Calibre trying to fetching news when I'm not online

[PaulSmi]

I notice you sorted out the Internet connection in a recent release, but not for Mac users - that would be me

Just a quick question, why not just test the connect against the site it is supposed to be going to, and if it can't access it, the software just asks the user what to do. e.g.

- There appears to be no Internet connection. What do you want me to do?

1. Try again in X minutes/hours
2. Wait until next scheduled fetch
3. Keep trying

I would have thought that would work on any OS including the Mac.

[kovidgoyal]

the news scheduler is supposed to run in the background. As such I'd rather it didn't popup dialog boxes. And even if it did pop up a dialog box, the user would then have to remember to re-enable the downloads when internet connectivity is restored.

If however it kept pinging a site, it would take too much bandwidth.

[PaulSmi]

I agree it definitely should run in the background - and that is a brilliant thing about Calibre.

The ONLY time anyone would see the dialog would be if the schedule COULDN'T run. That's the only time. Basic error checking.

i.e. if schedule can't run then display dialog and ask user what to do.

Most users would never ever see this dialog, but if they encountered an error (e.g. network connection error, Internet outage) they would at least know about it. At the moment Calibre (on my Mac) just pretends it did what it was supposed to and doesn't inform me that it has just encountered an error. That is BAD programming etiquette.

On several occasions I've left my hotel room thinking I've got all the latest documents on my Kindle only to discover that each one of them contains nothing but an error message.

I'm sure you can imagine how very annoying that is. It makes me want to scream!!!

You try doing a 17 hour train journey when you THINK you have all the documents on your Kindle, but it turns out all you have is the title listed. They're all listed, and nothing informed me that there was an error. Agh!!!!!

A simple error message would have courteously informed me that there'd been a problem, and I could then have done something about it.

This isn't a problem when I am at home or at the office as at both locations I have wi-fi, but if I dare to open my Macbook when I am away from those locations (on the plane, in a hotel room, at someone else's office) and the whole thing becomes a trainwreck :-(

Yes, I can solve the problem by closing down calibre, but that defeats the whole purpose of it working on schedule as if it isn't loaded it won't do what it is supposed to do when I DO have an Internet connection (which is most of the time).

It's all your fault Kovid ;-)

If Calibre wasn't so darned amazing I wouldn't care about it being the ONE piece of software I always want open ALL of the time ;-)

[kovidgoyal]

That's strange, in the absence of a net connection on OS X, you should be getting a download failed error message. You get nothing?

[PaulSmi]

No. I don't get anything at all.

For example, this morning I woke up to see three new fetched titles in the list, but if I look closer each of them has a size of 0.0 MB.

If I then plug anything in (Kindle or Blackberry) these files are then automatically copied over to that device.

Then, when I am sat on the train or plain and ready to start reading I click on the link on my Kindle (for example) only to discover that the file contains nothing but an error message. Here's one I'm looking at now:

'Failed feed: News
(8, 'nodename nor servname provided, or not known')

I get the news every day, so the only reason for it is that I'm not currently connected.

Darned Mac users huh! If we all stuck to PCs life would be sooooo much easier ;-)

[kovidgoyal]

Even more mysterious. You're getting entries in the book list of size 0? Can you post the full build log for one of these failed downloads. Get it by clicking the rotating spinner.