OpenBerg e-Book architecture / News: Recent posts

You can now open e-Books in a variety of formats from Firefox, using OpenBerg Lector 5 -- and take advantage of all the features of Firefox.

Download it now on http://www.openberg.org .

The promised new version of OpenBerg is coming. Within the next few weeks, we plan to release the first alpha version of OpenBerg Mk 3. This new version is a transparent extension of Firefox. In other words, it adds features to Firefox but doesn’t alter the user experience at all. Every feature of Firefox remains at your disposal, including whichever extensions you may have added, and there is no new piece of software to learn.... read more

The family of platforms supported by the OpenBERG open-source, open-standards, cross-platform, e-book reader, is growing again. After the Linux and the Windows version, the Mac OS X version is now available for download.

The family of platforms supported by the OpenBERG open-source, open-standards, cross-platform, e-book reader, is growing. The Windows version may now be downloaded, side-by-side with the Linux version.

The development and debugging of the cross-platform build system were long and painful. However, they will allow us to continue working on the Linux, MacOS and Windows versions from a common source base, and with the exact same set of features.... read more

The first objective of the OpenBERG project is to deliver an open-source, open-standard, cross-platform, e-book reader. After numerous days spend making the code and the build system platform-independent, the OpenBERG team is proud to announce that we have a Mac OS X build.

The next steps are testing that build, of course, and taking screen shots. We are also still working on automatizing the build-system, which so far requires all-too-many human interventions.... read more

Nearly one week (and 150 downloads) after the release of the first preview version of OpenBERG's cross-platform e-book reading sofware, it is time to draw a few conclusions on the quality of the package. In a few words: the reader behaves as expected, the installer is working, but the build system is badly broken.

Building the Linux version from source has proved a breeze for all who tried. Installing the Linux version using the downloadable installer has proved quite easy, too. Using the Linux version has revealed a number of small bugs, most of which have already been fixed. Bottom line : OpenBerg Reader for Linux is of an acceptable beta-quality.... read more

After a long wait, OpenBERG Reader Milestone 1 is now available. OpenBERG Reader is an open-source tools for reading e-books, based on open standards and cross-platform Mozilla technologies.

Although most of the features we have in mind are not implemented yet, OpenBERG Reader may already display complex books (including XHTML 1.1, CSS2, MathML, JavaScript...), organize libraries, etc.

At the moment, due to a lack of hardware and manpower, only source code and Linux builds are available for download. If you wish to help us fill the blanks, do not hesitate to contact us.... read more

OpenBERG aims at providing cross-platform tools for reading, writing and publishing e-books. Well, in addition to the Linux and BSD versions, we now have a Windows version, with the exact same set of features. Hopefully, a MacOS X version will follow.

The first version of OpenBerg for Windows has been successfully compiled and (briefly) tested. It uses the exact same codebase and libraries as the Linux and BSD versions. Although we currently do not have sufficient access to Windows development environments to ensure daily compilation and testing under Windows, we hope to manage reasonably frequent compilation and tests. If you think you can help, please contact us.... read more

The OpenBerg project deals with e-books. In particular, it deals with libraries of e-books, containing numerous informations which the user might wish to use when it comes to searching/loading a particular book. This, along with other things, is handled by the Persistence module.

The Persistence module takes care of loading and saving information regarding the books (author, genre... but also user-annotations, cache, last-opened date and book-specific preferences) and regarding OpenBerg itself (last-opened books, preferences...).... read more

Work has started on the User Interface for Milestone 1. The version currently available for developers (in the CVS) has an incomplete/experimental User Interface.

A first source release has been made public. You can find it in the Developer downloads section of the site.

The source code is now also available on the CVS, as part of module projects/openberg2.

For the first time, OpenBerg has opened a OEBPS 1.2 book and displayed its first page !

Several updates on the website:
* we now have a set of user-editable pages (PHPWiki) at http://openberg.sourceforge.net/wiki
* the wiki contains the beginning of a design document

We have a new website along with a brand new domain name !

You can now check http://www.openberg.org . Comments and corrections are welcome.

After almost two years in OpenBERG, Phyxie has decided to leave us, at least temporarily. Blame his PhD and the consequent lack of time for the project.

Best wishes for the last few months of your PhD.

It has been a long time without updates, partly due to the fact that the two project managers were busy writing their PhD. Now that 50% of the PhDs are finished and the other 50% well under way, the work will be resumed.

There have been important changes to the architecture. More on this later.

Andrea Colanicchia, from EvolutionBook, is now responsible for the Search Framework.

After a long struggle, the build system maintainer succeeded in compiling the openberg test program :-).
Meanwhile, automake and libtool have been banished. Porting to other systems than linux will be done when openberg will be a bit stabilized (then coming back to automake might be possible).

The configure script has been deeply changed. New features are :

- Correct wxwindows/gtk+ detection
- Improved mozilla detection, with minimal version control
- configure now prints more informations when it finishes

These features seems to work, but they have not been tested with the full cvs tree
yet. Please report bugs !

Greetings to Andrea Colanicchia, from Evolutionbook.com, who shall join the team starting next September !

And thanks to all those who made possible for LiberGNU, EvolutionBook and OpenBERG to meet each other.

After a long time spent updating OpenBERG to gcc 3.3, wxWindows 2.4, Unicode and Mozilla 1.3, the code now compiles once again.

Implementation of user-level annotations has begun. This is a quite complex part of the code and it is progressing steadily.

An experimental user interface prototype is in the work. We hope we will have something to show by the end of august.

We are now able to load and save user preferences.

We are currently redesigning the site. Any comments or suggestions will be appreciated.