Hey I've been playing with your IPhone and Mac software and have a few suggestions. Some of which im sure you already have.
1. Bulk upload. I have dozens of text and pdf files etc... that I want to upload onto the iphone. I don't see a way of doing this. I would hope that you would have have an actual bookshelf somewhere that I can drive from a directory (with appropriate caching for performance). Yes this would take a while but I could just set it and let it go.
2. Bulk edit. iTunes has this neat feature where you can set properties for a group of items by selecting a a group of them and then editing the information. This updates all files. This feature goes with 1.
3. Metadata editing. I saw that other people have requested it so I won't go on about it. Other than say that on text documents perhaps inserting the meta data as xml in the front or back of document would be sufficient.
4. Ability to infer (guess) book title (and perhaps author) from the file name. At least the book name could be infered from the bookname. Should be an option to switch this on or off or perhaps a bulk edit option. At the moment the text files I have are named appropriately so it would make my and im sure a lot of users lives easier to at least be able to get a title. At the moment every file i have uploaded has come up with unknown.
5. Search entire document instead of just by chapters (I noticed this on your poll on the right just as I typed it in)
6. PDF rendering of documents still needs work but I know that this is a real pain.
7. Something like a virtual bookshelf where books in my ebook directory are visible in the program somewhere. (Perhaps I missed this)
8. Option to override or delay the lock on the iphone. You should be able to override this I believe I saw this in the API somewhere. I have my iphone set to 1 min lock and it is a pain to switch it on and off. However, it is dangerous to lock it on. Many people read in bed and if you fall asleep the battery will go flat. I suggest a delay option (up to infinite) instead of just a boolean on/off option.
I have got to say that this program looks very promising. Keep up the good work.
These are all very good
These are all very good ideas. Many of them are things we have already implemented for the next version (such as metadata editing in Stanza iPhone), others are things we are working on right now, and the remainder are things we have added to our list of possible future enhancements and fixes.
couple more suggestions & feedback
Brand new user... so far, so good. I now have 'War and Peace' on my iPod Touch, which I think is both amazing and funny.
Suggestions/feedback;
Sharing books opened through the Stanza Desktop app over WiFi worked exactly as advertised - no problems at all using MacBook Air with latest OS and Airport Extreme.
Screenplays made into PDFs will open but all the formatting is lost making them pretty unreadable. Opening the pdf and copying to clipboard didn't work at all - but this might be the way Final Draft makes PDFs.
Backups - so far, iTunes hasn't seemed to recognise the fact that I have the Stanza app on the Touch - when it syncs with my desktop machine, it usually syncs my newly downloaded apps - not with Stanza. Which also makes me think about whether the downloaded books are being backed up at all?
Chapter markup etc - I have the 3rd draft of my own book written in Pages - I've tried saving it in various formats but the chapters, page breaks, headers and footers aren't working out right. The best I can get is by copying to clipboard and opening in Stanza - then, for some odd reason it only recognises the last five chapter names (I've checked and they are all formatted exactly the same). Also apostrophes and quotation marks are missing and ellipses show up as É. Stanza did recognise Title and Author though - that's cool. I can't find any e-book creators for the Mac OS - so maybe Stanza could be the best one.
Multi-touch - the new Mac laptops have muti-touch which uses two finger scrolling and three finger swipe for back/forward page - I think it would be cool to incorporate these UI features at some point for the desktop app when you have time to breathe again.
I have to second the previous poster's final comment - this really does look very promising - please keep it up.
SSB
(Datsusara)