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Announcing Calibre 2.0

blog.calibre-ebook.com

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Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#31

Post by chipotle_coyote »

w1ntermute wrote: post #25
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.

While that's absolutely desirable in terms of priority, calibre's UI has been not merely ugly for its entire six-year history, it's been a jet-powered unicycle ride to Crazytown for its entire six-year history. We're talking about things like just following generally accepted conventions for how to structure GUI menus.

I don't think this is a matter of calibre de-prioritizing fixing the UI. I'm pretty sure it's a conscious choice. They know their UI backward and forward and it works for them, therefore anyone who complains about the UI Just Doesn't Get It. That unicycle is BEAUTIFUL, dammit.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#32

Post by johnm1019 »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #31
w1ntermute wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While that's absolutely desirable in terms of priority, calibre's UI has been not merely ugly for its entire six-year history, it's been a jet-powered unicycle ride to Crazytown for its entire six-year history. We're talking about things like just following generally accepted conventions for how to structure GUI menus. I don't think this is a matter of calibre de-prioritizing fixing the UI. I'm pretty sure it's a con…

upvote for describing a UI experience as "a jet-powered unicycle ride to Crazytown"

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#33

Post by gone35 »

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, you were not exaggerating. From comment #11 of that bug report [1]:

(...) You are not doing us a favor by reporting a bug. On the contrary, you are asking us to do you a favor and spend our valuable time helping overcome a problem _you_ are having. (...)

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934/comments/11

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#34

Post by holychiz »

so much hate for the UI! personally, it works and works well for its intended purpose. To me, it's even intuitive at times. By that virtue, it's already better than 90% of software out there, free or not. Can it be better? sure, like everything else in life. Now that I know that the dev is abrasive from other HN comments, i've got even more respect for him, because of the heavier load he has to carried. :)

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#36

Post by btian »

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?

Why don't you help out? It's fully open source.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#38

Post by d0mdo0ss »

holychiz wrote: post #34

so much hate for the UI! personally, it works and works well for its intended purpose. To me, it's even intuitive at times. By that virtue, it's already better than 90% of software out there, free or not. Can it be better? sure, like everything else in life. Now that I know that the dev is abrasive from other HN comments, i've got even more respect for him, because of the heavier load he has to carried. :)

Yep so much love/hate/passion about the looks. I've been using it to convert into pdf and customize spacing, margins, fonts, page size, etc. Looks like a win95 application ok but works, it's free, gets the job done and then gets out of the way... maybe I'm missing something.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#39

Post by dunno »

btian wrote: post #36
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?

Why don't you help out? It's fully open source.

Look at the commits. It's not fully open source at all. The source is available if you want to fork it, but try submitting a patch...

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#40

Post by x0x0 »

yuribit wrote: post #17

Is there some Calibre plugin to convert scientific articles with math formulas to epub or mobi?

I'm guessing that's a very hard problem, but I'd love to hear otherwise.

If you go the standard route: write in latex then pdflatex, you have no information in the pdf as to what those symbols are, right? So this is pretty close to mathematical ocr, with all of the weird symbols that math alone uses and the various meanings of different lengths of underbar or overbar in the article. Am I wrong? Is there more information left in the pdf? Obviously you can just extract images from the pdf and put that into epub, but it's a crappy solution at best.

For a long time, I've wished for something that could ocr handwritten math and make even a shitty pass at ocr-ing to latex. There appears to be no such software. I doubt there's a big market, but there are a lot of people being paid $15+/hour to latex up written math...

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