Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Announcing Calibre 2.0

blog.calibre-ebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 102 posts

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#21

Post by walterbell »

fesja wrote: post #19
DanBC wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loathe the book management parts of calibre too. I only use the command line tools. A fork with a sane GUI would kill calibre.

I completely agree. I talked with the Calibre leader some years ago offering my help with the UX, and he didn't seem to have any interest in simplifying the UI. It's his app, and he wants it to have as much features as possible. It's great for many people but not for the majority I believe. I stopped using it because I can't stand the UI :(

What do you use instead? Calibre has a rather large amount of features, but they are hard to find :)

Edit: if someone were to publish independent mockups for a new Calibre UX, it could motivate community feedback and/or dev contributions. The ebook market is larger now than a few years ago, given the rise of mobile.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#22

Post by dmix »

walterbell wrote: post #12
vj44 wrote: post #6

I'm sure calibre 2.0 is a great technical feat, and kudos for all the work put into this product, but judging by the screenshot the user interface is equally clunky as in 1.0. This software does mostly everything I need it for to convert ebooks... but can you, the authors, please improve the UI?

What would you change first - the viewer, editor, cover browser, or config?

Preference menus need the most work and the giant toolbar with icons is nearly useless.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#23

Post by johnchristopher »

greyone wrote: post #8
vj44 wrote: post #6

I'm sure calibre 2.0 is a great technical feat, and kudos for all the work put into this product, but judging by the screenshot the user interface is equally clunky as in 1.0. This software does mostly everything I need it for to convert ebooks... but can you, the authors, please improve the UI?

I agree the app is good - but the user interface has always needed simplifying.

Do you mean you simplify the UI yourself with the configuration settings or that you wished it was simplified ?

I found calibre less clunky and very clean once I hid icons, menus and submenus I don't use.

Maybe there should be some kind of toggle mode (easy, god, expert, etc.).

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#24

Post by w1ntermute »

marianminds wrote: post #3

One thing that really sucks still is the conversion of PDFs (for e.g. journal articles) into formats suitable for e-ink readers. I've tinkered with its heuristic processing and regex formatting, but I'd never considered manually touching up the final .epub as it comes. If their ebook editor is any good I might start reading journal articles again.

I think it would make much more sense to instead have the journals publish articles in more formats, rather than just HTML and PDF. For example, they should offer them in EPUB[0].

Since EPUB is much more accessible to blind/visually impaired people than PDF, perhaps the federal government could step in and mandate that all articles with content produced using federal grants must be available in a format that the blind/visually impaired can consume as well.

0: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/03/19/is-it-time-for...

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#25

Post by w1ntermute »

vj44 wrote: post #6

I'm sure calibre 2.0 is a great technical feat, and kudos for all the work put into this product, but judging by the screenshot the user interface is equally clunky as in 1.0. This software does mostly everything I need it for to convert ebooks... but can you, the authors, please improve the UI?

Considering that it's free and open source, and that I use Calibre for a fraction of a percent of the time that I do actually reading the books on my Kindle that I loaded using Calibre, I would rather that the creator of Calibre focused on the technical details, such as making sure that the file conversion/transmission is working correctly.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#26

Post by publicfig »

vj44 wrote: post #6

I'm sure calibre 2.0 is a great technical feat, and kudos for all the work put into this product, but judging by the screenshot the user interface is equally clunky as in 1.0. This software does mostly everything I need it for to convert ebooks... but can you, the authors, please improve the UI?

I was so excited to see this headline specifically because I hoped they would be doing a UI overhaul. Unfortunately, that just seems to not be the case or even on the horizon. I'd definitely consider dedicating time with it, but I've heard nothing but bad things about trying to work with the maintainers of the code.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#27

Post by walterbell »

Maakuth wrote: post #7
marianminds wrote: post #3

One thing that really sucks still is the conversion of PDFs (for e.g. journal articles) into formats suitable for e-ink readers. I've tinkered with its heuristic processing and regex formatting, but I'd never considered manually touching up the final .epub as it comes. If their ebook editor is any good I might start reading journal articles again.

This converter is reasonable: http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/ I wonder if someone has done a Calibre plugin for it.

> "K2pdfopt works by converting each page of the PDF/DJVU file to a bitmap and then scanning the bitmap for viewable areas (rectangular regions) and cutting and cropping these regions and assembling them into multiple smaller pages without excess margins so that the viewing region is maximized. Making use of this method, k2pdfopt can re-flow text lines, even on scanned documents"

Looks promising. Hopefully this would also remove javascript and executable code from the source PDF, although any exploits may run within the context of the converter. To be safe, conversion could be run from a livecd.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#28

Post by necrodome »

I am trying to find a solution to ditch calibre(at least for library management) completely, and with the advent of cheap android eink devices, this seems more possible now. A simple app that communicates with a web backend to manage my library on such a device would be enough.

one recently released such device is Boyue T62 (http://www.banggood.com/Boyue-T62-8G-Dual-Core-6-Inch-WIFI-A...) Here is an overview (the review is for the same device, just rebranded and with previos generation specs) http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2014/08/11/icarus-illumina-...

You also get much better pdf reading capabilities with these devices.

Until the next generation displays for reading come into play, these look much better overall than kindle, nook, etc.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#29

Post by guiambros »

DanBC wrote: post #18
walterbell wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calibre is open-source and seems to be a Qt +PyQt front-end to a sqlite database, fairly mainstream dev tools. But it doesn't seem to have an active development community with multiple contributors, except for plugins. Anyone know why?

Toxic maintainer. Kovid Goyal is known to be abrasive. I'm looking for good examples. But maybe I've just seen the other end of the arguments and he's okay? I'm guessing the best bits are hidden here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/ Like eg this one: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934

wow, very eye opening. What an arrogant douche.

Anyway, I still rely on Calibre to manage my ebooks, and have donated a couple of times. Despite the messy and confusing UI, it's the only ebook manager I found that does what I need (Kindle sync, multiple layers of tags and categorization, download metadata).

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#30

Post by teraflop »

DanBC wrote: post #18
walterbell wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calibre is open-source and seems to be a Qt +PyQt front-end to a sqlite database, fairly mainstream dev tools. But it doesn't seem to have an active development community with multiple contributors, except for plugins. Anyone know why?

Toxic maintainer. Kovid Goyal is known to be abrasive. I'm looking for good examples. But maybe I've just seen the other end of the arguments and he's okay? I'm guessing the best bits are hidden here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/ Like eg this one: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934

And of course the infamous "calibre-mount-helper" fiasco: http://lwn.net/Articles/465311/
Post reply on HN