Flowe 0.7

Battery

Charge it once, then read for about 90 hours

It used to be about 15 hours. You can stop carrying a cable.

Your device stays connected to your phone the whole time, so you still get notifications and your place in a book still follows you. Nothing was switched off to save the power.

The reason it was ever 15 hours is that the chip ships with its power saving turned off, and no app can turn it back on. We rebuilt the chip's system software ourselves to get at it. Three changes did the work.

The radio alone used to eat more than half your battery. It now uses about three milliamps. That is where the six times came from.

Charge it on Sunday and forget about it.

Books

96,000 free books, already in the app

Find a classic and send it to your device in about ten seconds. You do not need an account, a shop, or a file.

The books come from eight public libraries, including Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks and Wikisource. There are 31,097 authors and 122 languages in there.

Free books normally look free. Missing covers, wrong titles, forty scans of the same novel. We fixed that. Every book has a cover, and where no cover existed anywhere we designed one, so you never scroll a wall of grey boxes.

• Search gives you the book, not forty scans of it, and puts the well known edition first.
• Every book has a description and a word count, so you can see what it is and how long it will take.
• Books open on chapter one instead of the copyright page.
• On iPhone the catalogue is stored on your phone, so search is instant and works with no signal.

Reading

A much better reader

More words on the page, better looking text, and the things a book reader should have had from the start.

The buttons and the status bar are gone while you read. You get about one more line of text on every page as a result. Text is now hyphenated and justified properly, which is why the right edge no longer looks ragged.

• Look up a word without leaving the page. Send the dictionary to your device once from the app and it stays there.
• Read footnotes. On a page with a footnote mark, MENU offers you the note, and one press takes you back to your place.
• Highlight a paragraph on the device and it appears on your phone straight away.
• Finish a book properly. You get a screen telling you how long it took, and offering the book you have left unread the longest.
• Choose your footer. Page number, percent, time left in the chapter, or nothing at all.
• Big books no longer show blank pages, and the chapter list now shows the book's real chapters instead of the file's internal parts.

Sleep

It wakes straight back to your page, and shows your day while it sleeps

No more waiting for it to start up, and no more blank screen sitting on your desk.

After five idle minutes the screen goes to sleep, but the device stays awake and connected. Your priorities stay on the screen. One press of the power button puts you back exactly where you were, with no start up.

Because it stays connected, the sleeping screen keeps up with your phone. Tick something off on the phone and the screen redraws itself a moment later.

Voice

Add things by talking

Faster than typing on a phone, especially first thing in the morning.

Press the button in the middle of the Today tab and say what you want. Add a priority, log a workout, or change one you already made. Long press the same button from any other tab.

It handles corrections, so you can say "no, make that Thursday" and it will fix it. It can only do things the app already does, so it cannot go off and invent something.

Speed

Less waiting, more doing

The slowest things you do every day are now about four times quicker.

Your device used to open every book on the card just to draw the shelf. It now remembers what it found last time.

What you do	0.6	0.7
Press BOOKS to leave a book	3.5 s	0.8 s
Open the chapter list in a long book	6.5 s	0.02 s
Turn a page on the X4	752 ms	594 ms
Restart to your home screen	6.0 s	3.0 s

Fixed

Sending books to your device actually works now

This was the most reported problem in 0.6, and most of this release went on it.

A book you deleted from the device came back on the next sync. Worse, once you deleted a title your phone quietly refused to ever send it again. There was no error and no way around it. If you took that book again months later it just sat there saying it needed updating.

Every sync also ended with a red message saying we could not reach your device, including the ones that worked. Your device restarts itself when a sync finishes, and we were reading that as a failure.

• Deleting a book stays done, and a book you deleted can be added again.
• A sync that worked says it worked.
• One book failing no longer stops the rest of them.
• You can delete from your phone, your device, or both. It asks first and tells you what it removed.
• Syncing now happens where you are, instead of throwing you onto a transfer screen and losing your place.
• You can watch each book upload.

Your home screen

Thirteen icon packs

Pick the one you like. Settings, Icon style, then press the arrows to try each on the screen before you keep it.

Classic, Stamp, Cutout, Etched, Signal, Woodcut, Inkdrop, Kawaii, Dinos, Ghosts, Snacks, Brush and Marker. Some are quiet and some are not.