Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a pretty good sign
Of what?
"red flag" I meant
Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
141–150 of 163 posts
Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
#142Nice project! I love Calibre's functionality, but I too was kind of frustrated by its UI and started designing an interface that kind of looks like a mixture of pre-Apple-Music iTunes and iBooks. I only created one screen so far, but feel free to take a look:
https://www.figma.com/file/m8qaYbPSnxiFPDPbuYtz2w/Calibre-re...
My main question was, how could Calibre's main functionality be presented in a UI that feels native to macOS?
Since this doesn't try to be cross-platform, I might try to build this as a SwiftUI app with your Rust backend if I find the time.
Kudos on actually publishing this! It might be hard to maintain something that keeps up with Calibre's development, but it sure seems like a fun hobby project :)
Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
#143Cool project, and best of luck to you. However, you might want to rethink the name as Citadel is also an established company - a large hedge fund with deep pockets that's not afraid of using it's lawyers.
That's not how trademark works
One manages the books the other cooks the books. I can see how that could be confused...
Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
#144Nice project! I love Calibre's functionality, but I too was kind of frustrated by its UI and started designing an interface that kind of looks like a mixture of pre-Apple-Music iTunes and iBooks. I only created one screen so far, but feel free to take a look: https://www.figma.com/file/m8qaYbPSnxiFPDPbuYtz2w/Calibre-re... My main question was, how could Calibre's main functionality be presented in a UI that feels nat…
This looks great! I'm no designer, so I always appreciate seeing other folks' ideas on how to design things. To shout out some other inspiration, there have been a few Calibre redesign projects.
In particular, Kemie Guaida[1]'s redesign posted to Reddit has been a major design inspiration (and she deserves credit on the repo, which I will address shortly): https://old.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/udzumn/testing_a_n...
You're able to see the entire overview of the project here: https://www.figma.com/file/g4ntqXWa6C0PRGrG3WjyXM/Calibre-pr...
Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
#145Love the project. Calibre is absolutely an amazing tool, but it never really adapted into the whole self-hosted era. I really like the focus on maintaining compatibility with the Calibre library. Personally the features I use the most are the folder watching and automatic book conversion. Now if there was support for multiple Calibre libraries...
Do you mean viewing multiple libraries at once? What would be the benefit of that over having one library with saved filter views?
Being able to switch between multiple libraries under one application, and being able to assign those libraries based on a logged on user is sort of what I'm talking about. My partner and I have two very different tastes in books, and managing them under one library is a pain.
Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is actually one of the reasons why I bought a Kobo instead of a Kindle or whatever else was available a few years ago. When you plug them in they mount like any other USB mass storage and you copy your stuff to them… no need for special formats or anything either, standards like ePub work great. It kinda made me wonder how Kindles remain so popular. First mover’s advantage? I dunno, but an eReader that can’t rea…
Most readers only buy books from their device’s store, so they don’t need to worry about sideloading. And then once they’ve done so, they are hesitant to switch because it’s hard or impossible to extract yourself from Amazon or B&N or Apple’s ecosystem without losing content. Ideally everybody would only buy DRM-free ePubs and audiobooks but realistically people don’t care. And I don’t see a repeat of Apple forcing D…
I think there's a lot of sideloading. Buying non-{english,mandarin,spanish} books happens often in other book eshops, usually language- or -country specific. If you supply your kindle ID, they are able to send it straight to the reader, but the book collection is then stored in the local eshop (or more eshops if you buy from multiple). That's why Calibre exists.
Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
#147Love the project. Calibre is absolutely an amazing tool, but it never really adapted into the whole self-hosted era. I really like the focus on maintaining compatibility with the Calibre library. Personally the features I use the most are the folder watching and automatic book conversion. Now if there was support for multiple Calibre libraries...
> [Calibre] never really adapted into the whole self-hosted era Could you explain that in more detail? It seems to me that Calibre is totally self hosted. I give an example. I use Calibre to import ebooks as epub (if they are not already epub, which they usually are,) maybe change their metadata and add a cover if they don't have one. The books go to Calibre's directory and then I sync to my phone using syncthing, li…
The content server is fine, but it's the managing of the library that is done in the desktop application. I have a home server that I use to host Jellyfin and such, and Calibre is the one application that wasn't really built to be managed from a web interface. In fact, the Docker container I use basically pipes an X11 environment to a VNC web client.
Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
#148Yesterday I realized that I can just copy an epub to a directory on my Kobo reader to the `root/ ` of the mountpoint in /media/oakhaven/koboreader (on Ubunutu 22.04). It will show up in the list of books on the device. For some reason I thought that uploading books to the Kobo reader was somehow complicated, and I only used Caliber to get books from laptop to Kobo. I know Calibre has lots of other functions, but I di…
Its been forever since I set it up but you can also sync via ssh, so, wirelessly recursively sync a directory. I think I loaded my books over USB, then synced daily news and additional books via rsync. Some of the content was auto generated and dumped into the dir like some auto fetch and email subscriptions, some was manual like copying in a new book after purchase. But its not a very complicated problem, calibre ju…
TIL that Kobo is running sshd :D. But cool, I'll try to find what the credentials are there.
Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reinventing the wheel is fine. However most attempts should be done "in your basement" and thrown away. Don't publish your attempt on the likes of github. Learn what you can from it and then throw it away. Apply lessons learned the the dominate project already there. There are many good open source projects that could be great if more developers would work on them. So instead of reinventing the wheel I strongly encou…
> Reinventing the wheel is fine. However most attempts should be done "in your basement" and thrown away. Don't publish your attempt on the likes of github. Learn what you can from it and then throw it away. Apply lessons learned the the dominate project already there. [...] > Note that I said "most" above. There are reasons to write a start a new project despite others in the same space existing. However this should…
> I personally tend to write much better software if I know there is any chance someone else might see it
Sounds like a personal problem. I'm not sure how to fix it, but it seems like you should take more pride in your work even if nobody will see it.
> Contributing to the dominate project in any space requires working within the constraints of the existing code
This is a GOOD thing. The world doesn't need more half baked open source solutions. The world needs more open source code that many people have carefully worked to perfect. If you have not already worked on a project then you don't understand it and the constraints and compromises that went into the original. I've seen many times where someone has attempted to do better (often in closed source software) and when they were done ended up with a similar mess to the first as there are often not-obvious things involved in the original decision that you end up reinventing.
> Sounds like a Zero-Sum Fallacy.
Not a Fallacy - there are only limited number of people working on open source. There is only a limited amount any one person can contribute. As such there often is a zero sum.
Again, don't get me wrong - there are sometimes good reasons to start from scratch. However if you don't understand the real problems of the original you cannot hope to fix them. Many of the problems are political - there are a number of people working on open source that I cannot stand and thus I refuse to work on projects they work on so if I'm really interested a new project is sometime the only option. Sometimes rewriting in Haskell or Rust or whatever the language of the day is really is worth doing. However the default should be work on a project that is already there.
Re: Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
#150This thing is incredible. I tried a competitors app before using this and found that they were mostly going around in circles all day long. This actually looks like it has promise.