[cfp]

Understand me well: actually, Calibre doesn't suck. It's an impressive development effort, but it has a fundamental flaw: its interface.

Edit: I'm very sorry that I used the word suck. If anyone can rectify this title. Please do. it was stupid to use it in the first place, only I was a bit crossed or something. To Mr. Kovid Goyal especially, sorry for sounding rude and reckless. My point here was more to say the software could be improved; but I acknowledge the power of this software, as well as the enormous effort put into its development. Once again, sorry for using this work.

I contacted the Calibre developer a month ago, comming up with a list of the most blatant ui design errors that I could see, but I got answer. Having no time to develop the fixes myself, I'm posting the list here, in the hope that it might reach a broader audience.

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I’ve recently come into possession of a sony e-reader device, and I thus started using your Calibre software.
Let me say first that this is an excellent piece of open source software. Being myself a software developer, I know how hard it is to produce such a streamlined, effective, and efficient application.

Unfortunately, I do not program in python myself, which prevents me to participate in the development of Calibre. Yet, my experience in software development urged me to suggest a few things regarding Calibre. You could see this list as a list of the tiny details that, once implemented/fixed, would imo turn Calibre, from a nice piece of software, to the perfect ebook library manager.
* Regarding the user interface/user experience
* The overall interface lacks coherence:
* The icons are not homogeneous, and much to big ; I would suggest to use the icons from the Tango projects, which are extremely readable, and provide much more integration in the gnome desktop, while not hindering at the user experience on other platforms.
* The buttons should always be popping up, rather than stay hidden until being hovered. Otherwise it is unclear what the tiny arrows are for.
* The "delete" key should delete ebooks, not enter in tag edition mode and delete a tag. Otherwise the behavior of the program is incoherent with that of the rest of the system.
* The controls should be better aligned, especially the categories list on the left with the books list.
* The enter key is expected to open ebooks for visualization, yet it doesn't do anything. In a similar fashion, coverflow is pretty, but it should open books when clicked.
* The program shortcuts are frustrating: while keeping the current shortcuts as they are, for backward compatibility, you may want to use Ctrl+... shortcuts.
* The program is overall too slow. Importing ebooks should be faster ; it could and should be made a background task in the first place, as in any music library manager. You could use the space on the bottom left to display the job currently running.

* Regarding ebook handling
* There should be some way to update an ebook. Suppose you're working on a document, and suppose you want to proofread it on you ereader. Then you will inevitably need at some point to update the doc, as the writing advances. Having to delete, then retag the doc is a pain. There might be an option already, but then it needs to be more obvious (why not compare the file name of added files to those of files already in the library?)
* The default behavior with an ebook reader should be to sync to it. That is, to compare which files are there, which aren't, which have been deleted from the computer and which have been added or updated on the device and should be synced to the computer. This is what users expect in the first place.
* A very nifty feature would be to display a sync button (say, arrows facing each other), when books are not present on a device, rather than displaying an empty cell. When clicked, this would start sending the book to the device. You would then improve on this by replacing the sync button by a progressbar while the book is sent, which would take as values the current job progress.

* Regarding the development process:
* To increase the hype about Calibre, you might want to create a setting to download all minor versions, disabled by default. This will make actual releases less frequent, thus triggering much more hype about those.
* You might have better luck with donations by choosing a somehow more explicit icon and moving it to the upper right, at the end of the buttons bar.

* Additional thoughts
* In right-click menus, there should be a default action. That is, hovering an expandable menu entry hould open the submenu, but clicking it should launch the default action for that menu. For example, when 10 ebooks are selected, clicking “edit metadata” should not just open the submenu, but should open the metadata editing dialog for these entries. In the same fashion, selecting send to device should immediately send to device. This would unify the user experience by making header buttons and menu entries behave in the same way.
* The metadata editing dialog needs to be reworked. A nice example can be found in the mp3tag software, where every filed is a combo box, that: 1. If entries differ, has a default “< keep current values >” entry selected, and has a list of all values 2. If entries all have the same info for that field, has that info already selected in this field.
* I don’t know what all the worker threads are for, but do they really need to have that heavy a memory footprint? They all take the same space (~20MB here), making me think that there is some static allocation going on that could be improved…
* There shouldn’t be a line feed between the number of ebooks and the work “ebooks” in the library button.

Now regarding the new version, I'd say that I basically totally disagree. Having merged both toolbars confuses everything, making some buttons act like tabs and others as actions. And the blinking heart just prevents me from donating. Plus, the new icons are less informative than ever (might be a good idea to consider using tango icons).
Another thing that I noticed lately is that the behaviour of keys is inconsistent between the library and the ebook tabs. On the former, it removes the book title (now come on, when you press delete, it's not to remove a books title, is it?), while on the latter it basically does nothing.

Anyway, just posting this in the hope that it might help. Calibre is a great piece of software, but seriously, it needs a lot of interface work.

CFP.