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Show HN: AgoBrowse: Picture books for kids without distractions (bitbucket.org/bjornerlingfloetten)
61 points by AgoRapide on April 7, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 35 comments



That's very nice and well done. Anything distraction free gets lots of points from me! A great way to browse the openly licensed images in the commons.

If you also want to introduce reading aspects, I highly recommend the African Storybook collection: https://www.africanstorybook.org/ all kinds of a short (like 10 pages) books for young kids.

For localhost access, you can read the books in Kolibri (a FOSS learning platform you can install on any old computer a raspberri pi). For the African Storybook channel, see this online demo https://kolibri-demo.learningequality.org/en/learn/#/topics/... and look around that demo server to see all the other channels available.


Nice!

That is exactly how I would like children books to be presented.

I see that there are also some English language books. Does there exist a site in this format, with English books but with world-wide cultures?

I have been googling for it now and then but am still unable to find the 'perfect' presentation format.


Here are some more kids stuff I've seen (sometimes with different reader UX from the above):

1/ Global Digital Library (PDF and ePub format) https://digitallibrary.io/ and as offline-capable Kolibri channel https://kolibri-catalog-en.learningequality.org/en/learn/#/t...

2/ Pratham Books' StoryWeaver (includes some of the African Storybook titles, and based around PDFs) https://kolibri-demo.learningequality.org/en/learn/#/topics/...

3/ Learn JS games (probably need 6+ years old for this) https://kolibri-catalog-en.learningequality.org/en/learn/#/t...

4/ Videos of kids from different cultures: https://kolibri-catalog-en.learningequality.org/en/learn/#/t...

5/ Educational math videos with lots of singing: https://kolibri-catalog-en.learningequality.org/en/learn/#/t...

And more generally, you can see all EN channels in the catalog: https://catalog.learningequality.org/#/public?languages=en


Thanks! I found quite a lot of interesting stuff there.


It's pretty cool! Looked at the examples and neat! No distractions that's what we need more in the web. NO ads and distractions.


Thanks! Just what I wanted to hear :)

Can I quote you on this?


A little off topic but I'm a little jealous that dinosaurs are way cooler looking now that they are feathered and modeled after birds. The leathery lizard-like dinosaurs that were in my books as a kid were cool, but these ones are wild looking!

Now that gets me to think about just how persuasive images are to children's minds. When I think about velociraptors I almost exclusively imagine the Jurassic Park movie velociraptors, and not these ones.


If you like creating picture books (no ads, no account required) perhaps you also want to try out my MyPictureBooks app for android.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.juliushuij...

Add text and audio to pictures and you can flip the pages. That's mostly it. I also provided a couple of books myself.

(update: removed multi-line question 'where are examples?')


Regarding collaboration, the datastream is available like this:

http://vifero.no/RQ/dt/bef/SELECT%20ToPropertyStream().json

(all picture books with user id 'bef')

Please feel free to incorporate this in your app.


Thanks. I theory I think I could write a parser that would allow my app to view/import books in your format. Does seem like a bit time consuming to do, but perhaps if there are many people using this format I can do that one day.

My books export to a zip file that includes a json like that. Would probably make more sense if we both would parse to something more universally used (https://schema.org/Book perhaps) and then perhaps more people would be able to use it.


I think it is easy enough as it is. In principle 'URL' is the only property needed, that is quite easy to implement a parser for.

But, BTW, schema.org looks quite intriguing.


An online instance of AgoBrowse can be found here:

http://vifero.no


Thanks! Would it be wrong to say it's a slide show creator / viewer? Do you want to grow it into like a super simple Libre Office Impress ( https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/impress/) / PowerPoint ? Or is your personal family use-case the main purpose.

I don't fully understand the wiki like edit, but not sure I need to.

Might be nice to add an index page on the space-bar press, where you have thumbnails of each slide to quickly jump to specific image.


See my reply above about your Android App.

I think I want vifero.no itself to be REALLY simple, so OOvsuOO's comment will always be relevant:

"It's pretty cool! Looked at the examples and neat! No distractions that's what we need more in the web. NO ads and distractions."


We can agree on the ads part.

What counts as a distraction vs a feature is depending on the use case and perhaps how your brain works.

If you're trying to accomplish something like 'get quickly to that specific page', a way to quickly get to a list of thumbinals, to tap on it, would not be a distraction.

But if those thumbnails are always visible when you are just viewing the page, then it becomes a distraction.

If you have features that are perhaps hidden by default, but could be enabled in settings, you could allow the user to add the features they don't see as distractions.


"My world is really about data structures."

Also good. I tend to take the perspective of features/impact to end users, so my feedback is about that. But great project to put your data driven back-end to a real use case as a way to learn and have fun with.

Another project that is bit 'on pause' that's perhaps more in your corner, is my attempt to set up a search engine for all charities, based on open data.

https://github.com/juliuszelf/global-charity-search-engine

Challenge is not even so much gathering the data, but figuring out a use case to make such a search engine valuable to a specific set of users, so it will get used, get feedback and can grow.


"Test it out at: http://charitysearch.juliuszelf.nl "

That link does not work.

DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN


Thanks!

You can test it at: http://www.charitius.org/

Fixed the url in Readme.


I agree. I think that would be an app like yours :)

My world is really about data structures.

https://bitbucket.org/BjornErlingFloetten/ARCore

"A library for building data-oriented backend applications written with .NET Core / Standard."

is what I really like to work with.


Bug: Clicking too fast to advance the image results in highlighting a picture, turning it blue.


I think it is moving the cursor simultaneously with clicking that causes it. In other words the web-browser sees it as intention to mark / select content on web page.

Any suggestions for how to avoid this?


There's some CSS you can use that prevents selection. I can't see any need for selection in your app, so you could just apply it liberally.


Thanks! I will look into it.


It looks like adding "user-select: none" for the image tag did the trick. Please try it out now.

(I do hope that the touch-interface was not affected by this, I only use mouse / keyboard myself).


Seems good now. It also seems more responsive/snappier. That might just be in my head, though.

It shouldn't affect touch events. That's a different CSS rule.

Edit: Just tried it on Firefox/Android, and it seems like it actually changes multiple pages now. Perhaps it's reacting to both click and touch on mobile?


That is possible, the touch interface is not that well tested. I will look into it.


Got any examples of how this manifests?


Could you be more specific please?

There is an example database in the Bitbucket repository if that is what you mean.


Yep, when I clicked the link it didn't load anything.


Sorry, I suppose you refer to the online demonstration at http://vifero.no It is a bit embarassing, I had to take it down due to a huge memory leak which only manifests itself on the server, not when running locally. But running the Visual Studio project locally should give you the same result.


No worries, it happens :)

Ok thanks!


Fixed now.

http://vifero.no is up and running.

I forgot to set an access right.

Will have to improve ARCore also, so such an error is not so dramatic.


The question mark in the corner of each image is not clickable on mobile for me, so in order to view the image attribution credits I have to view the site on my computer instead.


Yes, the mobile interface (touch interface) is the least developed.

I am one of the few persons left in this world who still uses a dumbphone. My laptop is my primary gadget.

But pull requests with a better touch interface would of course be welcome :)


thanks :)




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