So last night I was bored, so I downloaded Little Brother (legally) to read. I wanted to read more, and I know how to develop for my Zune. So, I made an E-Reader for the Zune called ZReader (haha funny pun ). It works great, and I'm almost done with the finishing touches. Anyone interested?

Cool! What kind of files does it take as input, plaintext? You should upload it to the Cemetech archives.

It takes plaintext, and I'm still tweaking it, but I'll upload it later.

Good deal, you should also show us some screenshots. Did you come up with any accessibility tricks to make it easy to flip pages, etc?

L0l i just implemented page turning now. Here's a screenie, the book is Little Brother by Cory Doctrow:

Click down to scroll, left/right to flip pages, play to go back to the start. Back button saves your place and exits.

The story is that I really needed something to do during gym with my splint on, and I knew Cory Doctrow put up free editions of all his books online, so I downloaded it. I spent 20 minutes making this app so I could sit in the corner and read during gym, and it works beautifully. The hardest part was word-wrapping, but I eventually got it.

Could use some visual goodness. Specifically padding around the sides. Make the font smaller and chapter detection (easy as finding "Chapter X" in it's own paragraph) and you're set.

Chapter detection for easy book marking. OR, Have the program insert a string of text (ZRPAGE) for the last recorded page the reader was on so no matter what story they read next, if they read more than one at a time, they can easily get back to the last page.

Its just a .txt file, so chapters and such are much more involved, but I can try that. And each book is its own app, and therefore I am able to save the user's current place on a per-book basis. Visual department is definately lacking, I can work on that.

Especially the font...

What about the font?

It should be a different one.....

Easy enough to change. Given that it needs to be rebuilt for each book anyway, just change the font face definition in the spritefont declaration.

To each his own font, or some such.

You should fix that. If apps can load data from a directory on the Zune, create a directory called "Books" or something that a user can drag text files into. Grab and list the title of each file on start up and you're set.

However, I myself am skeptical this would work. I mean, I can't think of any app on the iPhone that allows it to grab data else where on the device (aside from system information, contacts, photos, etc.)

There's no access to any sort of filesystem on the device, just a storage API, so programs can have data persist between sessions.

It would be doable to have one 'app' contain multiple books, though. The trick would be building them all in a semi-automated fashion.

Font anti-aliasing is your friend. Better yet, subpixel hinting.

I thought about making all of your books in one app, but I can only use up to 2gb of space per game

I'm thinking of an installer on your PC, where you can select the font and the size and such with a little preview. I will also probably support having bookmarks in each book.

Uh, only 2 GB? I don't know about you, but that seems like a huge number of books to me. For example, you could fit War and Peace in 2 GB roughly 637 times. Sounds like more than enough...

Plus the code, too. And, my Zune is only 4gb to start with, and only 1.5gb after factoring in music and videos.

I feel your pain; My Zune4 is filled to the brim. Too bad the screen broke... I would have loved to have tried this

Btw, anyone know if it's possible to develop for the ZHD?

The HD also uses XNA, so yes. You'll have to use the touch APIs rather than the more conventional input layer, but it's all the same otherwise.

I rejected your submission to the archives because it lacked ZIPping and a readme file.