From adduser.org at gmail.com Sun Mar 18 11:26:05 2012 From: adduser.org at gmail.com (Add User) Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2012 12:26:05 +0100 Subject: [Alexandria-list] List of Features Message-ID: (First of all excuse for my poor english) Hello, I am just new in the media library world. Some needs in my life given me at Alexandria. I ve been reading the mailing list archive and I consider to rewrite a list of features already requested and new features. I also know about project Palatina that have already some features requested for Alexandria. I don't checked the code (neither Alexandria or Palatina so I can't tell about features in the code structure, adn I am aslo not the better analyser -just amateur one-). So I list the features request and what I seen: 1- Add the possibility to have more than 1 book (palatina capable). Actually, if you want to add a duplicate ISDN, I think in future the GUI should ask you if you want to add a copy of the book. And add an option (a tag or someting) for the user to identify between the copies (imagine the user put fiscally a letter A for the first copy and a letter B for the second copy, so the user would set these options in Alexandria, so if he borrow the copy A, he know that copy B is/should be still somewhere in the library). I don't seen the code, but an ugly and fast way should be adding new file/database only for managing duplicates books. 2- Add the possibility to identify the origin of the book. Imagine that a friend of a the user borrow him a book, he whould insert that book in the database and let him know who borrowed it (borrow, gift, give, whatelse...). 3- Add the possibility of multiple users (reviews, reads, etc). I don't know about yours family, but in my house we are 6 at home. You can focus this feature in multiple ways. For example: Big familiy at home: you practicaly don't interested in which book is reading or have readed you brother, but it's possible you want to know the review of him about the book just reading is review instead of asking him (he is at this moment at work). Public Library: normally you don't need to read reviews of others (perhaps sometimes) but you want to know which reader have any pariculary book, from which time ago have it, or if they have more than one. Actually you can see a list of loaned books, but not the name. Public Libraris apps have noramlly a list of loaned books per users or per total. Implementation of this is more difficult. 4- View like icons better arrangment of images. Actually, if you set this view option, if the image is larger than other ones... you have an ugly des-arranged visualitation. It should be good to fit images with a predefined width (or something else) to prevent malformation of the columns. 5- Universal database storage like OpenLibrary. I think this is possible but I not sure if OpenLibrary is the perfect system. With OpenLibrary you can have duplicate books with duplicates images. I think it can be possible to do that with a semi-automatic insertion to Alexandria. If there are more than one possible ISDN with diferent results, you can show a preview window to the user with all of theme and let him to choose what data you want to use. 6- Auto-insertion of book without matches. Actually, if there is no matches with the ISDN or titles searchs, it stops. I think it should be good to add a button (or directly redirects users) for performing a manual insertion instead to lets user to close the windows, and open manual instertion option (one click is better than 3 or 4 clicks) 7- GIF implementation for book images. I only tried with JPG and GIF. JPG is working, GIF not. I don't know if Alexandria is PNG and SVG compatible for book images. 8- Auto-insertion of book retrieving external information with characters errors. In my language, we use ????? and another characters (UTF-8), so the system put symbols and other stuff like a diferent encoding charset. 9- Up-to-date home page. Actually the latest available stable version at homepage section is 0.6.7 and in the section download is the version 0.6.6 (like last stable) and in mailing list we can obtain 0.6.8 (but I don't know if it is considerad stable or not). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cathal.alexandria at gnostai.org Wed Mar 21 13:57:15 2012 From: cathal.alexandria at gnostai.org (Cathal Mc Ginley) Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 13:57:15 +0000 Subject: [Alexandria-list] List of Features In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20120321135715.6ebf10bc@jadzia.dax> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Sun, 18 Mar 2012 12:26:05 +0100 Add User wrote: Hi, thanks for your interest in these projects. You're just the kind of user I'm writing Palatina for. In particular, I hope you can help with user-interface design - even pencil sketches of what the various windows and dialogs might look like - at some stage in the future. > I also know about project Palatina that have already some features > requested for Alexandria. Yes, I will be concentrating almost exclusively on Palatina in future. In fact, I've already re-written Palatina from the ground up again (in a new language, Scala). I won't be adding any new features to Alexandria, just doing (very) occasional bugfixes to keep it working until Palatina has an Alexandria-like user-interface and is ready to release. > 1- Add the possibility to have more than 1 book (palatina capable). Palatina already distinguishes between an Edition, and a Copy of a book. > Actually, if you want to add a duplicate ISBN, I think in future the > GUI should ask you if you want to add a copy of the book. Agreed. I need to sketch the user-interface for this. > 2- Add the possibility to identify the origin of the book. Possible in Palatina, but not yet coded. > 3- Add the possibility of multiple users (reviews, reads, etc). I have designed Palatina with this idea in mind. ALL properties can be specific to individual users, not just reviews, notes and reading status. You can even set your own title for a book that only you can see. I haven't thought much about security & privacy for this feature, though. In the simple case, when Palatina is set up for "home" use, you could be able to view all properties set by all users, but when it's set up for "library" use all user-specific properties will be private. > 4- View like icons better arrangment of images. I've improved how thumbnails are handled in Palatina, including pre-creating thumbnail images in a range of sizes and storing them in the database. So far, the layout seems to be much more stable. > 5- Universal database storage like OpenLibrary. I'm not sure I know what you mean by this point. But Palatina's database is very flexible and distinguishes between: * Work: e.g. "Oliver Twist" by Charles Dickens. * Edition: e.g. the "Penguin Classic" edition of "Oliver Twist"; 0141439742 * Different printings of that edition (perhaps with different cover image, but the same ISBN) * Copy: any number of physical copies of a particular edition of "Oliver Twist" If an ISBN returns data for several printings, I can download and store the data (temporarily) and ask the user to choose the correct printing at any later time. (This is possible, but not yet supported by the code. Again, I'd need to design the user-interface for this to be easy for the user.) I will be using OpenLibrary as a data source, too. > 6- Auto-insertion of book without matches. Agreed. I intend to make the data-capture part of Palatina much more streamlined for rapid (and data-safe) addition of multiple books. > 7- GIF implementation for book images. I'll check if GIF import is possible. (I think it will be.) Palatina stores its cover images (and thumbnails) as PNGs in the database. I don't think SVG will work, though. > 8- Auto-insertion of book retrieving external information with > characters errors. I'll try to be more careful about character encodings. All text will be stored as UTF-8 in the database, so it's a matter of ensuring the metadata source character encoding is what we expect. > 9- Up-to-date home page. > Actually the latest available stable version at homepage section is > 0.6.7 and in the section download is the version 0.6.6 (like last > stable) and in mailing list we can obtain 0.6.8 (but I don't know if > it is considerad stable or not). Oops! This is because I was doing small bugfix releases. I'm normally better about stuff like that. 0.6.8 is the recommended version of Alexandria. - Cathal. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: GnuPT 2.6.2.1 by EQUIPMENTE.DE iEYEARECAAYFAk9p3jsACgkQfMAUnRdb+8pv8wCfV0pVHRgngOgZR7J9MifVyQ6b fhUAn2Us1OIpyQ/SH1wnSSc60u5UXMgP =OSm4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----