iBooks Local Language support

Why is it that all the eBook bookstores only have English books, and how long before we would see books in local languages? There is quite an opportunity there, for local language publishers.

Well, the good thing is that the epub format used on an iPad has good support for utf-8, so its quite possible to create books in Hindi/Urdu, and read them on iPad. However, the rendering of an Urdu book I created as a Proof of Concept was too slow to be of any use, and while the ePub format supports RTL (Right to Left languages), iBooks doesn't.

Without RTL support, Arabic/Urdu/Hebrew books are ruled out on iPad. Hopefully iOS4.0 would change this. As far as the rendering goes, I had all the content in a single file, so I suppose breaking it down into multiple files might have helped.

If anyone is interested, I used an online service to generate the epub from an html (although Calibre will work equally well). Then I expanded the generated epub file using zip, and edited a few things (including the RTL styling for text, so pages are turned from left to right), and compressed it back to ePub. It didn't work, but at the end of the day, its good to know ePub is only a zip file compressed with a few special options.

Hello Droid!

I recently bought an android based internet tablet. Its really cheap, and inferior to iPad in all aspects (slower processor, less ram, capacitative touch screen, less memory, smaller real estate to list a few). Yet, it is considerably more open than iPad.

Apple has never been known for openness, but the extent to which they have locked down iPad is frustrating. It was frustrating with iPhone, yet iPhone’s frame of reference was other phones, and they are not open either. On the other hand, I compare my iPad to a netbook, and not being able do anything beyond apple's imagination of what people should do with there iPads is very disheartening.

Maybe the lock down is a great idea - my parents love the device for its simplicity. But for the rest of us who feel a little bit less intimidated with computers, not so. So if you have not jailbroken your iPad, craiglisting would not be a surprise to me. There's an app for everything, but there is only so much you can do.

Back to my new tablet. Its a 7 inch SmartQ v7, running a 600 MHz processor. Its capable of triple booting, and comes pre-installed with Windows CE, Linux and Android. Android looks very promising - I am still awaiting my SD card to ship, but looks like there are a lot of things I can do with it. Things like installing a 3G modem, connecting it to other USB devices, and so on. Because it runs Ubuntu too - the possibilities are endless, although by far, android is the most usable system on it.

A wallpaper a day on iPad

Guardian Eyewitness is such a great app on iPad, and I wish it had a feature allowing you to set the images as a wallpaper for that day. Being able to rotate wallpapers would be even better. Unfortunately, it won't let us do that, at least not in the current version.

However, if you have a jailbroken iPad, it should be easy to do this. First, you need to know the location of the wallpaper, which is

/User/Library/HomeBackground.jpg

Then, you need to find out the location where Eyewitness app stores the Photos. For my ipad, it is

/User/Applications/7C322A28-737A-48DC-8535-08878D6001ED/Library/Application\ Support/Eyewitness/Photos/

I don't know how the cryptic names like 7C322A28-737A-48DC-8535-08878D6001ED are derived, and I found it out using trial and error, but I believe tools like iFile have a setting in their plist that allow you to see both the encoded name and the actual app name.

For now, I just overwrote HomeBackground.jpg with one of the photos in this app, and respringed. It should be possible to write a script that runs once in a while in background, and automatically rotates between available pictures. Let's see when I have a relatively free weekend to try this out - back to work for now.

google ipad call

Using the truphone app on ipad, you can make and receive voice calls, even with the wifi version, which is what I have. The call rates are reasonably cheap, and voice quality is excellent. However, it gets better than this. You can use Google voice + Gizmo + Truphone to make free phone calls to anyone in the US, right from the iPad. Of course you need a wifi connection, but isn't this cool?

Here is how to do it

1. Sign for a truphone account, and install their iPad app.
2. Sign up for gizmo and set it up to forward it to truphone sip account (username@truphone.com). The glitch here is that since google's acquisition of gizmo, new signups have been disabled. I was lucky to have an old account lying around.
3. Signup/ signin to google voice and set it up to forward it to gizmo number
4. Go to google voice page in browser. From the bottom link, select the desktop version, as there is an issue with the mobile version which opens up automatically.
4. Make that call, choosing to let google voice connect you using the gizmo number.

That was how you make outgoing calls. Here's how to make incoming calls.

Now while truphone app is good enough, it is still not supporting push, which means you get your calls from google voice only if truphone is running in the foreground. If you have jail broken your phone using spirit, you can install backgrounder and run the truphone app in the background, which would enable you to get the calls all the time, as long as your wifi connection Is up ( or if you are on 3G already)