:
> Hello,
> I am trying to continue the work done by Sayamindu in the GetBooks activity
> and I have a initial version to test and get feedback.
> This is a unofficial testing release
> New Features:
> * Old and New toolbars support.
> * Reworked user interface.
> * Filter by language (working only in Feedboks server)
> * Display of book cover
> * Initial support to OPDS Catalogs.
> * Support for configuration of local deployments
>
> The configuration can be done adding a file /etc/get-books.cfg and allows:
> *  enable/disable off cover display
> * enable/disable language filter
> * add or remove OPDS sources.
>
> You can download it from http://dev.laptop.org/~gonzalo/GetBooks-6.xo
>
> I have used code from a modified activity from Ceibal project.
> I think the Catalogs button is not optimal (the icon and the menu), but i
> want it in the first toolbar. Any idea is welcomed.
> Also i want know if the deployment need any other configuration/feature.
> Send me any other idea/comment.
>
> Gonzalo
>