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Introducing Aranduka

Yes, it's yet an­oth­er pro­gram I am work­ing on. But hey, the last few I start­ed are ac­tu­al­ly pret­ty func­tion­al al­ready!

And... I am not do­ing this one alone, which should make it more fun.

It's an eBook (or just any book?) man­ager, that helps you keep your PDF/­Mo­bi/F­B2/what­ev­er or­ga­nized, and should even­tu­al­ly sync them to the de­vice you want to use to read them.

What works now? See the video!

In case that makes no sense to you:

  • You can get books from Feed­­Book­s. Those books will get down­load­­ed, added to your database, tagged, the cov­­er fetched, etc. etc.

  • You can im­­port your cur­rent fold­er of books in bulk.

    Aran­­du­­ka will use google and oth­­er sources to try to guess (from the file­­name) what book that is and fill in the ex­­tra da­­ta about it.

  • You can "guess" the ex­­tra da­­ta.

    By mark­ing cer­­tain da­­ta (say, the ti­tle) as re­li­able, Aran­­du­­ka will try to find some pos­si­ble books that match then you can choose if it's right.

    Of course you can al­­so ed­it that da­­ta man­u­al­­ly.

And that's about it. Planned fea­tures:

  • Way too many to list.

The goals are clear:

  • It should be beau­ti­­ful (I know it is­n't!)

  • It should be pow­er­­ful (not yet!)

  • It should be bet­ter than the "com­pe­ti­­tion"

If those three goals are not achieved, it's fail­ure. It may be a fun fail­ure, but it would still be a fail­ure.

Cito / 2010-09-18 08:59:

Hi Roberto, did you already have a look at Calibre before writing this?

Roberto Alsina / 2010-09-18 10:45:

This was written because calibre simply melts my lame notebooks when I try to do anything with it.

Pierpaolo Da Fieno / 2010-09-18 13:05:

Really nice. I use Calibre and it's powerful but also incredibly cumbersome. I guess this one should be more focused to everyday tasks but quick and neat. Does aranduka mean anything? ...

Roberto Alsina / 2010-09-18 14:12:

It means "Book" in guaraní

Steve Romanow / 2010-09-18 19:29:

I am really looking forward to using this app. Any consideration how to include file stores such as Dropbox or UbuntuOne, where the syncing is already handled?

Roberto Alsina / 2010-09-18 23:12:

Well, the whole idea of Dropbox is that the app doesn't have to do anything, right? :-)

I want tags to have optional associated folders and filetypes, so if you tag the book with, say "iPad", it will automatically put a PDF version of the book in the "~/Dropbox/iPad-books" folder. That way, the dropbox app will make those books appear automatically on your iPad.


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