FBReader 0.72 is something lefthanded readers will really love — now the text will rotate 90, 180 or 270 degrees, allowing the user to hold the 770 in the right hand and easily page through a book. While the Preferences dialog is blocking most of the screen, you should be able to see that the text in the screen capture above is rotated 180 degrees.
The Enter key (in the center of the scroll wheel) still switches between normal and rotated text; the Rotation tab lets the user select which rotation.
Today’s new release fixes a few minor bugs and adds a few other new features, such as support for bzip2 archives and another file format, TCR.
You can download the latest installer-ready version from the FBReader home page:
While lefthanders have been asking for this on all programs to make the 770 more usable, I can only recall seeing one game — Frozen Bubble — that also rotated, but it’s never come out. I wonder how long it will be till this is a feature built into the OS? According to Lemody’s blog, Ramblings of a Madman, it’s technically feasible “without speed or memory loss.” See his photo from December in an earlier item, “The Nokia 770 and the Pong clock.”
When I had a RocketeBook, one of the first devices for reading e-books, I used to read for a while holding it in my left hand, then rotate the text 180 degrees — then physically rotate the device so the paging keys were on the right — and then hold it for a while in my right hand.
The RocketeBook was considerably heavier than a 770, but I imagine I’ll end up doing the same with it. After all, when you’re getting sleepy, that six ounces becomes heavier and heavier, doesn’t it.
I note that a newer version of the FBReader deb file has been posted:
Unremarked in the earlier description is a fix to FBReader that prevented it from seeing e-books installed in the Documents folder. A post by geometer (aka Nikolay Pultsin, FBReader’s creator) in the Mobileread.com forums alerted us to that. That’s the best place to get FBReader information beyond our reports here at itT.
Then the next day, he wrote about Airset, which he liked.
Are any of these suitable calendars for the Nokia 770? I mean, I can look at them, but I won’t be able to give any of them a good test. But some of you can. Let’s find out which of these if any work really well, and work really well on the 770.
Report back in your blog or the itT forums or as comments to this blog item, please. Thanks.
Update: Maybe I should just say “online calendars.” =DC=points to RSSCalendar as another candidate, though not Ajax. I say, whatever works, works.
OK, we’re waiting for VoIP. In a discussion about what we might expect from the next iteration of the Nokia 770, I said maybe VoIP will be the killer app for a device like the 770.
As I thought about it, I was reminded of two things Ari Jaaksi wrote about on his blog. First (well, in importance; chronologically it was second), he reminded us that “the killer app for the internet tablet is the INTERNET.” The way the 770 interacts with the internet, from displaying web pages to doing email, is just something that phones are not good at by themselves.
And “by themselves” I am referring obliquely to the fact that a Bluetooth phone combined with a 770 provides a different web experience altogether than a phone alone.
We say, “The internet tablet is about accessing the internet.” And it’s good to get away from the desk and use the 770 in a meeting room or in the elevator on the way to the meeting, or at home on the couch or in bed (or as others have described, as a control device accessing devices on the network).
But I keep thinking about the day I paired with a BT phone and surfed all the way into the city on a train and all the way to work as I walked from the train station to the office. That was different.
That was accessing the internet in a full and complete way, while I was away from the physical network. Ari wrote about that experience, saying, “I surf in trains, in cafeterias, at airports, even while driving. I can go online anytime and anywhere I want.” Just as cellphones meant voice communication was no longer stationary, he said, the 770’s release meant that the internet is no longer stationary either.
The big barrier to fully utilizing the 770 this way isn’t something Nokia can do anything about. It’s the price of cellphone internet access. If that were truly affordable, then the true promise of the internet tablet would be realizable, and we would appreciate, as Ari says, that the killer app is the internet, anywhere.
Not being British, I use the English (US) virtual keyboard, which puts a plus sign (+) and an equals sign (=) in the two spots next to the zero in the numeric keypad on the on-screen keyboard.
Choosing English (UK) as your first language in the Text Input control panel gives you a different keyboard layout, with a hyphen (-) and an equals sign in those positions, as well as other changes with the keys shifted. And of course, other language settings have different characters for other keys as well.
Obviously the virtual keyboard simply uses different mappings for the different choices. I keep thinking I should be able to change the English (US) mapping to use a hyphen with the numeric keypad.
Others have explained that creating a .xmodmap file in /home/user/ lets you remap the keys on a Bluetooth keyboard.
Is there a similar solution to the virtual keyboard mapping? I really, really want that hyphen.
Second update: I’ve been practicing the alternative case gestures, as described in the Maemo Wiki page, HowToInputMethod770, in section 1.4.1 Gestures, and as MikeB reminded me in a comment to this blog item. When you press a key, wait a beat, then drag up, you get the shifted character. This works for =/- as well as for lower-case/upper-case letters and so on. I’ve been using it for parentheses and some caps, and it’s great — except that I am only succeeding about 80 percent of the time.
Apparently when the pressure of my stylus is deemed inconsistent, the virtual keyboard interprets my “gesture” as a double-tap and give me two lower-case letters. Meanwhile I’m still pressing and moving up and then double-deleting and starting over, and in those cases it’s not faster. I’ll see if I get better at this or if the keyboard/touchscreen is just too finicky.
Wanted A C and python programmer to do the heavy lifting on a port of the FBReader source to MS Windows and the creation of a converter from OEB and OpenReader formats to FB2. Interest in SVG a distinct plus.
• • •
OK, I’m not a programmer, though I’ve managed to say “Hello, World” in a half-dozen languages. C is not one of those; however, I did struggle through 41 pages of Kernighan and Ritchie back in 1981. (I gave up when I couldn’t figure out what they meant when they said to pop a stack, and no one I asked knew what I was talking about.)
But I like FBReader so much I want to get it onto the Windows computer I use daily. And, more importantly, onto the Windows computers of most everyone I know. There is no e-reader that spans Windows and Linux, and I hope FBReader can manage that.
Nicolay Pultsin and Mikhail Sobolev are responsible for creating FBReader and getting it on the Nokia 770 and the Linux desktop, and they have their hands full finishing the program. FBReader still needs bookmark and annotation capabilities, not to mention integrating a dictionary, adding table support, and reading additional formats.
Rather than get in their way — they’ve been doing pretty well without me — I’m thinking the best way to boost FBReader is to do what they can’t or don’t plan to do. Of course, this has the side effect of boosting the Nokia 770 as FBReader’s prime platform. The combination of the 770’s display (the pixel density provides for font size control in one-third-of-a-point increments) and portability with the most capable and customizable e-reader will be a tipping point in the 770’s favor when compared to other devices.
One part of making FBReader more accessible is to enable more e-books to be read on it. Since FBReader does its best work with e-books in FictionBook 2.0 form, I want to get more e-books into FB2. And that’s whay I’d like to get a converter written in a cross-platform language like python (yes, so you can even use it on your 770). Maybe later on, modules can be written to accept open formats like OEB and OpenReader directly.
And SVG? Just looking down the road. E-readers should be able to handle anything browsers can.
Reggie posted the news that in the 2005 Engadget Awards, the Nokia 770 won both the Reader’s Choice as the 2005 Handheld of the Year, and the Editor’s Pick.
Wow! Congratulations to everyone at Nokia! I can mention Janne Jormalainen, Ari Virtanen and Ari Jaaksi by name because they’re upper-enough management for their names to be known, but we know a lot of people made this happen. They all deserve our appreciation and thanks, and this award provides us an opportunity to give them that. Thanks, you guys!
Lots of things go into this. First of all, with as much as they bit off, the people at Nokia were able to get the 770 delivered in 2005. Look at Microsoft, which is hoping to get an “ultra-mobile” with comparable abilities delivered in 2007 for about three times the price of the 770. Or Sony, hoping to deliver a 2-bit 1-color e-reader without WiFi or additional apps, removing the pricetag from their website this week because they can’t meet their same-as-the-770 price. Or the PepperPad, bigger, heavier, fewer apps, twice the price.
Second, Nokia looked at the Bermuda Triangle of web pads and didn’t flinch when setting off to build its own internet tablet. Requirements: Must be super small so people will carry it — pocket size, in fact. Must fully access the web, which means at least 800 pixels wide (oops, that makes requirement 1 really hard) and WiFi. Must be affordable (oops, that directly conflicts requirements 1 and 2).
Third, for all the breadth of its capabilities, the 770 doesn’t try to do everything. It doesn’t include a phone. No camera. No keyboard or disk drive either. You don’t need those things for what it does. Nokia stayed focused on what it was trying to do and didn’t yield to the more-is-better delusion, like for instance, the OQO.
Fourth, Nokia didn’t try to partition off the 770 but instead placed it squarely in among the Linux/open-source community. Was this a separate goal or the lucky consequence of the requirements above? I don’t know. But either way, belonging to the community instead of profiting from the community made things signficantly different in helping the 770 succeed where others had wrecked.
Yes, we’re enthusiasts here at itT, and we’re happy the object of our fascination has won. It means that others can see this remarkable confluence of capabilities and recognize what it is too: a handheld worth celebrating.
I didn’t think I would want to stretch the 770 in so many ways.
To tell the truth, I started out reluctant to even flash a new firmware image. It wasn’t till the third image came out that I even did that. And when I first got my 770, I thought I should restrict myself to just the built-in apps so as to better understand what the typical user would experience. That was both a strategy and a tentative response to a new Linux computer.
Well, that decision lasted about three days. A vanilla 770 isn’t enough.
Actually, the first thing I did with my 770 was to change Home’s appearance — I looked at the four color schemes, wishing I could build my own (must be a way to do that), removed the News reader, web shortcut, and internet radio, and changed the background image to one of Jayne and Sam perched in the red maple in front of our house. Small things, completely superficial, and btw springing from the distinct need to feel I was the master of my Linux destiny.
So, three days in, I began to install and then later to uninstall apps. FBReader and Plucker Viewer came first (naturally, given my bent towards books — I’ve worked in publishing for my whole career). Then games, a lot of them. I’m not really a gamer [1]; but I play a couple and I sometimes need to engage one of my children so some games are for them. Installing was easy, and finally I had added more apps to the device than it had come with. The 770 was beginning to feel like my computer. Of course, I wanted more.
So then came Joe, the text editor, and vim. What, a text-to-speech engine? Flite went on. And Granule for flash cards. The GPE-PIM trio. Happiest day? When Tomas Frydrych casually let slip how to install fonts. I put in a dozen I can’t live without (Maiandra, Trebuchet MS, Gardiner’s hieroglyphs). Comfort food for the eyes: Look, I control how text looks on-screen! I tried things out, I removed what i wasn’t using.
It didn’t take much encouragment to venture under the hood. I installed XTerm (had to for the fonts) and did the command-line thing. Sure, it’s not so daunting, but I really really would like to give up the command line. I installed the cpu/mem/screenshot applet in a slight euphoria, because it meant I could take screen captures without becoming root and going through elaborate contortions that I didn’t understand (does that old method involve a web server? I still can’t figure it out). With a steely eye, I put in Midnight Commander to do simple file management things like move files to a directory hidden from File Manager.
So for the first few months, modifying my 770 meant finding apps that did neat things I wanted to do. I was pretty content and put some energy into e-book-building apps on the desktop. I thought I had everything under control.
Part 2: I learn the reality.
[1] Confession time: All the blog items about games during the long period before release weren’t about the games — they were about the screen grabs! We needed pictures! What did things look like? We needed to see! And lots of games were being ported. Nice thing about it is that I started reading Marcelo Eduardo’s blog, A Handful of Nothing, which I really enjoy, and from there a number of other Brazilian blogs written by INdT developers, including etrunko’s (void *) and Renato Araujo’s Tux em Recife.
I posted the following speculations in the itT thread called “Mike Cane’s Live 770 Blog”. I’m blogging it here, which will start a new thread where people can identify their 770’s country of origin, code (hopefully this will equate to batch number), date of receipt and level of reliability.
In his forum blog, Mike Cane has detailed the problems he’s had with his Nokia 770. And I’ve been thinking about them for some time.
If I had consistently wacky behavior from an application on my PC that someone else with the identical hardware and software was not having, I’d suspect a bad install or a bad sector on the hard drive.
I’d uninstall and re-install, and I’d test the drive. Really unpredictable behavior would lead me to test the RAM too.
Mike wrote that he has re-flashed the most recent image. So a re-install didn’t fix things.
Of course, the 770’s “drive” is its mmc card and half the device’s flash memory. Is there an application that will test the 770’s memory? Both the internal and the mmc? Bad memory is usually an infrequent problem on PC’s, still it does happen.
But if it’s not the install, not the memory, and not the case that Mike is stressing the software beyond other people’s use, could it be the manufacturing that’s at fault?
Maybe Mike has a defective 770, or maybe there’s a batch of 770’s manufactured together in which more defects show up. Does that sound plausible to anyone? It is a new device, after all. And Mike’s not the only one who has frequent problems.
So let’s collect some data that would let us know if there’s a pattern to these problems that is manufacturing-based.
Here’s my info:
My 770 was made in Estonia. It has a code of 0631265. (Turn off the 770. Look under the battery. This isn’t the number you use to get firmware updates.) I got it in mid-November 2005.
And my device has the some flaky crashes, but nothing consistent and nothing on the frequency that some others report. (And since I’ve used a swapfile, the crashes are less frequent.)
Please post your info too. Let’s get to the bottom of this if we can.
