Zeno's Paradox
September 21, 2003 - Books Update

Since there were less bugs reported than I would have expected with Books 1.1, I've been working on additional features for the next release. I am somewhat philosophically conflicted whether I should continue shoring up the existing functionality before adding new functionality. Since there doesn't seem to be too much to shore up, I went ahead started adding more stuff for the next release: cover images in the browser window and .Mac support.

The browser window is the window that pops up with the "Show All" and search functions. I went ahead and added cover images as an additional field and it's pretty sharp. My one complaint is that I've been unable to vertically center the text in expanded list, so I've been forced to use an ugly kludge to make it readable as it should be. (I prepend \n to the text fields. :-P)

The .Mac support may be the killer feature for this software. You can elect to store your data on you iDisk and work from that. Note that this incurs a significant performance impact, and images are stored locally. This basically allows users to edit a single book collection on different computers. I'm still working out some of the bugs and implementation issues, but it is working pretty well at the moment. There is no reason that I couldn't expand this functionality to other network file systems such as SMB and AFP shares, but I figure I'd phase this in slowly and work out the generic remote store issues that pop up before complicating the picture by allowing people to store the data anywhere they wanted. I do plan to add more flexibility later, but first the basics.

Posted by br284 at 06:18 PM

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Well, since .Mac users can share a collection, wouldn't it be nice to have a special function that looks up all you cover images and just those? That way you could easily rebuild a nice collection once you moved to another Mac. And in case you ever lose you library, you can always re-import the XML file, select the command "fetch my covers" and you're set ;-)

Posted by Stephan on September 22, 2003 11:42 PM

I like the .mac feature. This is a very useful app. Thank you for making my "Digital Hub" more of a hub.

Posted by Hilliard Davis II on October 5, 2003 06:23 AM
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