onlyinamerica / glancereader

RSVP reader for Android.

Glance-Android

Glance is a RSVP reader for Android 4.0.4+ (API 15). Glance also includes a curated collection of feeds for your reading pleasure thanks to work by Rich Jones. The Glance reading collection is also available at glance.wtf, because silly TLDs are great.

You can share URLs to Glance from your favorite web browser, or open .epubs on your device's external storage directly.

Available on Google Play under the name Glance

Lend a hand

Some quick, incomplete thoughts on what's next.

Enhancements

• Find some nice monospace fonts
• More sophisticated pivot choosing
• Better handle "Chapters" with epublib, or some other epub library
  • This seems unreasonably hard.

Features

• Read text from clipboard

Building

0. Make sure you've installed the following from the Android SDK Manager before building:

   • Android SDK Build-tools 19.0.2
   • Android SDK tools 22.3
   • SDK Platform 19
   • Android Support Repository 4

1. Define the ANDROID_HOME environmental variable as your Android SDK location.

   If you need help check out this guide.

2. Build!

   To build an .apk from this directory, make sure ./gradlew is executable and run:

    $ ./gradlew assemble
   

   The resulting .apk will be availble in ./app/build/apk.

Thanks

In no partiular order. Thanks everybody!

• Rich Jones for adding the curated feeds & community features.
• andrewgiang for contributing a re-usable library based on the early project, and other contributions
• defer for refactoring that made it easier to support multiple formats
• epublib by psiegman (LGPL)
• rcarlsen for work adopting for Glass
• mneimsky for work adopting for Glass

License

GPLv3

glancereader's Issues

Handle different file formats

Possible formats:

• pdf
• txt
• mobi

Guava Event Bus not optimized for Android

I would suggest using either Green Robot's EventBus or Square's Otto.

Text is too big

I've just updated to the latest code c7eea6b and have tested it on Huawei g330 which has 320dp*533dp; also a Nexus 7. In both cases, either in portrait or landscape the lines wrap. I set the text size to 24sp for all the buckets and that seems fine.

License Question

Why use a restrictive license GPLv3? If its because of the epub integration, consider licensing the library under something less restrictive and keep the app under GPLv3.

Rewind, jump, and scrub

Hi!

Just downloaded and installed the APK. Amazing stuff. Not sure if this is on your plan already, but there seem to be a few missing functions, which I think would improve the overall experience.

The most important is a rewind function. Being able to jump back a sentence or paragraph would be awesome. The second one is to be able to jump to any point in the book / chapter. (Scroll bar?) And the third would be what I'd call a "scrub" function, where the speed can temporarily be sped up and slowed down. This would behave similarly to an audio scrubbing tool. Here's a good example:
http://www.ehow.com/video_4976209_pro-tools-tips-scrubber-tool.html

(I'm a UX designer by trade, and I'd be happy to help out on this project if needed)

Thanks! Loren

invalid resource directory name (ic_launcher.png)

I'm not a specialist, and i don't know the implications for this message but appear in Ecplipse (i'm trying to build the apk. noob here 0.0)

http://i558.photobucket.com/albums/ss26/fabianhtml/Capturadepantalla2014-03-24alas161204.png

WPM Setting Problems

The WPM selector is very finicky!

There are two distinct problems:

The first is that sometimes, it doesn't properly store WPM. I'll change it from 500 to my preferred 800, and the setting will not save. The next time I use Glance, it'll be back at 500.

The second problem is that occasionally, the WPM will be reset to 100WPM. This is a particularly annoying bug. Since 100WPM is the "special message" speed, I assume this is related to that. I think we should get rid of the Touch to Start thing anyway, as when I did some basic user testing, they didn't understand that and tapped at it multiple times and I had to help them to get it started. It should just start when the article is loaded.

Intents: register for ACTION_VIEW on .epub

Allow OpenSpritz to handle ACTION_VIEW Intents for epubs.

Build: Missing SECRETS.java

There are several unresolved references to the SECRETS class. I noticed inside the root .gitignore that SECRETS.java is included to be ignored. Is SECRETS.java something we need to fetch/generate from somewhere else or does it need to be included in the repo?

Sample Build Output:
/app/src/main/java/pro/dbro/glance/activities/CommunityActivity.java:21: error: cannot find symbol
import pro.dbro.glance.SECRETS;

WPM Inaccurate?

I feel like WPM is inaccurate. This is just anecdotal, but I'm getting through a book much slower than expected.

How do we currently test the WPM?

Intelligent pause after symbol

Actually the app makes a pause after a dot, even if it represents an abbreviation. For example in the following sentence, the app will do a pause after the first dot.

Mr. Smith uses Glance Reader.

I think you could create a list of "known" words and ignore the pause when you encounter one.

Why not use existing ebook readers?

Why reinvent the wheel? I know of at least 2 GPL'd ebook readers for Android (Cool Reader and FBReader). Why not modify one of them to have an OpenSpritz overlay?

sharing webpage broken

I know it was used to work in an earlier Version! General bug vor is it just me?

Legal issues and cooperation

Hey there, I was looking for a way to contact you privately, however I didn't find anything.
I was inspired by your work, couldn't understand your code though. Therefore I made my own interpretation at https://github.com/arpheno/dontblink which features a more natural way to choose the wpm (Numberpicker), preview bars, and a seekbar to enable users to go back if they just missed a sentence.
I'd like you to check out my app and explore the further possibilities of working together and give me some advice what I should do if I'd like to publish it under GPL to the play store.
my email adress is [email protected]

Better detection of chapters. Actually one chapter have division that really don't exist

Add F-Droid Compatibility

I would love to see this app on F-Droid as I don't have Google Play. I notice that devices without Play Store and Google Services cannot run Glance Reader. As a novice to source code I have not taken the time to learn how to build. If I understand correctly the outcome would be the same as if I used an APK downloader and downloaded from Google Play.

Is it possible to change this following compatibility issue with F-Droid? It seems more F-Droid users are wishing to have Glance Reader added as requested here: https://f-droid.org/forums/topic/glance-reader/

"Some jars and an user maven repo are being used and have to be replaced. Also, they are using API keys for diffbot, billing and HockeySDK" - This issue seem to keep it from happening. :)

Build failure using gradlew: "Could not resolve all dependencies for configuration ':app:_debugCompile'."

Trying to build on Linux using gradlew, the build fails with the following error:

<snip>
FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

* What went wrong:
A problem occurred configuring project ':app'.
> Could not resolve all dependencies for configuration ':app:_debugCompile'.
   > Could not find any version that matches com.android.support:appcompat-v7:+.
     Required by:
         OpenSpritz-Android:app:unspecified
   > Could not find any version that matches com.android.support:support-v4:+.
     Required by:
         OpenSpritz-Android:app:unspecified

* Try:
Run with --stacktrace option to get the stack trace. Run with --info or --debug option to get more log output.

BUILD FAILED

To solve this, I had to use the Android SDK Manager to install "Android Support Repository, revision 4". Please consider adding this to the documentation on building your app.

Usage on Glass

It would be nice if the UI were compatible with the Glass interface. I believe that the Glass touchscreen swipes are passed as Tab / Shift-tab. Would it be difficult to enable tab cycling among the UI controls?

FWIW, the stock build instructions made an apk which successfully runs on my Glass (XE12).

Readability API for cleaning up the source material

A possible filter for content would be the great Readability API. It does such a good job of cleaning up websites and ending up with just very clean text:
https://www.readability.com/developers/api

Another option would be to just include wallabag's cleanup algorithm:
https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/tree/master/inc/poche

Color of text in dark theme (not precisely an issue)

That would be great specially for AMOLED display. In the dark theme the text could be an grey color and not white. The white is more exhausting

Use google play books as source

I don't know how that would work, or even if it would be possible, but it would be totally awesome to be able to choose a bock i already have in my device instead of having to select it from the SD card.

Use New JankyGlance Endpoints

Aight, I finally ported all the Yahoo! Pipes shit to Zappa so Glance should work again.

Just need to replace all the Pipe end points to these:

https://1yae9gfwab.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dev/40805955111ac2e85631facfb362f067

Related: https://github.com/Miserlou/JankyGlance

Give option to hide icons and notification bar

Great work guys, seriously. Apart from the rewind function that others have mentioned, what I'd really appreciate most would be ability to hide the system notification bar, and the three icons at the top of the screen. These are distracting, especially when using the black theme in a dark room on an AMOLED display. Also, it would be awesome if I could choose where the spritz window was located on the screen in case it was more comfortable to hold/read somewhere else. Thanks!

missing maven-metadata.xml]

When compiling (under linux) I receive the following error:

[anv@server OpenSpritz-Android (master)]$ ./gradlew --info
Starting Build
Settings evaluated using settings file '/home/anv/git/OpenSpritz-Android/settings.gradle'.
Projects loaded. Root project using build file '/home/anv/git/OpenSpritz-Android/build.gradle'.
Included projects: [root project 'OpenSpritz-Android', project ':app', project ':lib']
Evaluating root project 'OpenSpritz-Android' using build file '/home/anv/git/OpenSpritz-Android/build.gradle'.
Evaluating project ':app' using build file '/home/anv/git/OpenSpritz-Android/app/build.gradle'.
Evaluating project ':lib' using build file '/home/anv/git/OpenSpritz-Android/lib/build.gradle'.
Resource missing. [HTTP GET: http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/android/support/appcompat-v7/maven-metadata.xml]
Resource missing. [HTTP GET: http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/android/support/appcompat-v7/]

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

* What went wrong:
A problem occurred configuring project ':app'.
> A problem occurred configuring project ':lib'.
   > Could not resolve all dependencies for configuration ':lib:_debugCompile'.
      > Could not find any version that matches com.android.support:appcompat-v7:+.
        Required by:
            OpenSpritz-Android:lib:unspecified

* Try:
Run with --stacktrace option to get the stack trace. Run with --debug option to get more log output.

BUILD FAILED

Total time: 5.451 secs

Better separation amongst punctuation

A simple — or – usually kills it since shows the entire thing, usually taking two lines.

better split after point and other symbols (. ! ? ' " : / - | etc.) (even in the last apk update on 03/10)

Unsupported file

Haven't been able to open any epubs, from my own library and various internet sources.

Text is not Right-Weighted

Text is currently centered. To be a true "Spritz" view, words should never have more than 3 or 4 letters to the left of the pivot point, regardless of word length.

I think this should be doable by adding this logic to the printWord function in Spritzer.java

Support for local PDF documents

Hello!

Firstly congrats on a superb App, I found it last night and am enjoying it very much.

Before starting work on a pull request I'd like to seek your opinion regarding PDF support.

I'd like to suggest adding support for PDF docs (in addition to epub) using iText or similar for PDF-text extraction with some minimal filtering to remove noisy lines (like mathematical equations in scholarly articles).

Thoughts?
Chris

Add link to Play Store in README

nt

Simplified TextView Wrapper for OpenSpritz

I created a simplified TextView wrapper that encapsulates the Spritzer object for easy integration.

It can be found here: SpritzTextView

If you would like I can submit a pull-request to your repo.

Build the app

Hi, this app is pretty exciting and i would like to test but cannot build it in my computer. Could you please add a direct link to download the apk ?

Splitting larger words

Spritz shows no more than 13 characters at a time. Should consider adding this in at a later time.

400: Invalid request cannot build with gradlew

400: Invalid request when running the build command:

./gradlew assemble

Here is the full error:

Could not GET 'https://github.com/karussell/mvnrepo/raw/master/releases/com/android/support/appcompat-v7/'. Received status code 400 from server: Bad Request

Big List of ePubs That Don't Work

Bummer thread ahoy. Counterpart to this: Miserlou/Glance-Bookmarklet#8

The Book - Alan W. Watts.epub
http://ge.tt/api/1/files/6LvtC3O1/0/blob?download

This just returns an "[Obj]" Unicode symbol.

chapter repeat

can you fix that the chapter ale repaeting.
should go to the next chapter.
thx