VaultInk 0.62: Dice, Sudoku, VaultEUC and a much better Library

Since the 0.55 post, VaultInk has moved on seven versions. Nearly all of the reading changes came from Kostas (kos25k), who keeps testing it on a real X4 Pro and asking for the next thing.

One thing first: most of this has only run in the simulator and in tests on the computer. There's a section on that below.

The Library grew up

The Library now has a Folders tab, so there are five, and you choose their order and which one opens first. Every book shows how far you've read. With Recent open, a small bar sorts by most read or least read. A gear in the header filters by format, and PDFs finally show up in the list.

Search in Book, properly

Kostas's issue #24 ran through nearly every release. Search no longer lays out every chapter first: it reads the text directly, starts at your chapter, shows hits as it finds them, and Back stops it at once. It can match part of a word or whole words only. Pick a hit and the words are shaded on the page, a bar steps to the next one, and an arrow takes you back to exactly where you were, with your reading position left alone. There's also an optional index for later searches.

Kostas's crash logs also caught a real bug: Back on the empty search keyboard restarted the device. That's fixed in 0.58.1.

Random page, and paper contrast

Random page! is an optional Home item that opens a random page of a random book. Nothing is saved while you look. Paper contrast is a 0 to 100 slider with a tile of every page background changing as you move it.

Tools: Sudoku, Dice, VaultEUC

Home → Plugins now has three built-in tools.

Sudoku has three levels, pencil notes, undo, hints and a timer, and it saves your place.

Dice does polyhedral dice with advantage, keep-highest and exploding dice, plus old World of Darkness, Vampire V5 with Hunger dice, Willpower rerolls and Rouse checks, Chronicles of Darkness, Fate, Powered by the Apocalypse, Blades in the Dark, Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun, Savage Worlds, Year Zero and Cyberpunk Red.

VaultEUC is an electric unicycle companion over Bluetooth: speed, battery, temperature, trip and more every 5 to 30 seconds, alarm limits, and ride logs as CSV on the SD card. It has never talked to a real wheel. It has only run against a demo wheel, several protocol details are still unverified, and it isn't for use while riding. An e-ink screen is too slow to warn you, so rely on the wheel's own alarms. Its protocols were studied from open projects: WheelDash, VESCDash, eucWatch and WheelLog.

Smaller things

• PDFs with AES-256 and an empty password open, and three and four columns read in order.
• Reading streaks and finished books on the stats sleep screen.
• Drain per hour on the Battery page, asleep and awake.
• Info with the modified date on every file.
• LiveSync sends notes on vaults with the newer id scheme.
• A plainer corner lock screen.
• Fixes: Home Screen Rows losing its last rows, an upload ending cut short, and the first Home after an update showing the wrong layout.

What isn't proven yet

Dice, Sudoku, Random page, the sort bar, the search index and paper contrast have run in the simulator and in host tests, not on a device. The speed of the search index on a long book isn't measured, and Random page from a PDF has never been run. The screenshots are from the simulator, and the new screens exist only in English for now. Back up your SD card before updating.

The Android companion is still at 0.4.0, and it has no Dice or VaultEUC features.

Getting it

Install from the web installer, or see all the features on the project page and the releases.

Thanks to Kostas (kos25k) for the testing, the crash logs and the ideas.