Calibre ui made me stay away, I don't mind different but sometimes you do need to get a bit more mainstream. Blender 2.80 did this move and it helped a lot I believe.
Perhaps I have a different use case. I spend very little time in Calibre but loads more time on my Kobo reader. The time I spend is so little that I have never really noticed the user interface. I use Calibre to transfer books to and from my reader and occasionally download meta data for books. I know Calibre has functionality to download blogs and so on but I use Kobo's integration with Pocket[0] to read online articles.
I read most things on my Kindle, but from the moment I unboxed the Kindle I put it in airplane mode and have kept it that way. More privacy and better battery life. So, Calibre is useful as a way to get content and move it over to my e-reader over USB, and so I don't ever risk connecting to the e-reader maker's proprietary ecosystem. I would worry that even that Kobo Pocket integration is sending data to Kobo's servers.
Anecdotally, when we bought my girlfriend her first Kindle about five years ago, we noticed it was requiring charging way more often than the back-of-the-box battery life quote of "weeks of battery life". Upon calling an Amazon agent, they referred us to the fine print for that quotation:
> A single charge lasts up to six (6) weeks, based on a half hour of reading per day with wireless off and the light setting at 13. [0]
We were still pretty pissed at the blatant false advertising (a hardcore book reader reads for only a half hour a day!?!), but moving forward, she keeps the device in airplane mode 95% of the time, only turning it off to download whatever new book she just bought. It increased to at least 2-3 weeks after that, instead of a single week.
The nice thing about the kindle is that with both wifi and light off, the battery use is nearly non-existent between pages. So the difference between 30 mins / day and 6 hours / day of reading is not that large, tbh.
My old Sony reader gets a few 1000 pages of read time/ 8 weeks (& more) or so of occasional use. On WiFi it drops to a week or so. Making an antenna work uses heaps of energy. It's worse when roaming as it searches for a known network.
A full charge on my older e-ink Kindle (whatever the last one that had buttons, rather than a touchscreen), can last for months with the wifi turned off. If the wifi is on, it usually runs flat in about a week.
One of the key features of e-ink is that it actually requires zero energy to sustain an image. It only consumes energy for state changes between images.
Of course, modern e-readers have a backlight. Though you can never fully turn it off, at least on my first-gen Paperwhite, which is unfortunate.
Yeah, the UI is appalling, but it works really well for normalizing the book metadata, and loading the books onto my e-reader. That's more than enough functionality for me.
It's non-native anywhere, and so your intuition fails you. Icons change behaviour, the fit and finish is terrible (many text labels do not line up, for instance).
As I said, functionally, it is marvellous. But using it interactively is painful.
Kobo's integration with Pocket is a killer feature for me. It's so seamless: reading an article on my phone, and at any time hit a button, grab my kobo, and continue reading from there.
I have only used Calibre a few times, but doesn't the Kobo show up as a storage device, allowing you to drag/drop the books there? What advantage does Calibre offer purely for transferring?
YMMV. I probably have more books and documents than I will ever read. I use Calibre to manage this collection. It is easier to flip through my collection of books on a computer when deciding what to read next than on my ereader. Being able to download meta data helps me decide what to read next. I use the Calibre storage as my backup for my ebooks. My first ereader was a Kindle which I stupidly trashed while trying to swat a fly (true story). I then bought a Kobo. Calibre converted my books as I loaded them onto Kobo.
do you integrate with pocket? i tried but miserably failed. it results in a mess of files and data that i can't read.
do you have a source link or good link on how to setup?
Instapaper might work better for you for Kindle integration.
The Kobo integrates Pocket natively, so it works seamlessly. It's one of the reasons I bought a Kobo. Native Overdrive integration was a huge plus, too.
I bookmark articles during the week using Wallabag (an open source Pocket alternative), which gives me an RSS feed that I use within Calibre's "Fetch news" feature to send the articles to my Kindle on a Saturday morning.
I then go to a cafe next door and read them. They don't look like an ebook on a Kindle, more like a Kindle magazine. I adore that feature.
Check out Calibre-Web[1], It runs on top of a calibre database and some other calibre tooling, you can upload and download books from it, edit meta-data, read through the browser. Any books I grab I upload to it (can do via phone easily enough) and then I point my Kobo to it to grab books. I run it on a headless server, and never interact with Calibre UI.
Calibre has a built-in web server, and it seems it improved a lot in this release:
> The server has gained all the major capabilities of the main calibre interface. You can now edit metadata, convert books, and add/remove books and formats just as is possible with calibre itself.
Calibre-Web has shelves (that can be public or private), and a built-in OPDS server (that you can use from within phone apps such as Moon+ or a rooted Kindle).
It not only replaced Calibre's server for me, but also those few functionalities for which I've previously used Goodreads: organizing books into shelves, marking them as read, keeping track of how many books I read in a year.
It is by far the ugliest program I run on my Mac. That said, I run it frequently, and don't know what I would do without it, despite its complete lack of design.
That doesn't mean it's well-designed, it just means it's not using custom widgets. Those of us who aren't particularly thrilled with Calibre's UX are mostly annoyed by how it doesn't bother with typical UI conventions when it comes to menus, displays, command keys, etc.
If I were designing a "competitor," for a start:
- have a "File" menu that collects the commands relating to, you know, files: open, delete, rename, add, edit metadata (akin to the "Get Info" command in most other file menus), etc. Converting between file types could be in a submenu here.
- have an "Edit" menu that does Edit Menu Things (tm), most notably copy, cut, and paste
.
- let me drag and drop files to add them to the library.
- when I connect a Kindle or other device, show me a second pane with its content side-by-side with my library, rather than making me switch between "here is your library with flags to indicate what's on your device" and "here is your device with flags to indicate what's in your library."
- since I have two panes like the gods intended, let me copy files from my library to my device with drag and drop.
Calibre has all of that functionality, but it ignores three decades of UX convention to no particular benefit.
I personally have never had an issue with it. There are many buttons but they are all very discoverable with a bit of hovering. I vastly prefer it to "modern minimalist" interfaces where I have to drill through 90 layers of Hamburger menus to disable a goddamn notification.
I could write a long list of small quality of life tweaks to its UI.
But, at the same time, I wonder how many HNers have even built a UI for a product with so many features. It's incredibly hard to find a good place for everything. And experimentation is expensive and time consuming.
Nah bundling chrome would modern UI worthy of a billion dollar company. Supporters will innocently ask who in the world does not have a machine with at least 32GB RAM and octa-core processor to run this wonderful application.
I don't really mind the UI itself, but the experience from how everything's jumbled around (especially the toolbar from hell) certainly does detract from it's mid-90s charm.
It's totally fine. It has a bit of mid-90s Java program vibe to it -- large chunky icons and buttons -- but functionally it's the same as any of these programs. I seriously don't need it to be upgraded to a Material UI or any hot new thing.
I think many people don't realize that its appearance is very customizable - you can turn off all the icons, buttons, extra views etc., after which it has a very plain and simple appearance.
I get that tiny icons are in these days, but my icons are less than 40x40 pixels. Is that considered large? They look the same size as the icons in Firefox.
I'm not sure what these people are complaining about.
You have a search box with a big list box underneath and a preview frame on the side. I guess it's 'dated' in the sense it doesn't use a browser engine, layout everything with CSS, and have icons that match 201XQY's design fad.
I have 32 GB of RAM in my desktop, but I'm getting maxed out on the number of Electron apps I can have running at one time.
At this point, I've got a pretty good sample of apps that were native and have now become Electron, and the Electron versions use 8-10x more memory across the board.
This is not ok. At this point, Outlook is the least resource-hungry productivity application that I need to use on a daily basis. Outlook!
