Kennyblog Redux: The running history of my life, take two!

I don't know that I mentioned it the other day, but the version of the eBook reader that I got was the Sony 505.

I don't want to bitch too much about this thing, because I think it's really cool; a super neat device that I'm very excited to have. But I feel like there were just so many bad decisions that were made with it that will prevent it from being made a vital part of my life.

For instance - you can subscribe to RSS feeds, and have the e-Book Library software (which we've already established is kind of a piece of crap) download the latest posts and sync them automagically. Which is great! Except that you can only subscribe to a closed set of blogs (about 2 dozen). One of which is Gawker, and another of which is the Daily Kos.

Dear Lord, save me. On the other hand, this is a surprisingly good opportunity for me to learn how to program an XCode application. What are the aspects that I'd really want a library management tool for this thing to have?

Provide some way for me to change the metadata on a file (Author, and Book name

Synching of ARBITRARY RSS feeds. What format shoudl they go into? A fair question. If you wanted to get really fancy, you could take the last N posts (including images!) and generate a PDF on the fly. But for right now, I'd really just accept something that takes the last N posts and makes a chronological concatenation of the durn thing in plaintext.

I'd love to be able to point the thing at a blog, and have it go through and pull all of the posts from that blog. Something like that would be great for Paul Graham's essay feed, Raganwald, or even Spolsky (his early stuff, anyway).

Something that would allow you to search Gutenberg?

One thing I have a problem with is that the books I download from the Gutenberg Project (which, by the way, is the best thing ever) mostly have fixed width. And that fixed width does not match the width of my eReader screen. So I get things like this:

In London, from about Sixteen Hundred Fifty to Sixteen Hundred Ninety, Samuel and Thomas Roycroft printed and made very beautiful books. In choosing the name "Roycroft" for our Shop we had these men in mind, but

Which is annoying. I've actually been looking for a project to start writing to learn how to use XCode - this might be a really good thing to do. If you have any ideas for features, leave a comment.

Comments (1)

Benjamin Stein:

You should *definitely* upgrade to Leopard and write it in RubyCocoa.

Posted by Benjamin Stein | November 3, 2007 6:55 PM

Kennyblog Redux

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