Database Develop

[Q] Is any EReader for WP7 can access txt / pdb file in storage (SD card)

Is anyone know where can find a Ereader for WP7 that can access txt/PDB file in SD card / Storage?
Thanks.

freda
sor far I dont know of any ebook reader that can access your sd cards to search for ebooks saved on it but...
have a look here: Ebook Reader - Freda, you also can find it in the market place. With freda you cannot directly access or copy eboods on your sd card, but you can access a dropbox account from wich you can download any placed ebooks there. According to the developer only EPUB (DRM-free), HTML and TXT format are supported. Might not be exactly what you are looking for but its a start.

folumi said:
sor far I dont know of any ebook reader that can access your sd cards to search for ebooks saved on it but...
have a look here: Ebook Reader - Freda, you also can find it in the market place. With freda you cannot directly access or copy eboods on your sd card, but you can access a dropbox account from wich you can download any placed ebooks there. According to the developer only EPUB (DRM-free), HTML and TXT format are supported. Might not be exactly what you are looking for but its a start.
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I also search and try some readers in market place but no luck to find out directly method to access file in storge
But i will try the dropbox method you suggested.
Thanks folumi

from my trials, Amazon Kindle reader is the best ebook reader for WP7 out there - in terms of performance, UI, functionality, etc. I converted all my epub books to Kindle's format and side-loaded them on my WP7. Works like a charm...just perfect
If this is an option or u, then take a look at the side-loading Kindle books thread and you're good to go.
Cheers

To answer the original question: actually there is no way to access 'SD Card/Storage' on Windows Phone 7. The storage card is formatted in a weird way, and it not accessible via USB synch. When you connect your phone to your PC using Zune, you can synch media files (music and video) onto it, but you can't control whether those files go on to the SD Card or into the phone's internal memory; the OS will just put them somewhere in its accessible memory space, and link them into the phone's Media Hub folder.
The Zune USB synch system and the WP7 media player don't understand any ebook formats, so there is no point putting EPUB (or MOBI, or PDB or PDF ... ) files into the Zune media folder - because they will get synched into the Media Hub folder on the phone, and the only program (WP7 Media Player) that has access to that folder does not know how to read those file types.
So you have to use an App (like Freda, Amazon or ABookReader) that comes with some way of side-loading ebooks into the app's own folders on the phone. Amazon does this using the Kindle side-load function, Freda and ABookReader can fetch books from DropBox, OPDS catalogs and web-sites.
I recommend Freda, but then I would, wouldn't I (see sig.)

Jim Chapman said:
To answer the original question: actually there is no way to access 'SD Card/Storage' on Windows Phone 7. The storage card is formatted in a weird way, and it not accessible via USB synch. When you connect your phone to your PC using Zune, you can synch media files (music and video) onto it, but you can't control whether those files go on to the SD Card or into the phone's internal memory; the OS will just put them somewhere in its accessible memory space, and link them into the phone's Media Hub folder.
The Zune USB synch system and the WP7 media player don't understand any ebook formats, so there is no point putting EPUB (or MOBI, or PDB or PDF ... ) files into the Zune media folder - because they will get synched into the Media Hub folder on the phone, and the only program (WP7 Media Player) that has access to that folder does not know how to read those file types.
So you have to use an App (like Freda, Amazon or ABookReader) that comes with some way of side-loading ebooks into the app's own folders on the phone. Amazon does this using the Kindle side-load function, Freda and ABookReader can fetch books from DropBox, OPDS catalogs and web-sites.
I recommend Freda, but then I would, wouldn't I (see sig.)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've been looking for you, in fact...
Foremost, let me thank you for the extraordinary devotion you've put into Freda, moreover that its actually free. I truly do appreciate it, as many others who commend it without hesitation.
I also would like to suggest to you that you consider/solicit assistance from some of XDA's finest graphics/ui designers, for example, EL Condor or the team currently responsible for the GTX theme. Freda is a testament to your FINE programming skills, but I believe it would benefit greatly from UI overhaul and aesthetic improvements.
I hope you consider this seriously as a sincere advice - I have nothing in my heart other than an earnest desire to see your initiative and hardwork prosper beyond its current stage.
With kindliest regards...

I use Freda. To get books on there (in any format), I use Calibre to convert to epub and then use the built in content server. Freda can access this over wifi.

indeed, freda is prolly the most promising e-reader for wp7. it's not quite usable yet, though. it has great features but desperately needs some ui design work. i really miss a decent ereader, so i'm anxiously awaiting an update.

ebook reader
really no alternatives???

yh ABookReader seems quite good although not customizable like Freda, Freda is like how it was on WinMo way too slow,this time it looks uglier...no offense Jim but every wp7 has 1ghz, books should be loading alot faster like in ABookReader.. but like everyone else agrees Freda's got lots of potential and with a little more performance improvements i wouldn't actually mind paying for it

Like I said, I tried "all" the ebook readers available in the marketplace (both paid & free). The BEST one is Amazon Kindle app. Here is why:
- Very streamlined, smooth & polished experience.
- No clutter of confusing options.
- Books load very fast, and you don't need to wait while book is loading & indexed.
- Only con is that you have to sideload your books. Check out the thread on it in this same section.
As for the rest, here are my 2 cents;
ABookReader, Freda, and iSilo all suffer from one or more of these:
- Jittery performance - lots of stuttering.
- Very slow to load & index apps and you can't really do anything while that's happening.
- inconsistent experience: too many options that are scattered all over the place, and they all invariably lack the familiar, content-centric design of Metro UI
- Getting books into the library is actually NOT as simple as you might think.
Cheers
I hope this helps both users & devs.

Freda performance and UI
Hi all,
And thanks for the commentary on Freda. A couple of thoughts:
1) UI design:
I'll be happy to receive UI design advice, but it does raise IP issues, because I do expect to get some revenue from Freda (advertising, licensing to book publishers, etc.) and I do not want to give away a share of that revenue. And I can quite sympathise with a UI expert who doesn't want to give their work to me free of charge.
That said, any UI designer who does want to give me free, no-obligation advice is welcome to. To be useful, such advice needs to be detailed and specific, and implementable in WP7 XAML/C#. That last point is actually a very strong constraint; I have tried out all sorts of slick design ideas that look neat in principle, but give unacceptable performance on a real WP7 device.
2) Performance:
This is an area that I continue to work on. But EPUB files will always present something of a challenge, because opening them involves decompressing a big ZIP archive and parsing large-ish XHTML files. Amazon Kindle actually has it easier here, because the MOBI format is easier to open and parse quickly.
One point to note: I have optimised Freda for the use-case of "I want to resume reading a book that I was reading before". The first time you open a book, you will wait some time before you can see the first page (up to 30 seconds) while it downloads and unpacks the book, and you'll get jittery performance for a few minutes while the whole book is processed. But on subsequently opening the same book, you should be reading smoothly within 5-10 seconds.
Cheers,
Jim

File Manager?

Has anyone found out if there is a File Manager? One which can access network shares on a wlan? Or one available as an app?
If no, sticking with Android...

There is no local File Manager. Apps that can access remote Network Shares are already available on WP7.5. Given that WP8 allows Apps to launch other Apps that support certain file types you could use one of those Apps (when they are updated to WP8) to grab a Video from your NAS-Box and launch it in the built in Video Player.

StevieBallz said:
... you could use one of those Apps (when they are updated to WP8) to grab a Video from your NAS-Box and launch it in the built in Video Player.
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Great, thanks for the info. Could not find it googling. And you guessed what I'd like local and/or network share access for: playing media at home from the NAS. Will need to check out Windows Phone 8 at a store, maybe upgrade the phone hardware soon.

hardy81 said:
Great, thanks for the info. Could not find it googling. And you guessed what I'd like local and/or network share access for: playing media at home from the NAS. Will need to check out Windows Phone 8 at a store, maybe upgrade the phone hardware soon.
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Most NAS boxes currently support UPnP or DLNA servers. This can be played through various software. Before jumping in I'd still wait to see if the required Apps are updated to allow for a seemless transition because at release the Apps are almost certain to not have been updated (given that the SDK was just released yesterday). So the possibility is there but at the moment the Software isn't really.
Might be worth checking wether your Media Files are currently stored in a format supported by the phone, given that similar to iOS WP is pretty picky when it comes to file formats.

Windows Phone 8 questions

Based on what I've seen today it still has no:
- system dictionary for definition lookup(only for predictive text). The Kindle App does nothing when I press & hold on a word, unlike on my iOS device.
- hi-speed media scrubber for music. you know the little round knob on the progress bar that allows you to move the time index to any point in a song or video.
- unified search aka Local Search(apps, music, videos, contacts, emails)

The music app is pretty bad. I had several attempts to build a proper one, but the developer can not interact with the music library, other than playing existing playlists or songs.
You can't make custom playlists(actually you can, but it very, very, VERY complicated and prone to error and simply does not worth the shot), change the order of music inside the list and stuff like that for a third party app, and that sucks.
There are no new APIs for XNA (which is used to access the songs in the phone) so there is no way of making one.
If there is something I can say it is not right on WP, that's the music app.

mcosmin222 said:
The music app is pretty bad. I had several attempts to build a proper one, but the developer can not interact with the music library, other than playing existing playlists or songs.
You can't make custom playlists(actually you can, but it very, very, VERY complicated and prone to error and simply does not worth the shot), change the order of music inside the list and stuff like that for a third party app, and that sucks.
There are no new APIs for XNA (which is used to access the songs in the phone) so there is no way of making one.
If there is something I can say it is not right on WP, that's the music app.
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Does that imply that there´s the same limitation for video? ...and ...as a result of that a videoplayer with support for more codecs is very unlikely to ever happen?

TarKin said:
Does that imply that there´s the same limitation for video? ...and ...as a result of that a videoplayer with support for more codecs is very unlikely to ever happen?
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The File-Assosciation feature in WP8 works like this. Your App can define certain file endings (e.g. .mkv) which it can handle. If those are found on a SD-Card or downloaded the according registered App is then started for those files. The App can then do whatever it is it does as long as it keeps to reading the file (the original can't be manipulated although the app could copy it into it's isolated storage and manipulate it their). But there is one Caveat - there are several file extensions that are reserved for the OS which means that 3rd party Apps can't register for them. One of them is .mp3. Avi is another one of those (you can look them up in MSDN).
.mkv on the other hand is an extension that Windows Phone itself does not know so people could build Apps that would be able to consume them. Given that we now have Native Code capabilities writing a decoder or recompiling one written for another platform is possible, though it remains to be seen wether anyone will put the effort into it.

StevieBallz said:
The File-Assosciation feature in WP8 works like this. Your App can define certain file endings (e.g. .mkv) which it can handle. If those are found on a SD-Card or downloaded the according registered App is then started for those files. The App can then do whatever it is it does as long as it keeps to reading the file (the original can't be manipulated although the app could copy it into it's isolated storage and manipulate it their). But there is one Caveat - there are several file extensions that are reserved for the OS which means that 3rd party Apps can't register for them. One of them is .mp3. Avi is another one of those (you can look them up in MSDN).
.mkv on the other hand is an extension that Windows Phone itself does not know so people could build Apps that would be able to consume them. Given that we now have Native Code capabilities writing a decoder or recompiling one written for another platform is possible, though it remains to be seen wether anyone will put the effort into it.
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Click to collapse
ok. i was mainly into psp dev. before, and never had a winphone in my hands so far.
but if you say that´s possible, then i´ll go for the lumia920, reg. for a dev account and see what i can do

StevieBallz said:
The File-Assosciation feature in WP8 works like this. Your App can define certain file endings (e.g. .mkv) which it can handle. If those are found on a SD-Card or downloaded the according registered App is then started for those files. The App can then do whatever it is it does as long as it keeps to reading the file (the original can't be manipulated although the app could copy it into it's isolated storage and manipulate it their). But there is one Caveat - there are several file extensions that are reserved for the OS which means that 3rd party Apps can't register for them. One of them is .mp3. Avi is another one of those (you can look them up in MSDN).
.mkv on the other hand is an extension that Windows Phone itself does not know so people could build Apps that would be able to consume them. Given that we now have Native Code capabilities writing a decoder or recompiling one written for another platform is possible, though it remains to be seen wether anyone will put the effort into it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I haven't had the chance to look over what the native code can do and what it can't do, but it is to be expected that it will have limitations, just like C# has.

You can render images (obviously) and output them using Direct3D which is pretty much what e.g. VLC does on the Desktop. You have complete read access to files on the SD-Card for your registered filetypes. MKV could be registered, MP3 or AVI could not (because they are in use by the system already).
But of course you would not be able to offload processing to the dedicated decoding units like with the built-in Codecs, which will mean more processor utilization and worse battery life. Still as a programmer I don't see too many actual road blocks (but it's a bumpy road to do this to be sure).
@TarKin: before you drop the money perhaps it would be best to start looking into the SDK. I'm not an expert in Multimedia-programming by any measure so you might be able to spot problems in there beforehand.
If you're still going for a L920 with these uncertainties for your use-case: welcome to the family, I'm anxiously awaiting mine.

[Q] Are WiFi Drives supported in WP8?

I've been looking into WiFi drives recently (with a particular eye on the "HyperDrive CloudFTP" to make use of a couple of external hard drives). Are these supported by Windows Phone 8?
Has anyone tried one with a WP8 device (presumably the web-based support works at least)?

HOD said:
I've been looking into WiFi drives recently (with a particular eye on the "HyperDrive CloudFTP" to make use of a couple of external hard drives). Are these supported by Windows Phone 8?
Has anyone tried one with a WP8 device (presumably the web-based support works at least)?
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All WP7 devices had a UPnP/DLNA Client on Board so you will be able to access the data using that route. The Web App should work as well. Aside from that the device seems to support FTP and SMB as well. There are Apps on WP7 that allow accessing those although they will have to be updated for WP8 before you can use them to share data they retrieve from the WiFi-Drive in other Apps.
The system itself has no direct support for Windows Explorer like functionality.

StevieBallz said:
All WP7 devices had a UPnP/DLNA Client on Board so you will be able to access the data using that route. The Web App should work as well. Aside from that the device seems to support FTP and SMB as well. There are Apps on WP7 that allow accessing those although they will have to be updated for WP8 before you can use them to share data they retrieve from the WiFi-Drive in other Apps.
The system itself has no direct support for Windows Explorer like functionality.
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The only dedicated app I've seen (so far) is the Western Digital "WD2Go" which only supports about 3 devices.
Presumably there are more generic DNLA apps.

HOD said:
The only dedicated app I've seen (so far) is the Western Digital "WD2Go" which only supports about 3 devices.
Presumably there are more generic DNLA apps.
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The HTC one is called Connected Media. The Samsung one is called AllShare. I don't know at the moment what Nokia calls theirs but there is one as well.

Could this be a awesome idea? What do you think?

Saw this redit
""
Anyway since the SDK is released for Chromecast, hasn't google missed a trick?
Is this a good idea
Why doesn't google make Chromecast app be with google drive? I could upload all my files, movies, torrrents, photos and would love to have them ALL in one place and be able to cast them?
I would really consider upgrading the storage and paying for more storage, they would be able to get more $£€¥... IMO
So do you think google should do google drive Chromecast, if no why not?
Same thing with that ^ but again would like to see DRopbox have the ablitlty to stream. Things from the cloud.
Pros of this - limited space on phone storage, so drive can be used No need to run a server 24/7. Save electricity costs Assuming its cheaper considering that ^ Can view word files, homework, PDF , on big screen
Post your views would you like to see this?"""""
I live that idea, could be very useful. Your views ? Should google do this

Krisshp said:
Anyway since the SDK is released for Chromecast, hasn't google missed a trick?
Is this a good idea
Why doesn't google make Chromecast app be with google drive? I could upload all my files, movies, torrrents, photos and would love to have them ALL in one place and be able to cast them?
...
I live that idea, could be very useful. Your views ? Should google do this
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Click to collapse
Avia can pull from Dropbox
AllCast can pull from both Dropbox and Google Drive
RealPlayer Cloud can pull from their cloud
If Google was going to do this, they would have already - because they didn't need to wait for the SDK release - they could make any Chromecast app they wanted to whenever they wanted to.
They could just do a straight dump/retrieve from Drive to Chromecast, but without a player app that can handle that file type, Chromecast will just get the file and not know what to do with it, just like having your browser download a file that your computer/phone doesn't have an app to open.
The trick is in the player app, and Google for the most part leaves it to the app developers to develop.
The business aspect is that if Google starts developing lots of apps for Chromecast, developers may shy away from Chromecast development in fear that Google will do what their (paid) app is doing for free.

bhiga said:
Avia can pull from Dropbox
AllCast can pull from both Dropbox and Google Drive
RealPlayer Cloud can pull from their cloud
If Google was going to do this, they would have already - because they didn't need to wait for the SDK release - they could make any Chromecast app they wanted to whenever they wanted to.
They could just do a straight dump/retrieve from Drive to Chromecast, but without a player app that can handle that file type, Chromecast will just get the file and not know what to do with it, just like having your browser download a file that your computer/phone doesn't have an app to open.
The trick is in the player app, and Google for the most part leaves it to the app developers to develop.
The business aspect is that if Google starts developing lots of apps for Chromecast, developers may shy away from Chromecast development in fear that Google will do what their (paid) app is doing for free.
Click to expand...
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Oh didn't know that. Yeah I get what you mean.
I'm guessing you must use avia, all cast or real player ,
Could I ask which one do you prefer the most ?
How much online storage in GB do real player offer?? Edit 2GB!!!!! Is that it????
Does it support the other 50gb cloud storage , mega???
Thanks

You can get an additional 3GB (I think) from Real by completing a few tasks (just like Dropbox).
But I don't put my media online, it's all local. Still working out how to handle it, to be honest.
There's definitely lots of room in the Chromecast space.
-= this post enhanced with bonus mobile typos =-

I don't use Google Drive, so this may be idiotic - but can you paste the url directly into LocalCast and go from there?
https://sites.google.com/site/gdocs2direct/