[maemo-developers] GSoC 2010, eBook reader

[From: Juhana Jauhiainen]

Hi, I’m Juhana Jauhiainen a student of Media Engineering at the
Ostrobothnian University of Applied Sciences (Finland). I’m interested
in developing an ebook-reader for Maemo with a touch-friendly UI.

In my studies I’ve focused on programming, UI-design and graphic
design. For the past year and a half I’ve been working at my
universities R&D lab developing applications with C++, Python and C#.
The last 8 months I’ve been focused on developing multi-touch
applications for large optical multi-touch screens and tables, most of
them with C++ and Qt.

I got introduced to Maemo when my friend bought an N810 in early 2009
and I then started learning Maemo development mostly by making Python
scripts and small pyGTK applications. Now I have a N900 and when I
have free time I love to tinker with it and I also have developed a
few simple widgets. My contract with the university ends in May and it
would be great to do some open-source work for Maemo during summer.

Here's some of my thoughts about the eBook reader:

As suggested in the ideas list Okular could be a good starting point
for the project. It supports a variety of formats(PDF, CHM, DjVu,
Epub, CBR/CBZ) and is based on Qt and KDE libs. At least Okular could
provide a reference on how to construct the application but of course
it would be great to be able to support all the formats Okular can
load and render. A lot of the features can't be brought to a mobile
application due to screen size and other constraints but getting all
the features shouldn't be the goal of a GsoC-size project anyway.
Looking at the Okular source, most of the KDE dependancies in seem to
be in the UI code.

The UI could maybe be built around Qt:s Graphics View Framwork. I
think the Graphics View  Framework can be used to build really nice
and fluid UIs. An example of this could be the TwitterBox/TweeGo
application, though it uses a lot of customized UI elements. Most of
the multi-touch applications I've built have also been based around
the QGraphicsView so I have some experience with it.

Since GSoC ends in August and by then the first MeeGo device(with
multitouch) should be right around the corner, I think it might be
worth it to implement some basic multitouch functionality. With 4.6 Qt
now has support for multitouch and gestures. Using gestures is
relatively easy and Qt has support for standard pan, swipe and pinch
gestures which can be used with QWidgets and QgraphicObjects. These
are standard gestures for navigation and should be a part of the
application. I haven't tested the gestures on the N900 but in case
they work a custom gesture similar to the one used for zooming in
MicroB could be nice to have.

Here's small list of other features:
• Portrait mode
• Paging for formats like plain text/html, with maybe a percentage
based progress indication.
• Kinetic scrolling
• Fullscreen mode
• Text search
• Bookmarks

Overall though I think it would be wise to stick to implementing a
basic UI, touch friendly navigation and good format support without
adding too much features.
Ok I maybe got a little carried away here :)

I'd like to hear some thoughts and comments about my ideas. I'll try
to make a draft of my proposal by monday.

Juhana Jauhiainen
parasight