Kobo Glo firmware 3.2.0 et al.
After some calm period a new firmware for the Kobos, all of them. The latest one being 3.2.0. The new firmware brings several changes to the handling of selection and related operations like highlighting, translating, annotating. This has always worked very well for Latin based scripts, but was rather clumsy for Japanese as I complained in a former articles comparing Japanese reading on Kindle Paperwhite and Kobo Glo. Now it works much better, especially more responsive, but on the negative side still does not auto-select kanji-compounds.
Changes to the selection process
These changes really improve the usability of the unit a lot. Selection is now much easier, quicker, and more reliable, even for Japanese text. Immediately after the selection has made a transient small window pops up with the default dictionary lookup, as well as buttons for further options: the left button is for highlighting and commenting, the middle one for searching the web, and the last one for social networks.
As mentioned above, the selection in Japanese text still does not work on character class level (like on Paperwhite), meaning that the largest compound of characters of the same class (Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji) are selected, but one has to tap-hold-drag to select the word. This process was very tedious and error prone in former, especially the 2.N firmwares, but has improved considerably.
On the negative side, ff you want to go to the full-screen definition, one has to tap-hold one of the words in the transient window – which unfortunately does not work in Japanese, see above, as only single characters are selected. And in case you look up an English word where the short definition does not show the same word again, there is no way. Pity.
(Further comment: the dictionary I use is a local one which merges the Kobo provided Japanese-Japanese dictionary with the eDict dictionary)
Other changes in the current firmware
According to this post on MobileRead, the following items have also been changed: WiFi fixes, deletion of annotations, new patience game
Firmware
As usual one finds the latest firmware in the respective MobileRead thread: Kobo AuroHD/GLO 3.2.0.
Kobohack-j
The latest Kobohack-j, i.e., at the moment the one at kobohack-j-140113.zip or newer works. See my other posts concerning the kobohack-j.
Kobo patcher (libnickel)
There is a new thread about patching for Kobo firmware 3.2.0. The third post already gives a link to the nearly full set of found options. Thanks to user GeoffR for providing these.
