ILiad Software Wishlist

What do you want the software to be able to do? Here is the place to put it down.

This feature has been implemented
This feature is planned for one of the next updates
This feature will not make it to the iLiad via iRex
This feature has been implemented by an independent developer

Please note that iRex now allows for shell scripts to be executed, if you order that feature.

ATTENTION, requesting and using this feature, may result in a bricked iLiad, if not used with care. But it will also allow you to run some of the fine new additions brought to you by the iLiad community. Be prepared [reflash your Iliad]

General

• lock the hardkeys with an icon and the stylus (EbookSince2002) OS 2.7
• make flipbar behavior consitent through all applications OS 2.7
• character recognition on device. OS2.7
• news/books/docs/notes reprogrammable via xml manifest on memory card</span> (tribble) OS2.11
• Note taking ability for individual pages that act as bookmarks, similar to real life "post-its," plus other student-targetted functions. (AndrewLB)(arivero)(nekokami)
• search for a word or phrase (kwizmaster)(nekokami - should be able to include all text/OCR files and PDF scribbles, or subset of files)
• copy/move documents/books from/to usb stick/memory card (EbookSince2002)
• rotate the display 180 degree (to turn pages with the right hand) (EbookSince2002)
• rotate the display 90 degree (for pages with very small chars) OS 2.8
• user management (so different users can make different notes and different bookmarks) (tribble)
• HID module for USB keyboard: kernel modules and user-level event redirector (hudson)
• support from some Bluetooth key. (arivero)
• When you power on the device, put it back to the state, where i powered down (unless the necessary media is removed) (tribble)(nekokami)
• News/books/docs/notes should include items on memory cards. (having those buttons only for internal memory is just a waste.) (tribble)(nekokami)
• The Back-Button (steps) should go to the last place you visited in the contentlist from most applications.
• "Back"-Command, for when you accidentally interrupt reading (stinky_ox)
• Put menu items (like stroke width selector) not in the same row with other icons. Use a second row for the selector icons. (tribble)
• suspend to flash mode (scotty1024)(nekokami)

maybe a suspend to MMC or CF if possible, to save write cycles in internal flash (tribble) (arivero)

• user definable startup and shutdown image.
• user definable image when the device is off
• show memory usage of internal and external memory
• bookmarks [discussion on irexforum]
  • bookmarkbutton on menubar
  • use prev and next and select buttons to add and navigate through bookmarks. (nekokami)
  • autobookmark last read page before going to another bookmark and use up button to return there.
  • finger bookmarks: Use long click on the newspaper/etc buttons to store a quick bookmark. short ones to jump to the bookmark. Like putting your finger in between pages. Show pagenumbers above buttons (maybe short tag you can enter; i know it will collide with page number bar.)
  • bookmark overview page (nekokami)
  • short note for bookmarks or first line of page as info
  • include "existing" bookmarks from PDF (nekokami)
  • add possibility to save iLiad bookmarks as PDF bookmarks.
• customizable icons
• half-page rendering option
• allow multiple instances of applications for "tabbed" reading and notetaking (tribble) (arivero)(nekokami)
• font support for any font
• use docs/notes keys to go forward and back (flipbar is great, but only if you hold the iLiad in your left hand) (tribble)
• rename and delete files from open document. (tribble)
• internal privilege separation in iliad software (currently everything is root)[1]; according to Matthijs, a user-level ssh access will be available for development access following this feature implementation (BACbKA)

Settings

• ability to setup ip addresses and other network setting manually to avoid dhcp (nidsche) OS 2.5b
• sound: on / off / keyboard only (tribble)
• change flipbar behavior OS 2.8
• Integrated support for setting timezone ala http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10619

Page & Icon Bar

• processing icon (so user knows when to wait) (tribble) OS 2.5b

Version 2.6: should be a single icon, not misuse of page icons. (got even uglier in 2.6)

• upicon - more comfortable when using stylus (tribble)
• show a power down icon, when iLiad powered down due to low battery. (tribble)
• icon for stylus if its active or not. (tribble)(arivero).
• Informative icons smaller than clickable icons (arivero)
• possibility to move Icon Bar to the upper side (arivero)
• hide icon menu on bottom of page unless stylus is active (elahuguet)
• clock in iconbar (i just always forget time when reading) either manual set or timeserver with settable timezone(tribble)
• pageflip control, automatic pageflips, pace adjustable by flipbar (scotty1024)
• "invisible mode" ["full screen mode" of content viewer] (yokos)

Content Lister

A page for an improved contentLister has been created. Please add all wishes there

• show longer filenames (tribble) OS 2.5b
• rootline to see where in the file hirarchy you are (tribble) OS 2.6
• file size OS 2.6
• rename files OS 2.7
• search for filename OS 2.7
• last accessed documents page (tribble)(nekokami) OS 2.8
• show more files per page (tribble)
• Read/unread marks on book icon files (like un/visited links) (elahuguet)(nekokami)
• nicer and customizable views (more items per page) for contentlister image summary images different views (tribble)
• show more info about files (last page read, total page count, bookmarks present, notes present) (tribble)(nekokami)
• make filelist sortable by (last access, page/totalpage ratio, name, type) (tribble) (nekokami)
• make filelist sortable in own prefered order via drag and drop (tribble)
• Category System, to add your files to multiple categories. And view them of course (tribble)(nekokami)
• show files from all media, when pressing news/books/docs/notes and show an icon, where on which device they are.(nekokami)
• gray out the entries for MMV/CF/USB if there is no media present(nekokami)
• new files page
• search for filename on all media simultaniously
• Filemanager with two windows and copy and move functionality via drag (henkvdg)
• have an "up" icon to use with stylus, maybe click in the rootline to get to a specific folder in it. I dont like to use the stylus for almost every operation, but not going up a level.
• if filename is too long, break it up into two lines. (tribble)
• scribble on content lister entry, allowing quick notes. (tribble)

Connectivity

• send document to iDS for delivery to an iLiad - you could use dLetter email client instead (Nergal)
• timed iDS connections for up/downloading content OS 2.8
• support for WPA OS2.10
• support for WPA2
• Create a network profile automatically when it finds an open network
• Wireless connection to PC (mount iLiad as local disk to a PC or local server over WiFi) (OS 2.9)
• make all inserted media accessible, when connected via USB (arivero)
• Local IDS server (for example on a company server to distribute documents to all employees) - you could use dLetter email client instead (Nergal)
• Setup static ethernet and sshd before gui to avoid bricking the unit. Tar file to install dropbear (hudson)
• allow 2 wireless PC connection profiles to be saved.
• connect two iliads so you can share notes

iLiad eBook format

This is actually something that should not be iLiad specific, but an open eBook standard. There are a few standards developing and they will probably do most of the wanted things. We then just need an appropriate reader on the iLiad :)

These are the ones i know:

• [IDPF - International Digital Publishing Forum] formerly known as OEB (Open EBook)
• [Open Reader]

What i want from an ebook format:

• should be XML language with picture and font resources included. Everything in a compressed (zlib?) single file.
• open and documented
• support of:
  • utf-16 or utf-8, ?html-entities?;
  • fonts, font sizes, font weights, font styles; all sizes should be relative, to easily change preferred fontsizes. The font should be chooseable aswell.
  • pictures;
  • page breaks: pagination should be done in a special way, so people with different screen sizes and font sizes can refer to pagenumbers. There should be a standard pagesize and for different screensizes it should add subpagenumbers.
  • bookmarks and links, footnotes, headers for odd and even pages (which i find very annoying in a single page device) , table of content, multilang;
  • soft hyphenations (i guess, that will have to depend on the viewer.);
  • book author, book title, book subtitle, book genre, book annotation;
  • categories (to put a book automatically into a certain, ?user-defined by category? directory in the device). Who owns REB1200 - knows how convenient it is.
• a good viewer for this format (?plus a desktop emulator?).

including: bookmarks, highlights, annotation, search within the book, view images separately (pdam)

PDF Viewer

• Support PDF/XML Dynamic Forms that users can either use scribble or keyboard to fill out (pitchitsolns)
• search for first/next/previous occurence of a word/phrase (sergeij)(nekokami)
• open last view page on reopen (tribble) OS 2.5b
• caching of next/prev page OS 2.6
• rotate view 90 degrees (oliverbogler) OS 2.7
• selective zoom (wiljo) OS 2.7
• Scribbling on PDF OS 2.8
• hide scribbles (tribble)
• show list of pages with scribbles (tribble)
• merge scribbles into PDF on device in a secondary PDF (tribble)
• merge scribbles into PDF desktop application OS 2.9
• cropmechanism - set a zoom position as standard user crop (tribble)
• multiple cropmechanism: select several crop regions (eg. left and right side of a 2 page scan) and via flipbar, you flip from region 1 to region 2 to region 1 on the next page (tribble)
• notetaking/marking; bookmarks and annotation (wiljo) (pdam)
• support official commenting feature on PDFs (tribble)
• dictionary support
  • one click dictionary support (click on a word an show translation) (tribble)

  i would prefer it like this. Have an icon to activate dictionary support, if a dictionary is available. When you activate it and click on a word, the translation should appear instead of the pagebar (partial update). It can revert back to pagebar after clicking the pagebar or when turning the page.

  • dictionary files as XML formated files easy to edit by users and to create new dictionaries and specialice dictionaries. Translation dictionaries to for translation from language A to language B. Being able to associate documents (PDF files for example iva their current IRex config XML file to a dictionary or to multiple dictionries) Remember one document could have several languages in it.If posible provide a way to attach pronunciation files to words also.(ynceraj)
  • dictionary to lookup a word automatically when double clicking on it in the pdf document similar to the original Adobe reader.
  • dictionary of translation to another language. When reading a document in English for exmaple being able to swap the dictionary to a translating dictionary that will get all posible meaning to the word from English into some other language. That could really be an extra ordinary feature and will allow the creation of multiple translation dictionaries from language X to language Y.
• "goto page" dialog (EbookSince2002)

page jump via keyboard still broken in 2.8

• highlighting like textmarker (tribble)
• full screen mode (ath)

say, switchable by pressing 'confirm' button for 2 seconds

• allow for screen 'outside' document area to be black: it helps for documents with a different aspect ratio than the screen (ath)

I would remove the outside view feature. In my opinion it's useless and annoying (El Chupacabra)

• show TOC of PDF file
• enhance contrast (darken light text eg.)
• implement reflow (please!!!)
• watermarks shouldn't be visible (yokos) (nekokami)

viewer shows pdf watermarks which are set as "visible at printing"

• Zooming:
  • defining a zoom window as standard zoom level(lets call it "user crop"), which you reach when clicking full page icon.
  • click zoom: make the zoom level from a single click configurable. and center on clickpoint (or 10% increase each click)
  • have a zoom out button to last zoom size. OS 2.8
  • have a "zoom to width" button. (should use "user crop" on first click, full page on second).
  • go to pan mode, after zooming in
  • raise maximum zoom level to at least 400%
• Have Arrows around the pages so you can navigate around

• Panning:
  • change the icon. "the full page" icon looks more like a panning icon.
  • center click point on single click
  • maximize area from the spanning rectangle of first point of drag to last point of drag.

• Full page:
  • zoom to "user crop" zoom on first click, to full page on second.

• landscape:
  • automatically change to "full width" view, when switching to landscape.

• Width view:
  • when showing the page in width view, let us be able to pan through the page with the flip bar, and flip pages, once you have reached the end of the page (or "user crop" level) OS 2.8
  • Split in two mode, Sony eReader like.

• icons:
  • add "user crop" zoom level icon
  • add zoom to width icon
  • add 100% zoom

• Settings
  • put in user settings
  • make show border optional (now only visible when zoomed in) OS 2.8

• auto rotate, when opening a landscape document. (tribble)
• The JPXDecode filter [JPEG2000 compression] (yokos)
  • more & more pdf files use jpeg2000 compression [with was introduced with pdf 1.5], pdf-viewer can't handle this stream, so it doesn't open pdf file [if included on 1st page] or hangs with flickering green LED [if included on any page].

HTML Viewer

• pagination for html files (tribble)

it could be done with javascript, eheheh (arivero)

or they could set the browser to use CSS-printout definitions, as this would allow to set page splits. (b_k)

• one click dictionary support (click on a word an show translation) (tribble)
• Online surfing support (tscherno)

Bookmarks (pdam)

Save to PDF (pdam)

• default font size override (minimum font size aswell)
• Ability to link to PDF files
• easier way to change font size (tribble)
• overlap, so you can read lines at bottom of page (better change it so, you dont get to see "cut" lines.) (tribble)
• better screen update machanism, so you dont have to reload page manually for frames, and form elements. (tribble)
• remember not only page, but position on page. (tribble)
• Custom browser CSS stylesheets (El Chupacabra)

Notes Applications

• delete page button (DrBibber) OS 2.6

display page you want to delete, click on trask icon, click somewhere in page, click trash icon again.

• disable the bottom buttons (easily pushed by palm when writing) (optional) OS 2.7
• being able to create new pages with the flip bar (ynceraj)
• maybe allow the icons to stay in full expanded mode (I think there is space for it) (ynceraj)
• being able to change names for notes and other files and organize them in folders. (ynceraj)
• allow selection of pieces of text or graph and being able to move it around in the same page to diferent location. (ynceraj) (arivero)
• allow to select a piece of text of graph and allow to change the width of the pen and the color of it. (ynceraj)
• implement a user setting that says for example if pen is out and not use for 2 minutes desactive the pen sensor (as to save battery live) should be able to activate pen once is place back in the pen pocket.(ynceraj)

This is supposed to be implemented in OS 2.6 and still not working in 2.7 (tribble)

• user predefined pens, to click once and use (tribble)
• use layers, so we can have different layers of annotations.
• more pen sizes available, perhaps via the predefined pen feature asked above.
• lock notes button, so you cant change them anymore
• have a text entering mode, where you can type text from the keyboard.
• rename a note from within the Notes application
• use pdf files as basic notes in wich It Can be used as a form. Is only the option to use a complete pdf file as a normal png file (actual model), so each time this pdf file is selected, a new copy is opened
• pens should be anti-aliased [png exports are very low quality/hard to read because the lines are not anti-aliased]
• be able to create straight lines (for underlining) by clicking on two points.
• be able use keyboard, not only hand writing
• keyboard with diacritics for east Europe (Czech Republic, Slovakia, etc.)
• Advanced note types: First page gives one background (like meeting date, location, participants, etc.), following pages gives another background (lines). Could be implemented with layers, or filenumber (lines_001.png, lines_002.png, etc.) - First layer/file for first page, next layer/file for next page, last layer/file for all the following pages.

TXT Viewer

• line breaks for too long lines (DHer)
• choose font type, size

Image Viewer

• resize Images to full screen button (tribble)

Wacom Digitizer

• pressure sensitivity for writing/sketching (sammykrupka)(nekokami)
• pen calibration (nekokami)
• second botton of the pen (arivero)
• customizable timeout for the automated shut-off of the note/scribble function (DokterBibber)
• use higher resolution for drawings (nekokami)
• use antialiazing
• Wacom as USB input device for the PC/MAC when the iLiad is parked in the cradle. (arivero. A student of me made the driver (zhid) but it only works for the linux usbmouse driver; untested in Macs. For HID USB either kernel 2.6 or heavy patch of 2.4 is needed))
• possibility to switch off - for reading books I don't need ...

Additional Software

Applications

• Maps (tribble)
• Moving Map application (GPS, waypoints, route tracking, etc.) (DJ Vollkasko)
• irc/im clients (deadite66)
• Spreadsheet application (gef)
• simple wordprocessor (nekokami)
• 'Notepad' - MiniPad 0.2.2, written by Hansel
• Supermemo (lepetitbaigneur)
• Star Charts for astronomy and non-GPS navigation (DJ Vollkasko)

Readers & Viewers

• todolist - something that does that (tribble)
• RTF Reader (tribble) (nekokami)
• LIT Reader (tribble) (nekokami)
• CHM Reader (tscherno)
• RSS/RDF/ATOM/Newsfeed Reader (tscherno) (nekokami)
• A sequential image viewer that will accept compressed files in both zip (.zip/.cbz) and rar (.rar/.cbr) forms. (iManga [2], iViewer [3])(riocaz)
• Palm's pbd format reader (herve) (nekokami)
• PDB Reader - compatible with standard PDB, iSilo and/or Handstory (each)
• Mobipocket Reader (masc) (nekokami)
• Zinio Reader (masc)
• Openreader Reader (masc) (nekokami)
• djvu Viewer (IMHO a EXTREMELY useful feature, because DJVU files of scanned books can be a lot smaller than PDF's) (DHer)
• Newton eBook reader (DJ Vollkasko)
• Music Player [mpd with mpc as client][mp3,ogg] (yokos)
• Midi-/Karaoke-Player for .mid and .kar files (DJ Vollkasko)
• MS Word viewer (Abiword [4]) (pdam)
• Player for photo slideshows (DJ Vollkasko)

Games

• Adventure game (herve) (nekokami - Z reader would be fine)
• scummVM engine (arivero)
• Gargoyle "Gargoyle is an IF player that supports all the major interactive fiction formats." - ported by AdamB(mythago)
• GnuGo (mythago)
• crimsom fields or some Xstrategy thing (arivero)
• chess GNU Chess - Version 0.3 - ported by design356 (wifi, arivero)
• games :)
• MAME emulation (DJ Vollkasko)
• NetHack (with tileset 8) plz )

Tools & Utilities

• Calendar (kwizmaster, arivero GPE calendar can do the trick)
• Calculator x48 Calculator - Version 0.2 - ported by scotty1024 (gef)
• xterm mrxvt - Version 0.2 - ported by scotty1024(ribrdb)
• Big calculator / small spreadsheetMultiCalc - Version 0.1.2 - written by Hansel
• iCal, Address Book and ToDo List synching with Linux, OSX and MS Windows (DJ Vollkasko)

Programming Support

• Java (Gavrahil) (See [5] )
• Lua 5.1.4 Lua + libraries - ported by Hansel
• Python
• Perl (nekokami)