Kindle 4 NonTouch and Kindle Touch support

[hwhw]

This is far off for now, but I want to keep my ideas on this somewhere:

For supporting the other newer Kindles, we (or, hopefully, someone else who actually owns such a device) will need to do the following:

• adapt to different framebuffer. This is easier as it sounds when we keep it simple. I suggest to leave all blitbuffers at 4bpp. Only change two things: On framebuffer setup, create a shadow 4bpp blitbuffer for the full framebuffer size and make this accessible to Lua as fb:bb. Then upon framebuffer refresh copy from the shadow framebuffer to the real framebuffer and after that refresh.
• adapt to different input. This is the hard part. I hope that the new widget system can help there and let us create proper menus. An on-screen keyboard would be nice. The widget system might be able to track touch coordinates down to a certain widget and trigger events there. Can be used for implementing the keyboard.

[geekmaster]

The 8-bit framebuffer devices require that the bottom 4 bits contain a copy of the top four bits, as can be seen in the gpl source code. They are really just 4bpp, so it is easier that it may look. To display more than 16 shades of gray, images are dithered down to 4bpp. You can see that by copying the framebuffer while a picture is displayed, then do a histogram analysis on it. You will see that it contains only 16 evenly-spaces colors.

A port of xterm with a touchscreen keyboard was recently posted to the MR dev corner forum, but it requires X11 so will not work on the K4 unless X11 is also ported to the K4.

[th0mass]

Please start a donation thread on mobileread to enable us to donate to buy a Touch and a Kindle4NT for developers (seperate accounts for each would be more appropriate)

[hwhw]

Well, I think it will only make sense when the new_ui_code branch becomes the new main branch. There is still some way to go for that. The old code base will be hard to adapt to the changed input devices. As for a donated device: I'm not really volunteering. I think I can get the K4NT to run without much hassle, geekmaster already pointed out the main aspects. Rather, we need to add menus instead of (or better: additional to) the abundance of key combinations we have now in main branch. Also we need an on-screen keyboard - maybe we can just stand on the shoulders of giants here, since this is a thing that is actively discussed on mobileread. When we have both, the next step to the K5T won't be too hard. The new widget-based new_ui_code branch would have to be made touch-aware. Given the event-driven structure, that should not be too hard. All it needs is time - at least in my case.

[houqp]

Surprising to see @geekmaster and @th0mass here. :)

I managed to get a K4NT today. Hopefully, I can help with the framebuffer part and have KPV properly running on K4NT. As for our new UI framework, it is still far from mature ;)

[hwhw]

Slowly we're getting there. The new_ui_code branch is pretty much in shape now, a lot of details are fleshed out. But we still need to port a lot of the functionality the main branch already has.

And maybe I need to start to think about touch input...

[th0mass]

Any progress? (especially for Touch)

[houqp]

I think platform related code for K4 should have been finished. In fact I have already read some webpages in my K4 :) But it only has very limited features. Now we are gradually porting features to the new UI framework.

As for Touch, it seems that none of the developers has the device yet.

[vvs]

Hurray for basic K4 (No-Touch) support! How to try it out? I'm willing to be beta tester, if you need it :)

[wwdz99]

hi,houqp,could you please help me to resolve the Kindle 4NT Reading PDF in Full-Screen mode.i have been searched this issue for 2 days but i didnt find any solution. Kindle Touch and all old model have a solution for full screen pdf(without black border) but Kindle 4NT hasnt got any patch to eliminate this black borders. I hope you can help me to solve this issue.thx very much.