JD on EP

Lengthy overview from Alexander Turcic, at MobileRead... pull quote: "Which brings us to Adobe Digital Editions. It looks and feels a bit like the New York Times reader Microsoft has been working on. The main difference: it's built on open standards. And unlike Adobe Reader, it feels more lightweight, consumer-optimized and is simpler to use."

I think it looks very sweet too but I was disappointed to discover as I clicked through that it is Windows only :(

Dear John,

Very nice. That's got to have been made in apollo. There's no other way ;-)

It's actually pre-Apollo... development has been on parallel tracks. This first release is indeed Win-only, but I think the FAQ said Mac previews expected this year, and Linux after the Player 9 is finished. (Thanks for checking it out! :)

Wow. Well it's absolutely blow away, this is kind of a glimpse (in my opinion) of the way apollo apps are going to be like and it's very exciting for this new technology. Also what is cool is that the top banner doesnt have a win xp logo -- thus eliminating the OS. Which is exactly the intention behind apollo which is smart. Very nice job on the team who did this!

Very nice indeed, it's fast (faster than Adobe Reader). There are a few things I would change:
- When reading a document sometimes the toolbar stays on top of the document, why don't give the document some margins?
- When maximizing the window I don't see my taskbar, is this the normal behavior of an Apollo App?.

This is definitely nice. The pages and text look really good. It runs very smoothly, fast on my machine. A few weird things right off the bat though. Theres not a place on the bug report form for Digital Editions yet so I'll post em here for reference.

It feels strange to not be able to see a table of contents, with out navigating back to it in the book. Of course we have to do so with paper books, but that is just a flick of the wrist, so should it be on devices.

When in 'Closer Look' view, the super small louped section is too restricting. I should be able to resize the masking clip in the little mini page viewer area to get a wider view at different zoom sizes, much like the way picasa does with large images.

If you go to the Reading menu and click 'Find', some users may not notice the very subtle highliting of the search box. The scroller at the bottom is also maybe a little too unobtrusive. Some users may not notice it, but maybe my eyes are bad this morning.

The scroller nav at the bottom also is very choppy on this 2.4 ghz pc, I guess because the pages have to render, whereas the Closer Look view moves at blazing speed.

I love the Library, works very smoothly, good interface.

Just my 2 cents, but this is really exciting, good work!

Am I right in assuming that I can only view a digital edition (through the viewer) a PDF file that already sits on my PC (soon MAC) rather than simply click and view direct from a host site ?

[jd sez: It does seem to be that text files are downloaded before viewing, rather than pages streamed on demand like an HTML page would be.]