Anyview Introduction

by David Harding(New Zealand)

What is Anyview

Anyview is a free ebook reader for mobile phones. Anyview is written in Java, therefore should run on any phone that supports Java, and supports the JSR-75 standard. It is known to run successfully on more than 100 phone models from SonyEricsson, Motorola, and Nokia.

Anyview Features

Anyview has following features:
It can read files of type TXT, HTML, PDB and UMD comic format as well as display GIF, JPEG and PNG files.
Can handle UTF-8, GB2312 and Unicode - so can display Spanish and other language texts.
Fully touch screen enabled (for those phones with touch screens)
Very fast and responsive
Can open files directly from your phone - no need to add text file into jar file (as you have to do with most other ebook readers)
Has great page turning capability - you use 2/8 keys (or touch page) for page scroll and 4/6 keys (or use joystick) for line scroll. You can also turn on automatic scrolling.
Has Search, Jump to and bookmark features - everything you would expect of an ebook reader.
It supports reading directly from ZIP files - so your ebooks can take up less space on your phone.
Provides flexible customization capabilities with more than 50 user-customizable settings such as font size, colors, screen layout, etc. These preferences can be saved in Settings files and you can set up multiple settings files for use with different document types.

History

Anyview is not a commercial product, but was was developed in my spare time over the past 2 years. It has slowly improved from the initial simple TXT reader of Release 0.2 to the current 3.1 version which can handle many different file formats. Originally written to only work on E680/A780 phones, it now works on hundreds of models. Many friends have given me encouragement and advice with this development effort with the result that I believe that Anyview is now the best ebook reader available for Java enabled phones.

Installing Anyview

Anyview should be installed on your phone just like any other jar file. That is normally done by:
Download the rar file containing the latest version of Anyview and uncompress (unrar) it
Copy the fairy.jar file to the memory card in your phone
Click on the fairy.jar file to install the application. The application MUST BE installed on your memory card not the phone - otherwise it will not work correctly.
Before you can use it you must change the permissions of the app to allow it to read and write files from the phone's file system. This is done by editing the registry.txt file associated with Anyview. You do this as follows:

[These instructions are for a Motorola A1200. The location of the registry.txt file may differ on your phone]
1.After installing Anyview, plug the phone into the PC
2.Using windows explorer navigate to \.system\java\DownloadApps\MIDletXXXX on your SD card where MIDletXXXX is the last directory in DownloadApps in alphabetic ascending order.
3.Make a copy of the file registry.tx (in case you need to recover original file)
4.Edit the file registry.txt with a editor compatible with unix (eg wordpad). Do not use MS Word or Notepad! (Be sure the file has a line saying: Jar-URL: Anyview.jar - if not, you are in the wrong directory)
5.Change the values to these ones
- DRM-Mode: Allowed
- Is-Trusted: 1
- Domain: Manufacturer
6.Save the file and disconnect from PC
7.Go to the apps icon and hold the stylus until popup menu appears. Select Manage --> Change permission
8.Click OK (no need to change anything - that just forces new permissions to take effect)
9.The app should now be able to read and write files.

Using AnyView

Anyview was written to make it very intuitive to use and most functions can be done in less than 2 key presses. It consists of 2 main screens:

A. Main Interface

Reader Help - help file
Reader History - displays the last 3 files that were opened.
System Path location - this is a folder that you specify on either your phone or SD card as the place for Anyview to write any "page snapshots" that you can create within the program (under Edit option). It will also look in this folder for any font files to use (you are able to create font files to change the default Anyview font). Setting this path is optional. You only need to set this once when you start Anyview for the first time.
AutoSetup - only applies to not certain Sony Ericsson phones. For all other phones does nothing.
Change Themes - allows you to change the skin color. You are also able to build your own themes.

B. Text Interface

The screen that shows the text of the file you want to read. It has its own menu that permits you to:
Open - open other files
Bookmark - bookmark a specific page in a file, or open the Bookmark manager to view/edit saved bookmarks
Full Screen - go to Full screen mode. (You toggle between fullscreen and normal mode by clicking down on the phone's joystick).
Scroll - turn on page, line or continuous scrolling
Edit - Search for text; jump to x% of file; take "snapshots" of the selected text
Options - allows you to change color, font size and other settings
Close - closes the open file
Exit - exit the application

Shortcut Keys

Scrolling Shortcuts
In most phone models, 2/8/4/6/5 are defined as up / down / left / right /Enter keys.
You scroll by either touching the bottom or top of the screen (if phone touch screenenabled) or using the 2/8/4/6 keys or joystick to either
- page up or down (up/down joystick)
- advance line by line up or down (left/right joystick)
If you set Anyview to view text in landscape mode, then joystick positions change also.
Pressing on the joystick toggles Anyview between Full Screen and normal mode.

Menu Shortcuts:

Each menu has a number before the menu item. Pressing thecorresponding number key will implement that menu item.

Reading Shortcuts

While reading text you can use the following shortcuts:
1 =bookmark page
3 = turn on/off auto scrolling,
7 =to display Jump "popup"
9 =to display Search "popup"
0 = reverse color scheme

Using Zip Function

Anyview can display text files that are zipped. You do not need to unzip the file before using it to save storage space on the phone. However there are the following restrictions:
The zip file must only contain a single text file. The text file can not be inside a folder.
In order to decompress the zip file, the application needs some temporary memory space. If the usable space on the phone (or memory card)is not sufficient (120% of the zipped file size)then Anyview will be unable to decompress and view the file.

Changing Anyview's Language

Anyview can be easily modfifed to display its menus and messages in any language that you want by updating a single language file, language.rc, in the downloaded fairy.jar file. To do this you need to have a program like 7-zip installed on your PC which allows you to open jar files. It is a free utility that can be obtained from www.7-zip.com. Once installed, the language settings are changed as follows:
1. Use 7-zip to open the fairy.jar archive. You should see a lot of *.class files plus a language.rc file.
2. Open the language.rc file with Notepad. You will see that it has the format as follows:
Help = Help
Yes = Yes
3. Substitute the text on the right with the equivalent word in your language. (There are about 100 commands and message texts to translate)
eg Help = Ayuda
Yes = Si
Make sure that you do not put any spaces after the words - or the menus will not work!!
4. Save the file and exit the archive
5. Copy the fairy.jar file to your phone and reinstall it as normal (Do not forget to uninstall any current version of Anyview before doing this).
The program should now be in the language of your choice.