InDaisy Reader for iOS
Ever since I signed up for a Bookshare account I have been wanting a good solution to read DAISY 3 books on my iOS devices. I have been browsing the app store, and the only app that has come around that supports DAISY 3 at this point is InDaisy Reader for iOS. According to the description, this app would read all unencrypted DAISY 2 and DAISY 3 books. They even day they will work with Bookshare. The app sounded really good, so I purchased it to find out that it still has a bit to go before it is completely stable. Here is my experience.
Loading Books
Loading DASY books on this app is just like loading a file on any other iOS app. Simply use iTunes file charing to add a file to this app. In this case, you need to send over the zip file that you received with your downloaded DAISY book. You can also use ftp to deposit your file to the app. the default username and password for this is daisy.
Book Loading Issues.
If you are wanting to use Bookshare books, you must follow a few more steps. First, you must unzip the Bookshare book on your computer. Once the file is unzipped, you must zip the files back up in an unencrypted zip file and then send the book over to your device. It seems to me that the developer should implement the ability to extract passworded zip files.
Reading a book
Once I finished uploading my book from Bookshare, I decided to try and see how well the program worked. Once the program saw my book, I tapped on the name of the book in the bookshelf. The application took quite a bit of time, but it finally opened my book. Once it showed up on the screen, I tried to scroll, and to move through the book, but the app had not apparently finished loading everything, because the app was not responsive for several seconds. Once it wa, I tried several reading sommands, and that was when everything went really down hill. I tapped the button to show me all of the sections of the book again, and the screen went blank, and the app quit completely. It seems that this app has several memory issues that cause it to do this. I tried closing all open applications on my device, and this helped some, but it would still crash on occasion.
Conclusion and Recommendations.
I think InDaisy Reader is a good start to making an awesome DAISY reader for iOS devices. In addition, this app is the only app in the store that supports DAISY 3 books. I really think that the developers could spend some more time on stability issues rather than adding features to this app. One thing that would definitely this app would be to address the memory issue. Instead of loading the whole book in memory, juat load the sections that are being viewed. I also think that the Bookshare area should be addressed as well. Add passoword support to unencrypt zip files. To all potential buyers out there, I urge you to wait. With a price tag of $27.99, this app has more issues than it is worth for the time being. Once an update or two has been released, I will come back to this review, and see how well the app has improved.
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April 20, 2011 at 12:53 PM
Did you ever get to read the book with InDaisy?