Chris J. Karr, January 28th, 2010

In light of the release of the new Apple tablet device, I wanted to share a few thoughts and initial impressions. These thoughts are focused on the device as a whole – I’ll be posting more on Apple’s foray into the electronic book world later. Disclaimer: I am an AAPL shareholder and I plan to purchase at least one of these devices for research and development work when they become available.

Read more…

Chris J. Karr, January 27th, 2010

Since the most common e-mail complaints that I received about Books dealt with barcode scanning and quickfill, I thought that a post on the current state of these topics in Codex would be helpful.

Read more for updates and screenshots.

Chris J. Karr, January 11th, 2010

Lest I give anyone the wrong impression, Codex work has been progressing steadily, if a bit quietly. My last blog post on the topic described a user-interface scheme, which since I’ve abandoned in favor of a concept that simply works better than what I had in mind a month ago. No one ever said that software design wasn’t messy. :-)

The UI design that I’m previewing below addresses several issues that continue to plague the current Books interface:

1. Data availability. In the current version of Books, metadata is spread among several windows and tabs, making it difficult to review an entire record easily. The canonical metadata is in the details view, while the more readable overview (in the main window) only shows a small subset of the available data.
2. Printability. Printing out record data is more of a priority for users than I acknowledged in Books 3. The new UI drastically simplifies and improves the printability of book information.
3. Portability & scalability. When I created Books 3, I had no plans to target any platforms other than the Mac. Since that time, we’ve witnessed an explosion of fully-capable computing platforms that no longer fit the desktop mold. This new UI will be initially implemented on the Mac, but I have plans to port it to other platforms once the Mac app is released.

Please note that the following interface is intended for dealing with single records at a time. At a later date, I’ll be happy to share details about the interface that displays information across records (record browsers).

For screenshots and descriptions of the new interface, please read on.

Chris J. Karr, January 11th, 2010

Over the past few months, I’ve been working hard on a Symbian project for Northwestern University’s medical school. I’ve written a blog post describing the work at the official Symbian weblog.

A few thoughts:

1. I’ve really enjoyed developing using Qt on the S60 platform. I’m looking forward to finding new work on that platform.

2. The distributed IPC mechanism that I’ve built on top of XMPP is a technique that I originally implemented using Shion’s remote command interface. Because of this project, I haven’t recently had the time to bring some of the lessons learned back to Shion, but I’m looking forward to doing so when my calendar clears a bit.

3. This project is also an evolution of the context-aware computing work that I did in graduate school. I’m looking forward to bring Pennyworth officially under the Audacious Software banner once I clear up a few things with my former collaborators at the university.

I’d like to reiterate that Audacious Software is very interested in doing more internal and client work in the Symbian mobile space. If you have a potential project that this company might be able to help out with, please let me know.

Chris J. Karr, December 7th, 2009

It’s been a few months since my last Codex updates so I wanted to pass along where things stand at the moment:

1. First of all, I wanted to thank everyone who e-mailed their pledges for supporting a commercial successor to Books. I have officially begun development on Codex as the successor to the Books platform.

2. Using some of the code originally developed for the Spotlight and QuickLook plugins, my development version of Codex can now read ePub files. The next major challenge is to implement the writer for ePub that conforms to all the relevant standards.

3. I spent some time this weekend working on the user interface. The UI is still in its early phases, but I have a few general principles nailed down.

First of all, the new app will be a document-based application that will allow multiple records to be opened at once.

A document’s window will consist of a handful of tabs. The primary tab will be an overview tab that will consist of a styled WebKit window for displaying the metadata in an easy to read form. Think of this as the details view in the current version of Books combined with the cover view.

The second tab will be dedicated to adding and editing metadata for the open record. I am currently debating how to expose the full power of ePub’s data model in such a way that accommodates both advanced and casual catalogers. I’m still working on the interface for this, so stay tuned.

The third tab will be dedicated to custom metadata, while the fourth tab will be dedicated to the record’s content. This content tab is a new addition to the application and a replacement for the attached files feature in the current version of Books. Content added in this section will be exposed in such a way that makes it both accessible from within Codex as well as other ePub-reading applications.

As these sections develop further, I will post screenshots for feedback. I expect to have an early alpha version of the application ready for early review around the end of this month or early next month.

4. Amazon lookup support won’t likely be in the initial versions of Codex unless I can figure out a way around the “no mobile apps” condition of their license agreement. However, I will ship with Library of Congress support at the very least.

Thanks to everyone again for the feedback and support for continuing this project. I look forward some more updates soon.