ReadThemAll

Submit portable freeware that you find here. It helps if you include information like description, extraction instruction, Unicode support, whether it writes to the registry, and so on.
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maxerist
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ReadThemAll

#1 Post by maxerist »

Thanks for such a great resource. This is my first post, actually I'm the author of a program, I hope it's ok if the author of a program posts the info about it.

ReadThemAll is a e-book reader for Windows primarily designed to used in a hand-free mode. It is a Windows successor of the identically named software for PalmOS. Although it can be used as a general purpose reader, its main benefits comes from its innovative auto-scrollings, the way of reading books when you don't have to manually list pages.

I made the program with portability in mind, so if you notice something that breaks it, please, let me know.

http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=1777

Thanks

Max Vlasov,
maxerist.net

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guinness
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Re: ReadThemAll

#2 Post by guinness »

Tested: Portable
Created an .INI file and no Registry Entries, great addition and as the developer it's great you're passionate about Portable software.

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Lupo73
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Re: ReadThemAll

#3 Post by Lupo73 »

I'm testing it, but I have found some bugs during the use:
1. if I click Menu->Open->Close and than scroll with mouse or right-click on the software window, an error message appears and at the next software startup a message reports "..software interrupted unexpectedly.."
2. following the common software structure, the "Open" section could be renamed to "File" and the "File..." item could be renamed to "Open..."
3. if you right-click on window, but you don't have clicked on a text line before (in the session), instead of read "Add bookmark" and "Copy from this line..." the software show <bkm> and <cpy> items

Anyway a good idea.. I'll try to help you with tests :wink:

maxerist
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Re: ReadThemAll

#4 Post by maxerist »

Lupo73 wrote:I'm testing it, but I have found some bugs during the use:
Thanks, Lupo, agreed, fixed, version 1.2.11 on the download page.

guinness, thanks for your reply. A user e-mailed me about the way the program saved the info about the books. Actually I save rtainfo files near every book with the last used position and bookmarks. Ironically this allows the books to be portable, but one can complain that creating such files prevents the program from being portable. What are your thoughts?

Max

lyx
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Re: ReadThemAll

#5 Post by lyx »

maxerist wrote:guinness, thanks for your reply. A user e-mailed me about the way the program saved the info about the books. Actually I save rtainfo files near every book with the last used position and bookmarks. Ironically this allows the books to be portable, but one can complain that creating such files prevents the program from being portable. What are your thoughts?
Strictly speaking, it makes it non-stealth, but portable: The settings are all saved together with what they relate to (app settings in app-directory, book settings in book-directory) - if one only were concerned with "portability", then this is okay. However, another aspect of "autonomous apps", is that applications do not store personal info outside of the appdir or at least not without explicit user consent - the idea here is that:

- If you run an application on a system, and then delete that application, nothing specific to that application remains.

That is, the memory (not just RAM) of an application is sandboxed. It plays inside its own space, so if that space is removed, no traces are left.

If you want book-related settings work even if the location of the books moves, but without storing data outside of the appdir, then i'd propose the following: Identify books via some kind of fingerprint (i.e. hash), and store the settings related to those books in the appdir. If you want to go even further regarding privacy, offer the user to only keep settings of the last N books accessed (which may be 0 to disable this feature).

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Lupo73
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Re: ReadThemAll

#6 Post by Lupo73 »

I'm agree with lyx. Eventually you could consider to add an option (deselected by default), to allow user to store book info in the same book directory. But it is really better to store these info in a software subfolder, first of all because users could don't like that the app create undesired files out of its folder. Secondly it makes the software more flexible, given that user can decide to move books in other folders without need to pay attention to select and move also relative info files.
I like the idea of automatic scrolling of pages, but the default scrolling effect in my opinion is not so efficient and cause a little confusion. You could consider to use Spotlight or RTA (smooth) as default one.
A powerful feature that could be implemented is text underlining. I don't know if it is possible, but it could be very nice and you could save info about underlined text (from byte ... to byte ...) in the book info file.
What formats are supported by the app? Because could be good to support also other formats, even if this feature may needs to be discussed given that formatted texts could be more complex to be shown.

ps: it's funny that your app is named like one of mine :lol: ArcThemALL! (and exists also a DownThemAll, as extension for Firefox)

maxerist
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Re: ReadThemAll

#7 Post by maxerist »

lyx, lupo, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I agree that at least there should be a choice between types of info saving. I used hash-based identification once and maybe this system is preferable
Lupo73 wrote: I like the idea of automatic scrolling of pages, but the default scrolling effect in my opinion is not so efficient and cause a little confusion. You could consider to use Spotlight or RTA (smooth) as default one.
I see dark future for the Mixcroll mode :) (the one you mentioned as not so efficient). For RTA for PalmOS there were one part of user base that preferred RTA-general and some later - Spotlight. This one is brand-new and unfortunately has no user base at all. Just a word for it, contrary to others, this is the only one that doesn't remind me to keep up with speed, only when I completely out of sync with the current lines per minute.
Lupo73 wrote: A powerful feature that could be implemented is text underlining. I don't know if it is possible, but it could be very nice and you could save info about underlined text (from byte ... to byte ...) in the book info file.
Nice idea, in a way more powerfull than bookmarks, appended my todo
Lupo73 wrote:
What formats are supported by the app? Because could be good to support also other formats, even if this feature may needs to be discussed given that formatted texts could be more complex to be shown.
Good question. There are several problems, but no matter what formats is implemented, I will never be able to support copyright-protected books. My main goal is to spread the idea. There were several developers who adopted RTA-general concept on different platforms. It's good, but many of existing developers unfortunately suffer from NIH syndrome. They probably have enough motivation to implement something they invented, but not enough for ideas of others. I don't blame, I probably suffer too :-). But ironically, RTA for PalmOS was possible because the developers of iSilo reader politely refused the idea that I described in e-mail.
Lupo73 wrote: ps: it's funny that your app is named like one of mine :lol: ArcThemALL! (and exists also a DownThemAll, as extension for Firefox)
Yes, very funny, and we have still many words to replate in *ThemAll mask :). Interesting, I named it this way to address the idea of reading all the books of the world with the help of the program, but as the time showed, many thinks that the program just reads different formats. What else can I say, technology changes our minds :)

Max

stanmarsh
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Re: ReadThemAll

#8 Post by stanmarsh »

hi maxerist,

would it be possible to support archived (zip,rar,7z) html files? here are examples of the ebooks i like to read, http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/.

thanks

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Re: ReadThemAll

#9 Post by webfork »

How about scrolling text like movie theater credits? Can that be added?

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Lupo73
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Re: ReadThemAll

#10 Post by Lupo73 »

webfork wrote:How about scrolling text like movie theater credits? Can that be added?
Scrolling like the end of some films could be very good :mrgreen:
(eventually also with starts as background of the text :lol: )

maxerist
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Re: ReadThemAll

#11 Post by maxerist »

stanmarsh wrote:hi maxerist,
would it be possible to support archived (zip,rar,7z) html files?
thanks
Thanks for the suggestion, I will add it to todo list. Probably markup support will be limited in my case, but for fiction books it's not a big deal.
webfork wrote:How about scrolling text like movie theater credits? Can that be added?
Hmm, the primary reason for promoting these kinds of scrollings is to move from the well-known general one you described, it existed in e-book readers for a very long time. So not supporting this kind of scrolling is a bit ideological. But it is possible maybe since the eye strain some of user suffer with this credits scrolling was partly due to weak hardware of mobile devices that didn't allow to implement it smoothly. Anyway, thanks for the suggestion

Max
maxerist.net

stanmarsh
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Re: ReadThemAll

#12 Post by stanmarsh »

maxerist wrote:Thanks for the suggestion, I will add it to todo list. Probably markup support will be limited in my case, but for fiction books it's not a big deal.
thanks a lot! looking forward to it. :D

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guinness
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Re: ReadThemAll

#13 Post by guinness »

Seems we have more than 1 famous developer on TPFC.

Error Report Grabber has been documented on AddictiveTips & GHacks, but it only works on Windows XP and I haven't tested if Portable. Maybe the developer (maxerist) can tell us more?

maxerist
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Re: ReadThemAll

#14 Post by maxerist »

guinness wrote: Error Report Grabber has been documented on AddictiveTips & GHacks, but it only works on Windows XP and I haven't tested if Portable. Maybe the developer (maxerist) can tell us more?
Hmm, Very puzzling for me why a developer-specific program got so much attention :). As for the program itself, it's absolutely portable. But i didn't manage to make it run on Win 7 since they changed the way this errors are handled, some default suggestion to send the information to Microsoft. I myself would like to know the way to access the same information on Vista or 7. The program has link "Test it" that emulates the error. If anyone forces Se7en or Vista show some technical dialogs or find some information about it, please, let me know, I'll be grateful.

Max

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webfork
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Re: ReadThemAll

#15 Post by webfork »

Site appears offline ... dunno if this is a hiccup or the site really has gone down. If it has, here's the archive.org / softpedia pages:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150217061 ... or-windows

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-too ... mAll.shtml

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