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** This thread discusses the content article: ebook library ideas **

Hello Alex,

Very good idea. However, personally, I think ebook manager web application is useless since nowadays web application, specially in php, almost cannot be used as file browser because of web browser stability or internet connection issues.

Instead, you may write file browser application in .NET or any other language with your above ideas. I really love my files and folders are perfectly organized, but I still haven't found any useful information regarding folder structure suggestions or file organizer application as I expect. It seems you also like to be organized like me.

Sometimes, I really wish Windows offline file browser has ability like your above ideas (specially file description or commenting feature). Windows offline file browser has only few abilities of listing with file name, size, created date (still needs author name creation/editing, commenting feature and very easy thumbnail maker without opening any other softwares like photoshop or etc.).


You may get some ideas, here is my folder structure:
(I use Windows. My Windows is installed on my C drive and every other datas are stored in my D drive. Anytime you might get Windows screen [BLUE SCREEN] )

Because I have so many files, I always consider the file name very very important since I cannot add file description, author name, one-click thumbnail maker (shows only in folder thumbnail view) or make the file related to other categories (feature like in most blogging applications).


If you make good solution on it, I'm sure thousands or millions of people including me would love to send little donation (I'm student, so I'm not sure I can donate much ). Who knows Microsoft would offer you to sell the license.


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Enkbilguun

Thanks so much for the reply! I completely forgot about this kind of issue in local file management and never thought that my idea could be applicable to a desktop apps.
In your setup (which i really like), there is definitely an issue with tutorials (they are all over the place), tools and to certain extent setups. I can relate to this back when I was managing networks and storage and had to organize setup files for different needs (education, utilities, admin, graphics, development, etc). I was never certain where to assign them since most of them fit into more than category.

My primary concern is of course duplicate effort because Dolphin in KDE can do this using tags and allows for file comments (KDE apps can run on windows too now). For windows I see tag2find and XYplorer all of which attempt to address this problem using tag clouds. XYplorer also has ability to comment a file etc. So there already seems to be different attempts at this. However, with tag clouds you lose the ability to browse through a hierarchical tree so that's something all of them are missing out.

I've stayed away from MS technologies for a number of years and I really do not like the thought of doing it in .NET so if I am to do this I would probably pick Java (I know I will get arguments about speed but I don't think its that bad nowadays and its cross platform) or C++ with Qt (although I have 0 skills in the latter so I won't be using that combo any time soon). Since I am at the extreme beginner's level on Java, this could take a while but I would definitely enjoy doing this as a practice project.

Going back to this being a web app I see your point, especially with PDFs which are a pain. If majority of ebooks are in CHM format this won't be an issue though. It seemed like a good idea for intranets. For example, I did a test once in a classroom environment where teacher had to distributing some material and he found it easy to do the job through my, now non-existent, prototype.

Hi,
For information, there is a new appliction for PHP that allows you to make your PHP code into an exe like you would with C.
Just read about it this month don't know anything more, but it look's interesting ?
roadsend.com

Thank you for letting us know about it.
Just got around to play with it, however roadsend is incompatible with ZF . Problem is, ZF uses syntax like
foreach ($temp as $key=>&$msg) {
in many of its classes which roadsend does not understand thus giving
parse error (unexpected token `ref')
There is a bug about this on code.roadsend.com/pcc/ticket/3624
Doesn't seem like its even planed to be fixed

This would have been really great. ZF classes are quite massive to be interpreted from scratch every time and having them compiled in a binary would have been a real performance boost and be more attractive for enterprise development like JSP is.

P.S. I guess ZF can be modified to fit with syntax rules required by roadsend but that'll probably take some time to do. Anyone up to the challenge ??