cochrane / fanfiction-downloader Goto Github PK

Currently, the app uses the Mac OS X default icon. That's ugly. Problems with creating one:

• I suck at art.
• What would an icon for such an app even look like?

When initially sending a lot of stories, this can take a lot of time, among other things because we overwhelm Mail with our emails.

A solution might be to send multiple stories in one email. Amazon limits the amount of stories per email to 25, so several would have to be sent anyway. Apparently Amazon does not limit the total size of the emails sent, but email providers might, so it might be a good idea to present a UI to select the maximum email size (with less stories per email if it would go over).

How to calculate the email size? With or without encoding? Probably needs with encoding. How about simply adding 36%-40% as a heuristic?

When updating, the downloader can mark a story as two levels of dirty:

1. new chapter added (this is when word and chapter count change)
2. some chapter changed (this is when only the word count changes)

In case 1, only the new chapters are downloaded; in case 2, all are. It may be useful to look at the update count instead of or in addition to some of these points. Still, in all cases, it is possible that the updater believes that only new chapters were added, even though old ones have changed, since there is no way to check for this without downloading the entire chapter again (and then it's pointless).

There are only two ways of resolving this:

• Allow users to mark a story as needs updating manually. In that case, it would be downloaded completely.
• Whenever word or chapter count change (or the update date is newer than now), download the entire story again, without using the cache.

The first may be necessary anyway, for example when email delivery fails in ways that the downloader doesn't notice; e.g. to the wrong email address, or with a sender that Amazon doesn't know. I'm not too fond of the second version, but it might be worth testing how much it really hurts.

Sometimes, a new chapter for a story may be available, but this application will not notice. This is a problem with Fanfiction.net: The metadata on older story chapters can take a while to update. This application always looks at the first chapter to find the metadata, including how many chapters there are.

Other strategies would probably not work, because there is no way to predict what chapters have been updated yet - e.g. when chapter 17 was added, then chapter 15 may be updated, but chapter 16 not yet, but there is no guarantee for this.

In the Kindle list view, under each title, for normal books, there is an author. For stories loaded with this tool, though, it is always the sender email address.

I think this may actually be an issue with Amazon's servers, who might not allow anything else, but it could be related to Mail and the scripting bridge as well. Right now, I don't think I can fix it, but I'm leaving this bug open in case I get a good idea some time.