[IAEP] GetBook activity

[Gonzalo Odiard]

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 7:55 PM, James Simmons <nicestep at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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:
>
>
Thanks James, I really appreciate your feedback.


> 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.
>
>
Ok, I agree.


> 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.
>
>
You are not using OPDS in IA server, right?
I think the OPDS implementation is not very good.
Obviusly i can steal code from your application (again).



> 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.
>
>
Ok.


> 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.
>
>
Is not the idea. The configuration is to enable to the deployments
to add/remove servers.
Really, there are not too much server today, but I am trying to improve
Pathagar to use it.
May be later we can add a screen to configure it, but I don't think is
necessary now.


> 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.
>
>
I think different (tm) here. Is not very useful to you or to me because we
know
what are searching. I can search Jules Verne or Dickens because I know them.
But if you are a child, can look to adventure or science fiction books and
open
a door to authors or book you don't know.



> 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
> >
>
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