Tuesday, August 16, 2011

A small Cloud Reader bug is reported

Today I reported the following (in the next post I'll describe the pleasant Cloud Reader that I discovered recently):
"Hello,
first of all, I would thank you the Amazon team for this amazing Cloud Reader.
What is the most demanded thing for technical people? To see code samples or technical details in paralel with the related work in process. And to make highlights (i.e., quotes) and to put them into code or into letters as a proof in a discussion. Along with the kindle.amazon.com -> Your Highlights, the cloud Reader is a promising feature.
But there I found a bug. I use highlights intensely. The book I'm working with for now is of thirteen thousand locations long and I have hishlights in various areas of the book. Of course, I don't read technical books from cover to cover, instead I read what I needed now leaving gaps in 'highlights space'.
Coming close to a bug, the bug is that I can see in the Cloud Reader only highlights before location 2195, whereas I have at least several highlights near 7775th location and in other locations.
Th highlights list simply ends up at 2195th.
My chrome is 13.0.782.112 m.

Thanks, Alexander

P.S. Another minor bug is the window where I'm writing this - its size is unchangeable.
P.P.S. Time ago I asked for the ability to open several books in parallel. Cloud Reader is the answer. Thanks again!"

Below the screenshots of what was described in the letter. The first figure displays the highlight in Kindle for PC 1.6:

The same book in Cloud Reader is deprived of highlights after location 2195:

Saturday, August 6, 2011

A new proposal to improve Kindle software from technical readers' point of view

I've sent the following to Amazon:
Hello,
I'd like to discuss the needs a reader of technical literature may have. Further, I'll propose a variant of solution done from the reader's point of view.

First of all, what the process of working with technical books is? I work more than ninety-five percent of time that I spend working with techbooks with computers-related (programming, system administration) literature.
How does the working process go? The person uses computer-related books in two ways:
- reading (or reading and doing actions like control clicks, menu clicks and so on)
- search with small stripped reading.

The first way is obvious, there is only one problem: poor bookmarking functionality. For example, the user guide says that you need to open the 'View notes and marks' menu option and navigate from there.
Aha, the technical literary is the area where people do a lot of highlights. Why? To see Your Highlights everywhere, to see highlights on a desktop (Kindle for PC), to see highlights of your personal documents (I use also for reading the documentation of the products I'm working with) using third-party software.

Now, let's recall what we a second ago discussed: bookmarks. How is it possible to navigate to a bookmark having tens or hundreds highlighted places in the book you are reading?
The conclusion is simple, you need or to add a menu item 'Navigate bookmarks', or a window as it's done in other vendors' e-readers. The first way is preferable since there is less to do than in the second, UI is athe same and it's also the same 'View Notes and Marks' menu item but with filtering 'only bookmarks'.

The second problem is not so easy to resolve. Again, it is the Search. When you need to find something, it's very rare luck if one book suffices. Compared to Advanced Search in Adobe Acrobat Reader, your search in almost nothing. (Do you know their search? Open a document, press Ctrl+Shift+А and type a path. After that Advanced Search works over a FOLDER of documents (one document is also supported). Of course, working with more than ten or twenty documents may feel burdensome (desktop slows down, even Acrobat may fall down if too many resources have been consumed), but compare please with your offer.

The key of success is the ability to search in a book as well in several books. There'll be very good if you allow us to search in three books in parallel, and work with three books in parallel. Three is usually enough because or these three helpful, or one or two should be closed and other opened.

The typical style of work with technical books is to get code samples from three of four places and to read in one or two areas of one book. The dedicated bookmarks navigation would help here.
The second stage is search in two or three books in parallel, finding alternate solutions in books or code sample in the first and something like an explanation how it works in the other (some authors are best in code writing, whereas others write text well :)).

Please think about the propossal. As a technical person (I also read fiction, but there is no problem) I need to have improved navigation and search capabilities.

What do you the Kindle users think about the above proposal?