Beru has finally reached beta! You can get version 0.9.8 from the app store or version 0.9.9 from this website or the PPA. They differ only in regards to application confinement.
Although it often felt that this release was spent fighting entropy, a few features did make their way into Beru. Most noticeable is the new cover view that replaces the old “Recently Read” list:
You’ll also notice from this screenshot that Beru uses the new header style in place of the old toolbar. The toolbar still appears on the book page, so the controls are hidden and don’t get in the way of your reading. Beru is also using the new Oxide WebView to display the books, which should provide better performance.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of the Ubuntu Translators, Beru ships with translations for fifteen languages, including complete translations for Galacian, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian Bokmål, Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian. Their efforts also alerted me to the cool fact that Norwegian has two orthographies. Beru is translated on Launchpad, so if your language is incomplete or missing, you can help translate.
Behind the scenes, Beru has transitioned from a QMake build system to a CMake build system, thanks to the hard work of Randy Olive. This greatly improves integration with the Ubuntu plugin in Qt Creator, allowing single click building, packing, and testing on devices and emulators. If you were put off by the inconvenient build system in the past, please give it another look.
Beru is also sporting a new icon, seen at the top of the page. Sam Hewitt gets the credit for inspiring the design, but I took his work and messed it up. If you like it, thank Sam; if you don’t, blame me.
Please note: Upgrading to the new version of Beru will cause the per-book styles and saved locations to be lost. This was caused by the change in WebView components, but we have moved the storage of this information out of the WebView, so this should never happen again. This is what you get for running pre-beta software.
There are several known problems with dialogs when running under recent versions of utopic:
- Dialog text does not wrap (Beru, UITK)
- There is poor contrast of UI elements in dialogs (UITK)
- Dialogs do not shrink with their contents (Beru, UITK)
- Primary and secondary buttons are difficult to distinguish (UITK)
Several other bugs are listed in the issue tracker. Please report any problems you encounter with Beru. My hope is to clear up most of these and release a 1.0 in the coming weeks.