Tumbling and feeding

I've come to use Tumblr to post things most of the time now.

All of my tumblr'ing is mixed in to my main feed. If you care enough to bother, please subscribe to that feed. Or you can just view my tumblr blog at http://gschueler.tumblr.com.

If you're new to RSS feeds and feed reading, I would suggest you check out this video: RSS in Plain English.

And you can begin by signing up for a Google.com account at the Google Reader page.

eReading on iPhone

I'm interested in the capabilities of the iPhone as a form of eBook reading device. I'd love to be able to have an easy way to read the thousands of public domain books available from places like Project Gutenberg.

Here is a brief look at how the iPhone works as an eReader for three different formats: website, online book, and pdf.

I created a perl script a while back that would take a .txt from the Gutenberg project, parse it into chapters, and generate a set of Markdown formatted files (1 per chapter) with embedded links, as well as a Table of Contents page. Using my old Markdown cgi script to view this in a web browser made it somewhat easier to read the text, but I think if I adapted this especially for the iPhone it might turn out great.

Things I'd like my eReader to do:

• Remember how far you've read so you don't have to make a new bookmark each time you return to the book.
• look good
• make it easy to navigate the entire book, and within a chapter (if it is broken up into pages.)
• have an easy way to find new books

Limitations of the iPhone that complicate matters:

1. no user SDK for iPhone native apps: only web-based apps can be created right now
2. apparently iPhone doesn't trigger javascript "scroll" events, or doesn't allow you to get the scroll position
3. not sure how well/if javascript-created cookies work

Solutions to these problems:

1. web-based actually makes a lot of sense for an eBook that is not in PDF format.
2. each chapter of the book will have to be broken up into smaller sections ("pages") to be able to remember where you left off. the granularity of this is TBD
3. will have to wait and see, unless someone can answer this for me

I don't have an iPhone (yet), but that hasn't stopped me from doing some research. The iPhoneDevCamp has provided some answers to my questions, and Joe Hewitt has also created iUI, which seems like a perfect way to fit iPhone-like navigation and interface over this kind of app.

I'm going to hack away at this some more during my non-existent free time, but I expect I will make more time to work on this idea after I actually get an iPhone.