Greetings.
I’m not a programmer, but lately I’ve been using wxPython (thanks Noel and Robin for the book) to explore the workability of some ideas about the presentation of text for online reading. In my opinion, no browser or eBook reader out there does it in a way that takes into account the act of reading and how it is constrained by the human visual system. They instead rely too heavily upon the metaphors of the vertical scroll and the page. Here’s a link to an article detailing a possible solution:
http://pages.sbcglobal.net/joehuck/Pages/cScroll.pdf
Here’s a link to a zip folder containing an executable (created with py2exe) and some html files optimized for use with it:
http://pages.sbcglobal.net/joehuck/cScroll.zip
The program is the ‘dist’ subfolder and is named ‘cscrollNB.exe.’
And here’s a link to the source:
http://pages.sbcglobal.net/joehuck/source.zip
I’d be interested in getting folks’ opinion of the idea and the implementation (I repeat, I am not a programmer). Note that it has pretty limited functionality. It’s based on a horizontal-scrolling columnar scroll window (whence the term cScroll) built using the wxHtmlDCRenderer. It’s implemented using a wxNotebook control. Haven’t experimented much with the wxAuiNotebook control, but I think it’d have definite possibilities as well.
I’d love to see the cScroll window as a wxWidget, with more html functionality. I think it could revolutionize the online reading experience.
Thanks,
Joe