A forum to exchange ideas and questions around Ubooquity

02 september 2014    General


The ubooquity website now has a dedicated forum, hosted on UserEcho.

This forum is meant to gather your feedback (questions, ideas, bugs...) in a single place so that discussions between users can take place more easily than in the comments section of the news. It also has a few interesting features:

  • A voting system that will help me to know among the feature I'm asked to implement the ones that are the most popular.
  • A status label ("planned", "started", "declined") displayed on feature requests that will give you a better visibility over the future of the application.
  • An integrated search engine to easily find topics when looking for informations.

Private messages can also be directly sent to me through the forum. I will keep the contact page online for now, but they are redundant.

The only drawback: you will have to sign in to the forum before being able to post or send a message. But you can do that using a lot of different account provider (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, OpenID...) or by directly creating a UserEcho account, so it should not be a big problem.

Go to the forum by clicking the "Forum" link in the top menu or the "Feedback" label on the right side of your screen.

 


Ubooquity 1.5.0, now with themes and better PDF support

23 june 2014    Release


Ubooquity 1.5.0 is available.

New features

  • Better PDF support: Cover rendering is now working for all types of PDF files (image-only PDF as well as text+images PDF files)
  • PDF in the "books" section can be read online, like comics. Ubooquity now uses two different PDF rendering engines: one for comics (image-only PDF), one for books (text+images PDF). Depending on the type of your PDF file, be careful to put it in the right section to have a correct display when reading them online (if you just download them, it makes no difference).
  • Ubooquity now supports themes. A new lighter theme can be donwloaded on the Themes page. This pages also explains how to install and create new themes.

 

Miscellaneous

  • Improved image quality on high pixel density devices
  • Miscellaneous performance improvements
  • Better user access logging (see this tutorial on how to customize your logs)

 

Get it on the download page


Ubooquity 1.4.0, with mobi and PDF ebooks support

11 april 2014    Release


Ubooquity 1.4.0 is here.

Here is a list of what has changed.

New features

  • Support for mobi files. Let me know how it works for you, I have not many mobi files to test this feature.
  • Support for PDF files in the books section. The difference with PDF as comics is that PDF books get their metadata displayed (although I did not find many PDF with proper metadata) and their cover rendered instead of being just a extracted picture.

Miscellaneous

  • Web administrator password field characters are now hidden.
  • Debug mode has been removed as the bug it was supposed to help solve (partially displayed covers) was not really a bug.
  • Default display mode for books is now "by folder" (instead of "flat"), same as the one used for comics. The difference with comics default display mode was confusing.
  • IP address of users trying to login are now written to the log file, to help identify potential attacks.
  • The number displayed on folders (in "folder" mode) now recursively includes all files in the folder and in its subfolders.
  • The number displayed on foldersis now displayed even if over 99.
  • Added a loading icon between pages when reading comics.
  • Slightly improved layout on smaller screens.

 

Get it on the download page


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).