Kobo stuff

Well i had to do a factory reset of the Kobos - I just couldn't be fucked with seeing a blank page every time I opened a text file and dealing with their embarrassingly slow font tweaking window. I left it at the version it came with and just bypassed the "must have an account and be logged in to even use the machine" bullshit it comes with.

Very nice when simply "logging out" has it reboot to what appears to be a factory reset (it isn't, it just looks that way).

I left a rant on the mobileread forums about how shitfully fucked and slow the firmware is, but i'm just one voice amongst many there.

Anyway, so I guess I did do some kobo hacking soon rather than later after-all, and today I spent too much time today playing with some new widget code.

Basically i'm not all that happy with the old gadget toolkit stuff - although it surely would do the job. And although some guy who took a copy of some of the ReaderZ code via the koper project worked out how to make Swing talk to an alternative device (looks easier than I thought) ... after JavaFX i'm not a big fan of Swing either.

So, foolishly I started hacking on another toolkit which is basically a "cut down JavaFX". Which is obviously a bit pointless in itself because it should eventually be available in the ARM backend ... although that depends on if they support it for the soft float abi, and unless it comes with native eink support it might not be so easy to add it in.

Actually I just noticed that openjfx is GPLv2 + classpath exception, which I missed the first time I looked - should have been obvious I guess. Maybe I should just look at that (when it's ready?) ... although I guess by the time I get anything working maybe kobo will have released a working-enough firmware like 2.0.0 was.