The Book-bot Blog

Hey everybody, last night I finished up the Book-bot.com Dashboard Widget. If you’re using a Mac with OS X, you can download version 1.0 of the widget here (it’s about 132KB). If you’re using Safari, it should install into your dashboard auto-magically. Any other browser, just save the file, open the zip, which contains 1 file called “Book-bot.com Reader.wdgt” - double click the .wdgt file and it will ask if you want to install the widget, and you’re all set!

The book loaded by default is Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Clicking the info button in the upper right hand corner flips the widget over and allows you to browse or search for a different book. The “<<” in the upper left corner will collapse the widget down to show just the spine of the book - for those times when you need your valuable Dashboard space and aren’t interested in reading. Next page and previous page are the lower right and left corners, respectively. Of course the widget will save your progress so whenever you come back to it, it’s right where you left it. One thing the website does that the widget does not (yet anyway) is allow you to define words on the fly - but since there’s a dictionary widget built in to OS X it shouldn’t be a huge deal.

I decided to make a Dashboard Widget for three reasons:

• to learn how to make a Widget
• to provide a super-convenient way to read books online for Mac users (myself included)
• to help market Book-bot.com

Check out this page for screenshots and more information. Let me know what you think!

Paul has released version 1.5 of the incredibly addictive flash game Desktop Tower Defense. He added two new towers - one that squirts ink that damages all enemies who come into contact with it, and one that boosts the damage of surrounding towers. He also made a number of changes to the interface to make it slicker.

And David Scott, Paul’s new business partner, has a new game out called Vector Tower Defense. It’s my new favorite, has really crisp graphics and is lots of fun. It’s also quite challenging because the creeps eventually get millions of hit points, but the final tower upgrade doesn’t give them a massive damage boost like in Desktop Tower Defense.

Well folks, Book-bot.com officially went live today. For those not in the know, Book-bot.com is a revolutionary web 2.0-tastic way to read books at your computer. It can do things that a paper book could never do - like remember where you left off automatically, and define words for you by just double-clicking on them. It also gets rid of one of the most common pains of reading online - the endless scrollbar. But if you’re expecting the pages to be full of boogers like the books at the library, you’re out of luck.

The interface is designed to be as user-friendly as possible - you can browse through thousands of great books, and read them via an AJAX interface that eliminates messy postbacks and page-redraws. And there’s even a progress bar to see how far along you are. But the best part is, it’s all free. You can read the books without signing up at all - but if you do want to sign up, the Book-bot will know who you are and be able to remember what page of what book you were reading.

In case you were wondering, all the books at book-bot.com are in the public domain and available free via Project Gutenberg - I just cleaned them up and made a cooler way to read them. I also created the site to learn Ruby on Rails, an often hyped new web framework.

Some features I’ll be adding soon include the ability to jot down notes and “dogear” pages that you’d like to recall later, and add some additional typographic options so you can customize the reader to minimize eyestrain.