> that bloated pinnacle of software that is 80% about DRM, 20% about the reading experience
I have never seen someone explain the adobe software so perfectly. Using any adobe software is exactly this.
Your ePub Is fine
161–170 of 322 posts
Re: Your ePub Is fine
#162As 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.
The last time I looked into this, readium lcp drm wasn't something US publishers were comfortable distributing their titles with, although it seems like this may be changing, which is good insofar as readium is at least open source and free to build with.
Re: Your ePub Is fine
#163I’m curious if simply running the original EPUB through Kepubify fixes the problem.
Re: Your ePub Is fine
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
There was also the argument that "We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash"
Re: Your ePub Is fine
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
I never bought the benevolent technical angle for not supporting flash. I'm pretty sure Apple strategists knew the value of the gate-kept platform, the app-store revenue stream. The pivotal point was that flash would break this stronghold by allowing rich applications that are reasonably self-publishable. (Excuse me while I go rinse that sentence out of my mouth)
First iPhone didn't have support for 3rd party apps. Steve Jobs even explicitly spoke about wanting to have all 3rd party things run in the browser.
Only when jailbreaking and custom apps got very successful, Apple introduced official app support and the appstore.
Re: Your ePub Is fine
#166Kobo is actually in the process of completely rewriting their e-reader software (you can download the beta in the EU), and I’m pretty sure it’s no longer based on RMSDK. Adobe basically handed the EPUB DRM market to LCP on a silver platter by being a poor maintainer and then selling off to a third party that had botched the migration and further angered end users and platforms, that are switching off Adobe faster tha…
Interesting news! Though I'm on https://koreader.rocks/ like most people here, I suppose.
Re: Your ePub Is fine
#167Adobe 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…
What I never understand is why we never got a Flash-level authoring tool that exported to modern JavaScript/Canvas. Ruffle shows it can be done.
Adobe could have retuned Animate to do it, but instead let it languish as a niche animation tool for some animation studios to use before trying to kill it.
Re: Your ePub Is fine
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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,…
Re: Your ePub Is fine
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never bought the benevolent technical angle for not supporting flash. I'm pretty sure Apple strategists knew the value of the gate-kept platform, the app-store revenue stream. The pivotal point was that flash would break this stronghold by allowing rich applications that are reasonably self-publishable. (Excuse me while I go rinse that sentence out of my mouth)
It took them years to realize that the App Store could be a thing.
and now they make probably insane marketshare on the AppStore alone.
Re: Your ePub Is fine
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never bought the benevolent technical angle for not supporting flash. I'm pretty sure Apple strategists knew the value of the gate-kept platform, the app-store revenue stream. The pivotal point was that flash would break this stronghold by allowing rich applications that are reasonably self-publishable. (Excuse me while I go rinse that sentence out of my mouth)
First iPhone didn't have support for 3rd party apps. Steve Jobs even explicitly spoke about wanting to have all 3rd party things run in the browser. Only when jailbreaking and custom apps got very successful, Apple introduced official app support and the appstore.
I think the Appstore was planned all along, just did not fit in the first release, so they adapted the launching narrative to: "the browser is enough for all 3rd party software".