Flashbook

[FloppusMaximus]

Hi, everybody. It's time for the second beta release of Flashbook, that fabulous Flash-App-eBook-generator thing for the TI-83+/84+.

If you missed it before: Flashbook is a set of tools for creating eBooks. Unlike previous eBook readers and such things, it lets you store an arbitrarily long text on your calculator, in the form of a Flash App. The text is compressed, the reader is fast and easy to use, you can use whatever custom characters you like (the included fonts currently cover most of the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets.) In short, it's awesome, try it out.

What's new in this version:

1. Mac OS X support. Unfortunately I can only build binaries for x86 Macs at the moment, since the official GTK+ Framework is for x86 only. (I've been trying to cross-compile GTK+ myself, but as you may imagine, this is a rather daunting task.) The binary package has been tested only on 10.5 but it should work on 10.4 as well. The Mac port is still very much a work in progress (I can't seem to get the Mac file dialogs to work properly, for some reason) but it should do the job, anyway.

2. Hyphenation. eBooks can now be automatically hyphenated. A variety of languages are supported for hyphenation, thanks to TeX and OpenOffice.org.

3. You can import text from Notefolio and QWERTY files. Just to make things a tiny bit easier.

4. A lot of minor improvements and bug fixes.

Get it while it's hot: http://flashbook.sf.net/

[TheStorm]

I will definitly try it out, I could never get the first beta to work right so I hope I will have better luck with the new version.

[DigiTan]

I'll have to check this one too. I can see some potential paperless, go-anywhere TI tutorials there. Roughly how effective would you say the compression is? Text always seems to take up a lot more room that expected.

[FloppusMaximus]

It generally seems to compress English text about 40-50% in my experience. Depends on the text, of course, and the compression level (i.e., the block size.) The nice thing about using a small block size is that it's faster, and you don't need a lot of free RAM (with the lowest compression level you don't need any free RAM, it works entirely from saferam.)

It's not the best compression ever but it's decent, and the important thing is that it's fast enough to be usable.

[Chasney913]

Sorry for the necropost. I thought I might bring an issue up. I just downloaded this, and it looks great, but I can't seem to save or generate anything. All the other things (Import, Find, etc.) seem to work just fine, but I can't actually use it, which is somewhat disappointing. I can try it on a different computer and see if it works, but I was hoping someone might be able to offer some insight.

[FloppusMaximus]

That sounds bad.
Does it give an error message, crash, or what?
Also, what OS are you running?

[Chasney913]

I'm running XP, nothing special on it that I can think of that would interfere.

It doesn't crash, I click "Save As" for example, and it doesn't do anything. It doesn't hang or crash or error, it just doesn't do anything else. It also doesn't think I've saved the file. Same thing with Generate, but I can set all the settings, but when I click Generate, it just sits there.

[FloppusMaximus]

Hmph. I have no idea what could be wrong. I'll take another look at it the next time I have a Windows machine handy (although I'm pretty sure I would have noticed a problem that serious...)

[tribal]

Hey, not much going on here... I just wanted to verify that the problem Chasney913 was having is happening to me. I've put a link at the bottom of the post to the file I'm trying to convert, if anybody could get it to work and send me the file, that would be great





Julies Caesar: http://www.memoware.com/?global_op=downloa...mp;file_id=4551

[elfprince13]

Floppus, I'd recommend posting on the Revsoft forum, and ask for some help testing the Mac version. I can test 10.5/x86, but that's the one you're most confident in. Several people on RS have had trouble running apps on 10.4 that were compiled with the 10.4 sdk under 10.5, and there should be a PPC version of the GTK+ libraries available through MacPorts.

[FloppusMaximus]

Well, I finally found the nasty file dialog bug (no thanks to Wine, nor GCC for that matter. )

A new version is now available, with that plus a bunch of optimizations and bug fixes in the calculator code, and some minor GUI improvements. Give it a try - third time's the charm, right?