Ubooquity 1.3.2 is available

15 march 2014    Release

No new big shiny feature in this release, but a lot of work under the hood to improve file scanning (making it more tolerant to unusual files) and general application quality.

Here is what has changed:

• A "debug" mode can be activated in the options, adding a button to force cover thumbnail regeneration for a specific book or comic book (more details in the Documentation)
• New actions available in the options: "clear comics database" and "clear books database" in case you want to rescan your entire collection
• Epublib (the library previously used to read books metadata) has been replaced by in-house code, allowing a lot more books to be recognized by Ubooquity
• Empty directories and files without cover are now displayed and accessible (basically, Ubooquity will display a file even when the parsing of metadata fails)
• When comics image extraction fails, Ubooquity will now try to guess the real format of the file (it appears a lot of users have files with a wrong extension)
• Small aesthetic improvement of raw files display
• [Bug fix] On some versions of Linux, when using Ubooquity in command line mode, the CPU load was continuously very high.
• [Bug fix] Some Jpeg images appeared with a pink hue

Get it on the download page

Update (march 16th): Just released version 1.3.2.1 to fix a bug affecting default cover for comics.

What's next ?

05 february 2014    General

In the last weeks I received a few questions about the features that might be added to Ubooquity in the future. Here's a sneak peek of what's possible (and what's not) in no particular order.

• OPDS support
  I don't know OPDS very well, but it seems to be an XML files generated using the content of the database. I see no reason this could not be implemented, and it would be quite useful to be able to plug other software to Ubooquity.
   
• HTTPS support
  For now, the HTTP server used internally by Ubooquity, NanoHTTPD, does not support HTTP Secure (HTTPS) in his stable version. A beta version supporting SSL (therefore HTTPS) is currently being tested by the NanoHTTPD developers though.
  When the feature is stable I'll try to integrate it in Ubooquity to allow access through HTTP.S 
   
• PDF support in book section
  Today, PDF are considered to be comics due to the difference Ubooquity makes when managing metadata for comics and books. In short: comics files don't provide metadata (as they are just a compressed folder of image files).
  Since most of the PDF files I've seen don't provide metadata either, I did not bother extracting them and the PDF files landed in the comics category.
  But I can see why having them in the book categaory could be useful as well. And technically nothing prevents it.
   
• Mobi support
  This one's harder as there is no Java library supporting Mobi files processing (contrary to epub, which is a standard format). But since what I only need is cover and metadata extraction, mobi support might still be doable... I'll have to dig deeper.
   
• Internationalization
  Not convinced on this one. There is very little text on the web pages served by Ubooquity, and I would expect anybody capable of setting up a server to understand english well enough to understand Ubooquity's options.
  I might be wrong though.
   
• Themes support
  Theme support (CSS and images replacement) is pretty much already coded as it was one of my v1.0 target features. The only missing things are the right option in the interface and a second theme to demonstrate the concept (and somebody asking for it, as the current theme satisfies me for now).