Quote:
Originally Posted by Kristi K
Hi,
I recently downloaded your app from the app store (I think I gave you your second review), and read an earlier post saying you were working on v2, so thought you'd like some additional feedback. Please keep in mind I'm relatively new to Calibre and don't know any of the ins and outs of it, and I only upgraded to Windows 8 (8.1) a few days ago.
My Calibre database consists of abut 1500 books. When I first used your viewer yesterday, I noticed that I had multiple copies of some books.....when I converted all my books to epub format, it still had all the old formats too. As a db cleanup today I moved all of my original docs/lits/pdbs etc to a separate folder. When I reopened your viewer, I would direct it to the db, it would open to the white screen showing the heading tags etc (no books) and then quickly minimized. Every time I tried to maximize it again, it automatically minimized again. So I uninstalled your viewer and reinstalled. Same issue. I then opened Calibre to check the db...it opened fine, but during library maintenance it founded the missing/moved files, so I 'fixed' the db hoping that was the viewer issue. It wasn't....still had the minimize/maximize issue.
However, left my laptop open and running and left it for an hour. Came back, and your viewer maximized fine and showed all my books.
So, my learning, which may also help your newbie users:
1) ensure calibre db has been maintained: "checked", and that the files in library match the db
2) I suspect when your viewer minimized, it was simply loading my large db of files. During the process, it would not allow me to open it fullscreen, and kept minimizing as soon as I brought it up. From a user perspective, I assumed it was crashing or malfunctioning. Having a screen telling the user what your program was doing (e.g. "Please wait while your database is loading") may help avoid some confusion.
Side note: Tags are how I have sorted my entire db. I know you said in an earlier post that you are not a big tag user...but please keep this functionality to your viewer as it is a necessity for my use.
Not sure if any of that was useful information, but since you've made the effort of making the software, I thought i'd pass on my experience thusfar.
Kristi
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CalibreViewer trusts that the database maintained by Caliber is correct, but it does have handlers built in just in case files that are supposed to be there are missing. That is probably what happened: on a whole bunch of files, CalibreViewer expected to find files that weren't there. That would have slowed it down a bit. I can tell you from experience that the size of the database hardly matters: I have 15,000+ individual PDF's listed in my main database. It loads without much delay. But again: CalibreViewer trusts the validity of the database. In addition, I should note that it checks on startup whether changes have been made to the original database, but if that is locked (because Caliber itself is running), then it quietly fails to do that.
I am indeed working on V2. I had some health issues--and a regular job--so it had to take a bit of a backseat, but I'm working on it now.
Thus, I have a request: since there are at this time some 700 people who have downloaded this, I was hoping that I could get at least some of them to list their most desired changes. What I propose is that you indicate the top three things that you'd like to see changed. I can tally those votes, and see what I can do. One rule: I will not be implementing a viewer for all those document formats. I do plan to implement some logic to handle multiple databases, although I haven't quite decided whether they'd work like Caliber does now (switching from one to another), or whether I'd make it possible to search and view all of them simultaneously.
Marty_B