Working great on the Era P700

[Biep]

I already mentioned in another thread that it seemed to work well, and I can confirm it does.
Great that it remembers the state of the last game played, and the defaults for each game (size, difficulty, and so on)!
And wonderful that all those "extra" games are in there! I love creek already, and am enjoying ascent and others.

But of course there is always room for improvement, so:

• Long taps need to be really long to register as such. Time and again I my long tap is interpreted as a short one, because I released too early. I don't know whether this is system-dependent, but if it depends on the app, it would be nice to have a setting for that. In KOReader, much shorter taps are already seen as long taps.
  But I am learning, and am sure soon this will no longer be an issue for me in most cases.
• An explanation of the possible actions, and how to perform them, would be pleasant. I keep discovering. (Just now, looking at the name of the icon in the source made me sure that the brush icon just does a repaint, but I kept wondering whether it did something else instead, only repainting as the result. Where may one tap, and what is the result of a short/long tap there?
• An app icon? an entry in view.json can set it.
• No doubt I can invent more wishes if I set myself to it. :-)

None of this is really important, though.

Just a thought: as you have invested so much in learning the quirks of the PockedBook API, any chance you'll ever port Gargoyle, and open up the more than free 10,000 works of Interactive Fiction for the PocketBook? That would make the thing really complete: books, games, and IF in one device!
(If Gragoyle proves hard, a second option would be Frotz, though that supports way fewer formats.)

[Biep]

Do I need to say it?

Thank you so much!

[SteffenBauer]

Thanks that you like the port!

On your questions:

• Short/Long tap duration configuration would indeed be nice, but I haven't found out how to implement this so far. When you look at line 93 and line 96 in frontend/main.c you see that the app is simply reacting on system UI events POINTERDOWN and POINTERLONG, so the delay value for long tap is system-defined so far. Perhaps there are different ways to do it. Might check how KOReader is doing it.
• Explanation of the user interface elements is also on my to-do list. The explanation of game rules so far my using a message box is an improvisation. The screen redraw button is necessary here because some games tend to cause eInk ghost artifacts. I think I will add a quick explanation on the 'about' screen first, until I found a better solution.
• App icon I also need to look how this is done; thanks for the hint with view.json.
• I actually looked into porting an interactive fiction app! I checked out frotz. Challenge here is the frotz engine which is acting like a virtual machine. This collides with writing a REPL. I already found a modified frotz library from an AI project by Microsoft where an AI was learning to play text IF games, where the guys at Microsoft rewrote the frotz engine to be complatible with a REPL. This would be exactly what is needed here for a port, but time is always scarce and a whole IF app for PocketBook is a quite big project (I wrote the PocketPuzzles app during Corona lockdown when I suddenly had plenty of time during the evenings)

[SteffenBauer]

I just looked into the KOReader source code. Looks like KOReader is implementing its own event loop. It is mainly getting POINTERDOWN, POINTERMOVE and POINTERUP events from the system, and puts those events into an own event queue; as far as I understand it by quickly browsing over the code. Doing so, KOReader should be able to define own delay times for long presses by using some timer.

[Biep]

The main advantages of Gargoyle are its breadth, allowing lots of formats, and its visual beauty. There is Frotz for the Kobo, but playing it takes one back to the good old times of paper terminals, or at the best a mini version of a VT100. Which has its charm, of course, but disallows quite a bit of creative IF work.

Maybe Gargoyle is easier to port? It was written for portability, I understand.

[Biep]

BTW - there are a few Mah Jongg implementations for the Pocketbook, though they don't work on my Era. I don't know whether adding one of them as another puzzle in the SGT collection would work..
The web has quite a few versions of pb-mahjong - there is another implementation, but I can't find it.

[Biep]

To add a game icon, customised name, and so on, see here.

[Biep]

I just stumbled on this. Unfinished, but I suppose joining forces would be easier than struggling alone..