FAQ: Recommended Apps

[hazington]

Hello Community

Since sharing is caring, I would like to introduce some very useful apps for the Onyx Boox that I frequently use.

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Edge Gestures

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ss.edgegestures&hl=en

Edge gestures allows you to add custom gestures to your Onyx Boox. You have 3 invisible (they are only visible in the app settings) active edges (left, right, bottom) and can set different type of gestures to any edge like tab, long press and swipe and assign actions like back, recent apps, home, set a custom application, etc.

My settings:

1. Swipe from right to left for back
2. Swipe from left to right for recent apps
3. Swipe up for ContentBrowser. ContentBrowser is the launcher of Onyx devices. I choose ContentBrowser over Home, because ContentBrowser will bring you back to your latest active view. This means, that you can at least switch back to the latest notes or storage directory, that was open.
4. Holding right centered for power menu
5. Swipe down on the right for pulling down notification center
6. Swipe up on the right for Dropsync sync now command

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Kiwi Browser

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiwibrowser.browser&hl=en

Kiwi Browser is a chrome based web browser, like brave and Opera. Besides ad blocking it has unique feature that makes it my number one for Onyx devices. The Kiwi Browser supports Chrome extensions like the “High Contrast” extension made by Google that works quite awesome and makes web pages far more readable.

High Contrast

My settings:

My setting for “High Contrast” extension is “Grayscale” mode that is not visible in the screenshots. To find the extension settings scroll down to the bottom in the three dot menu. I also activated the checkbox “Hide annoying ads”. Useful, since the Onyx has an e ink display, is to deactivate auto play for videos in the chrome site settings under “Media”.

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Dropsync (Autosync)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ttxapps.dropsync&hl=en

The developer “MetaCtrl” offers a nice range of syncing applications to different widely known cloud storage like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. You can two-way sync any local folders to any destination folder on your cloud. For example, you can sync your Books, dicts and notes backup folder.

My settings:

I disabled auto sync, since this is draining battery and I do not need to sync my files automatically. Instead, I open the app and press the sync button, when I need to sync my files from or to Dropbox. At the moment I sync these folders: Books, dicts and note/backup.

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Open Settings

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dxidev.openhiddensettings&hl=en

This app is just a shortcut to access the standard Android settings. Since this one is ad free and does not need any special permission, it is my recommended app.

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Solid File Explorer

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pl.solidexplorer2&hl=en

For me the solid file explorer is the best file manager application for Android. Besides managing the whole internal storage, it supports multiple storage like Dropbox, Google Drive, FTP, etc. It also has a nice Application viewer, that shows also package name and location. This quite handy, if you would like to uninstall preinstalled apps via adb. Also remarkable, it can extract archives like tarball, RAR and ZIP. This allows you to download, extract and move stardict dictionaries on your device without need of a computer.

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I hope you will find these apps useful, too. Some of them are not free, but all of them are one time purchases and worth their money.

[dia2000]

Thank you very much for this wonderful “caring”!
It solved half of my problems with my Boox Note Pro!

[bit101]

I use a few of these already. Edge Gestures looks great. Since getting the latest version of Android with swipe from edge to go back, I’m constantly doing that on my Nova Pro. Or trying to do that until I realize it doesn’t work.

[hazington]

@bit101

With Edge Gestures you can implement the same behavior in your Nova Pro and even add some comfortable gestures that even Android 10 does not support. You can even add missing features like marking screenshots to your Boox. I implemented a double tap on the right side to make a screenshot. So it is no longer necessary to take a picture of my screen with the smartphone.

The settings I suggested in the opening post are already outdated.

[Victor8]

Thanks for caring,
inspires me to join in the sharing:

As file explorer MiXplorer works excellently on my BOOX device. What’s great about it:

1. It doesn’t seem to drain a lot of power.

2. It’s very versatile, you can customize a lot and it can look pretty good on e-ink. (See screenshot below using skin/theme “Corporate”.)

3. It works well.

4. You can read saved Webpages (.mht) well with the built in reader.

5. It has great add-ons. Particularly useful for BOOX devices: PDF add-on and Metadata add-on* - you can change title, author, etc. of e-books and PDFs (if you have PDF add-on installed too) directly here, no need for a PC.

6. Many other features of an advanced file explorer.

The free version is not on Google Play, you can get it online from xda-developers and probably other apk-sites. There’s a paid version on Google Play that includes all the add-ons.

I’m not sponsored by them, I just find it’s a great app and it was a worthy replacement for ES even with some improvements.

Another great one is Xodo.
Allows you to read and permanently crop PDFs. So even if you prefer to read in another app, you have it to size already.

That being said, KOreader has the greatest reflow function, can also reflow scanned PDFs well, even not so clean or straight ones, particularly helpful with scanned multi column papers.

Hope there’s something useful for someone.

Sharing is caring…

[dia2000]

Thanks a lot. This is so useful!

[jeffmcneill]

Edge Gestures, MiXplorer, and Open Settings are great recommendations. I also use:

• Rotation Control Pro (screen rotation)
• QuickEdit Plus (text editor)
• Syncthing (file syncing)
• Alpha+ Player (somafm internet radio)
• Telegram (chat app), though images look horrible
• Keypass2Android (password manager)

Note also that Firefox works fine as a browser, and there are high contrast themes which make it look better on eink.

[thecubist]

Thanks for the comprehensive recommendations. I gave edge gestures a try because I liked the idea of deactivating the navi ball for a cleaner look. After some hours of use I noticed, that the battery drains much faster than before. Even when doing nothing on my Max3 waiting for gestures obviously consumes much battery. Returned to the navi ball, but do wonder, whether the useful swipe up for home could be integrated in the native software efficiently? @claire?

[guohexiang]

Are you aware that double tap on the navigation ball will move you to the home screen?

[hazington]

Then something must have went wrong on your device. Edge Gestures does not have any positive or negative effect on my battery.

I charged my Note 2 three days ago, had a screen on time of 6.5 hours and I still have 80 % battery.

FYI: With Edge Gestures your can add a gesture to make a screenshot like these above (for me its double tap on the right)

[RL71]

Hello,

How did you get rid of some icons in the apps overview? I do not use some but can’t get rid of the icons.

BTW: I use:

• Google Chrome
• Gboard
• Trello
• Simple Calculator

also.

[hazington]

I uninstalled them with adb. You will find a good instruction here:

How to Uninstall Carrier/OEM Bloatware Without Root Access

[thecubist]

Yes, thank you for the hint anyways.

[thecubist]

Thanks for sharing your experiences. I did not systematically analyze the difference so far - if I find time to do so, I will report the findings back.

[claire]

Thank you for your valuable suggestion here. This new feature has been forwarded to our R&D team to follow up. Hope it would be available in the near future.

[hazington]

@claire

Your R&D department should really try Edge Gestures and implement something similar into the future firmware releases.

In my opinion the navigation ball is just a bad workaround for things that should be realized by gestures like swipe, double tap, long press, etc. You should really consider giving up the current navigation ball solution and replace it with a comprehensive gesture based control.

For example my current settings are:

Right side:

• Swipe left: Back
• Swipe up: ContentBrowser (Home)
• Swipe down: Expand notification center
• Swipe up & down: Sync now to Dropbox

Bottom:

• Swipe up: ContentBrowser (Home)
• Double tap: Dictionary

Left side:

• Swipe right: Switch to previous app
• Long Press: Recent apps

The side and bottom edges have a length of 25 % of the total side length. My side edges are also located close to the top that I can reach them easily with my thumbs, but never trigger them with my palm when writing. This is also the reason for not having a long press event on the right and the bottom. I could provide a backup of my configuration if you like.

Some apps like Dropsync also provide commands like “Sync now” that can be used by this app. If the ContentBrowser could provide such a command for refresh, then I could also add a gesture for refreshing the screen.

If you provide gesture support with the firmware, you could also realize something like: Two fingers swiping down for refresh, etc. This gesture would allow to refresh in any app, without staining from the navigation as it happens at the moment.

[Victor8]

Link for Corporate theme in MiXplorer:
https://mega.nz/#!j7x0wQDR!j7YAxYNDxILDgpdpZaQrEIC_SphjObeyaG54BU4J-V8

(You can also go there through Settings in the app:
Settings → Skins → Add → Web → Themes → Chalkyman → Corporate.mit → Download)

[Victor8]

Sorry posted this at the wrong place, should be connected to my post above.

[jistme]

Thank you @hazington, the suggestion for Kiwi as a browser and adding High Contrast to it was golden.
I am now finally enjoying my browser experience on my ereader.