ebook formats and mobiles - android

I have an app for android and iOS. I want to add in app option, which allow user select book from list and read it.
List of available books will be load from server.
Now i wondering which book format to choose. First i'm thinking about pdf, but it has not-flexible reflowing for different screens(books contains sheets and formules). Maybe .epub would be good choice?
ps. is this possible to prevent user copy loaded book files?
Should i load files only in memory(without saving on sd), but how then work with files exceeded ram memory?
have you know any good iOS and android libraries, sdk for reading ebook files?

I am searching for the same SDK options and found this for ePub:
http://skyepub.net/downloads/
There are handfuls of PDF SDKs. Throw a dart at the internet and see what it hits, however, I would like to know which ones have risen to the top (e.g., the top 3).
Still looking for .mobi (Kindle's format).

Related

Android App to talk to a web server, download a file and parse

I am new to this. I have the Android SDK installed with Eclipse. I can work with basic activities and layouts.
I am looking to write this Android application that will;
1) Allow users to sign-in using a pre-allocated password.
2) Login and change the password.
3) Every time the user opens the app, he downloads a CSV file from a server to the SD card.
4) The app parses from the file and displays them on several activities and small frames inside the app.
Think of it as an informational application. But, I'd like to add some intelligence on top of it after I get this done.
I have read many articles and topics but none of them give me a specific approach to do this faster. I have very little time for development.
If there's a similar application that you're familiar with, I'd like to take a look at the code.
I want to know exactly (the code) on how the communication between the app and a linux based server on the web needs to be established. Right now, there's only a CSV file (or an EXCEL file - which one's better to parse? How to decide?) there.
Also, when the CSV file is up to date, I wouldn't want it to download the file again. How to prevent it?
As I said, I am new - so please be patient.
Thanks
If you are new to this and want to develop something fast, why do it the hardest way, in java? There are so many easy toolkits out there, e.g. RFO.Basic, you will be amazed how much you can achieve, fast, that way.
(You asked several questions) Easiest to parse? If you don't have Excel installed on your Android device, the CSV is of course easier to parse, needing only text tools. However, if you have a choice of formats, why not use XML? If you have never worked with XML, there is a little learning curve, but there are lots of tutorials on the web. After that, you'll never want to go back to CSV.
Your last question: how to prevent download of unchanged file? Is this about a big file? In that case start with quickly downloading the hash (checksum) of the file, so that the client can decide if the file has changed.

Runtime resource files with PlayN

Working on a game that would like to allow users to select different character skins using PlayN (targeting Android as first platform). But these character skins will be made available later on (and due to their size, player may not want to download ALL skins). So rather than create a large bundle with all skins, is there a way for PlayN to access different resource files at runtime? We can setup a server backend for players to browse the latest available skins.
Any help/pointer is greatly appreciated.
You can use Assets.getRemoteImage to load images remotely.
There is currently no way to cache the downloaded images, which makes this non-optimal for your purposes, but I'm going to add support for caching the downloaded images which should make it work reasonably well if you use texture atlases and don't have a ton of images to download.
If you do need to download dozens or hundreds of images in one fell swoop, then you'll need to write custom per-backend code to handle that (and you'll have to give up using the HTML backend, because it cannot do things like download a zip file and unpack it into local storage).

Android App to access locally stores files, PDF, HTML and video

We have a mobile workforce using Android Galaxy tabs and use the MobiControl MDM product to sync detailed briefing files to and from the devices on a constant basis.
Rather than having the user search through a sea of irrelevant briefs in order to find the one they want, and to provide a nicer more activity specific UI, I would like to create an app which allows a user to tap a client from a list and then show links to the relevant files plus custom content such as recent news and summaries of activity.
I started to create locally stored HTML files (saved on the internal sdcard) with the idea of creating an app to access them using webviewer but have ran into a few problems...
1) What is the best way to access files that are stored on the sdcard using webviewer? loadData? string?
2) Although the files will be stored in client specific folders, the file names will change on a ongoing basis and these ever changing file names should be the titles of the links to allow the user to identify what they need.
Still very much at the preliminary stages of thinking and r&d so suggestions on the best route to take to achieve my goal is very much appreciated.
Ad
1) What is the best way to access files that are stored on the sdcard using webviewer? loadData? string?
loadUrl() should work.
BTW, your item "2)" is not a question.

File extension for Book App iPhone and Android

For the first time I am building a book app. I am developing the app so that you can pick from one - 5 books and buy the book as an in app purchase. I am using phonegap to build the app.
My question is what file format do I need to use for the actual books for iPhone? and what file format do I need for Android?
I need to prepare the file of the actual book and I need to know what extension they should be in to properly function. thanks!
You can use any one out of .epub, .mobi or .pdf.
In .pdf files Adobe has addressed the drawback of fixed screen size by adding a re-flow facility to its Acrobat Reader software. Most good PDF software now supports reflow so this limitation is one best left in the past.
Here are few links on same
PDF
Comparison_of_e-book_formats
Hope this help you.
I think you should look into the open standards like epub or mobi. PDF I wouldn't recommend, because it's very static and doesn't scale well. (e.g. a page is a page, regardless of the screen size)

PDF reading on Android

I have to make an application that should capable of reading PDF documents on Android device. Actually I do not want my app to be dependent on other apps to read the PDF file.
I had gone through the questions that are asked here and at some other places also. They all directly or indirectly using third party app.
Is there any API or something similar is available through which I can implement reading of PDF files directly in my app? How about converting the PDF document to PNG image? But the PDF-PNG method wont let users select the texts.
Any suggestions?
Thanks
There exists an library from Adobe that you can use. Its based on the NDK and you need to do the wrapping all by yourself. Its also extremely expensive, basically nothing for a small firm/single developer but for bigger companies. Afaik the license is not only expensive but also annual based, so you need to pay for it in every year...
There are other libraries, basically open source. Some of them have good performance but a lack of functionality (most of them based on NDK, too). I found only one pure "java" library but the performance was more than worse (loading time 10sec for a page and more).
There are three possibilities you should consider:
Using an external application, so you just need to implement the library of your PDF documents
You write everything by yourself including a pdf reader part
You create a middle "tier" where you convert your PDF into PNGs or JPG (I prefer PNG for better quality). The much better performance comes with a lack of features.
I'm currently developing a complex application like mentioned in 3. but I can't go into details, sorry.
I would definitely recommend the Qoppa stuff on Android.

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