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Your ePub Is fine

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Re: Your ePub Is fine

#141

Post by m463 »

echelon wrote: post #24
acdha wrote: post #20

Adobe has always been like this, too. They squandered an enormous marketshare with Flash because the alternative would've been spending a couple million on QA and they managed to unite all of the browser manufacturers in agreement that the web was better off without such an unreliable partner. I shipped a couple of things on Flash back in the day but it was staggeringly bad software — random crashes, various heisenbu…

Flash is still unsurpassed as the easiest publishing medium. JavaScript build system layer cake and "web standards" are a million times harder than just drawing some stuff, maybe writing a simple function, then building a static file that can be embedded anywhere and even downloaded. You have to spend so much time setting up any flash alternative, and the "standards" are worse. I hate Steve Jobs for killing Flash and…

I would think:

1) macromedia ->

2) adobe ->

3) steve jobs

I think 2 was the root cause, not #1 or #3.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...

That said, I wonder how easy it is to publish on apple? I think of xcode in sort of the same way sj complaining about adobe being cross-platform and slow.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#142

Post by srpablo »

drtz wrote: post #37
echelon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash is still unsurpassed as the easiest publishing medium. JavaScript build system layer cake and "web standards" are a million times harder than just drawing some stuff, maybe writing a simple function, then building a static file that can be embedded anywhere and even downloaded. You have to spend so much time setting up any flash alternative, and the "standards" are worse. I hate Steve Jobs for killing Flash and…

> Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power. Is this a troll? What could an application do with Flash in 2005 that we can't do with a modern web application today (excluding the obvious answer of runtime vulnerabilities that allowed apps to escape the sandbox)?

> What could an application do with Flash in 2005 that we can't do with a modern web application today

Show me the JavaScript framework (or tool that exports JS) that you can give it to a middle schooler and have them make a cartoon with audio and moving images that they can draw themselves, while responding to user input. Have the exported artifact be consistent across all major operating systems and browsers.

Yeah, Flash was never replaced

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#143

Post by TiredOfLife »

protocolture wrote: post #127

I once read an ebook that was formatted by a guy who had only ever done magazines and it was a huge mess. 2 columns of text per page. No auto scaling. The best ebook format I have ever experienced is .txt and just let the software figure out where the text needs to go.

The best format was fb2

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#144

Post by spankibalt »

echelon wrote: post #24
acdha wrote: post #20

Adobe has always been like this, too. They squandered an enormous marketshare with Flash because the alternative would've been spending a couple million on QA and they managed to unite all of the browser manufacturers in agreement that the web was better off without such an unreliable partner. I shipped a couple of things on Flash back in the day but it was staggeringly bad software — random crashes, various heisenbu…

Flash is still unsurpassed as the easiest publishing medium. JavaScript build system layer cake and "web standards" are a million times harder than just drawing some stuff, maybe writing a simple function, then building a static file that can be embedded anywhere and even downloaded. You have to spend so much time setting up any flash alternative, and the "standards" are worse. I hate Steve Jobs for killing Flash and…

> "Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power. And none of its ease."

Somewhat mirrors my experience with all those rubbish non-PDF formats for digital document publishing, e. g. ePub: Often terminally ugly and utterly useless on top of it (not properly citeable, et cetera).

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#147

Post by cwnyth »

dpark wrote: post #135
dghlsakjg wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first computer I remember using was a Compaq Portable with a green screen and DOS that my dad was allowed to bring home on weekends. I vividly remember going to Circuit City as a family to buy our first windows 3.1 machine. Flash was very cool, at first, then it got used for WAY too much stuff that had no graceful degradation so you were stuck waiting a few minutes for an animation to load so you could see the co…

Flash certainly became broadly hated. It had a pretty long stretch of being loved, and enabling content that was loved, though. Up until about 2005 or so, flash was critical tech for the young web. By 2010 it was clearly heading toward an end.

I remember strongly disliking Flash before 2005, and many tech-minded people I talked to agreed. It was an awful install, always needed an updated, was a memory hog, and was a pain in the ass to use without it crashing. Yes, it must have been great to create apps with (I never did), but it was not beloved. Flash games were beloved, not Flash.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#148

Post by hommelix »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #78
ndiddy wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried the PineNote yourself? It $400 and says that it's "aimed at Linux developers with an extensive knowledge of embedded systems and/or experience with mobile Linux." The community provided firmware they link for it hasn't been updated in over a year. The Kobos don't limit what you can do with them either, you can sideload alternative e-reader software like KOReader that improves on the built-in reader fun…

> More expensive and less out-of-the-box software, but straight to the point on device ownership/what kind of software you can run, fewer strings attached. This note was in the original comment, did you read it? The fact that it is $400 (more expensive) and has less out of the box software is literally mentioned to alert people to that. > The Kobos don't limit what you can do with them either, you can sideload altern…

> This is patently false, the latest Kobo Libra Color is using secure boot which completely locks out custom development: > > https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=363175

Thanks for the link on mobileread. I was not aware of current development in direction of secure boot / chain of trust.

Not OP, but when I was looking for an e-reader, I looked up the Pinenote. I could not find easily a lot of information on its software state. I could find a lot on Kobo hacking. I notably found https://anarc.at/hardware/tablet/kobo-clara-hd/ and this motives me to get a second hand Clara HD for less than 100$. It was way cheaper than starting with 400$ and unknown software state.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#149

Post by tjoff »

m348e912 wrote: post #136
acdha wrote: post #20

Adobe has always been like this, too. They squandered an enormous marketshare with Flash because the alternative would've been spending a couple million on QA and they managed to unite all of the browser manufacturers in agreement that the web was better off without such an unreliable partner. I shipped a couple of things on Flash back in the day but it was staggeringly bad software — random crashes, various heisenbu…

Love or hate Steve Jobs, his insistence of not supporting Flash on the iPhone (in favor of HTML5) accelerated Flash's demise dramatically.

The best feature of flash was that it was so easy to disable. Because 99% of the use was annoying ads that pinned your cpu at 100%.

And that was Jobs argument, that it was too resource intensive. Predictably though, now that annoying crap moved to "newer" tech (javascript) and now we can't disable it as easily or without as little consequence. Just as resource intensive though...

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#150

Post by Suppafly »

nfw2 wrote: post #31

As someone who has spent a good deal of time trying to build ereader software, eventually I decided to try to deal with the devil and build on top of RMSDK. There is no way to get access to it. I don't mean the licensing cost is prohibitively expensive for an indie dev although I understand that to be the case as well. There is no one to talk to. The email listed on their website does not respond to anything. Not eve…

I used the FBReader app to read a ton, they make their SDK available for other apps to use.
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