The development roadmap for the next revisions of the DaisyReader.

[Julian Harty]

Interested readers,
Here's a quick update on what we're doing at the moment.

1. Re engineering the internal support for Daisy 2.02 books to be more
consistent with how Daisy 3 books are structured. This should allow us
to support both formats of books more consistently. Gary's initial
work was in revision 130 http://code.google.com/p/android-daisy-epub-reader/source/detail?r=130
I've made various changes and added some tests e.g.
http://code.google.com/p/android-daisy-epub-reader/source/detail?r=159
If you update your subversion client to the head version then you'll
get the latest changes. This code isn't yet integrated. Gary & Julian
are working on this.

2. Adding support for full-audio Daisy 3 books. This naturally follows
the re-engineering of support for Daisy 2.02 books.

3. Changing the player from an Activity to a Service. This addresses
issue 15 http://code.google.com/p/android-daisy-epub-reader/issues/detail?id=15
Julian's working on this.

4. We need to add support for Text Only Daisy books. I've been
thinking about how to do this for a while as I think the Android
Accessibility Implementation is at odds with the way I'd like to
implement support (it responds to GUI events, Services inherently
don't interact directly with the GUI, and there's no public way to
send events to the Accessibility event Queue). We may end up calling
the TTS API directly, then we'd need to understand how to address
potential conflicts when the user is using the phone for other
purposes e.g. web browsing, editing the phone settings, on a phone
call, composing an SMS, etc. All these cause TalkBack to interact with
the TTS engine. I've decided to wait until we have the first 3 areas
of work under control before worrying too much about text-only books.
However if you'd like to experiment and contribute code then feel
free :)

5. Add a simple search for books online, initially. Integration with
online catalogues such as bookshare is on the roadmap once the
application supports Daisy 3 books. Bryan has offered to work on this.