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Originally Posted by rchiav
Really, I have an open mind. I've just been involved in software development for quite some time and I think it's better for software to allow users more flexibility in how they chose to work. Having written software since I was 8 years old (and I'm 38 now), I have a pretty good understanding of what's possible and that you want to enable people to do what it is that they want to do without having to do very much to get there.
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If you can articulate an improvement, the bug tracker is the best place to suggest it. Even better, if you can write the code, do that. Kovid went to a lot of trouble to write code that's easy to read and to provide instructions on how to set up a development environment on each of the 3 platforms he supports. There's no doubt that many improvements can be made to Calibre. I just finished one today that I have hopes will be integrated, and Chaley is in the middle of one.
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There was another thread where a woman asked about sharing the same books with her husband but setting it up so that he had his own library and she had her own library. Tags were again given as the solution. No doubt you could use tags for that, but this isn't intuitive to people and it doesn't work the way most people think.
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Tags are the way Calibre customizes the information it provides to the user about the ebooks it has stored. What she wanted was a way to mark books for herself, for her husband and for both, without having to set up multiple libraries or keep multiple copies of each book. Tags are perfect for storing that type of information about the books. Directories are not.
Any bit of information you want to connect to an ebook is flexibly stored via tags, whether it's workflow status, book content or book ownership. If your concern is just about how many clicks it takes to do a search, see Chaley's stored search thread. He's working to avoid repetition in typing searches. He also has some thoughts about additional fields. Calibre typically releases improvements about every 6 days (except when Kovid is goofing off)
However, I can't agree that just because many users are unfamiliar with the advantages of tags, Calibre should be redesigned to use another interface you may prefer (that so far you haven't articulated very clearly). Most users just need some help in understanding how well tags work to do what they want done.
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The software could still leverage tags to accomplish this, but if the interface clearly identified people and what books were in each persons "library", this person would have been happier than anything. This also wouldn't take very much work.
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If she follows my suggestions about tags, she'll have a nice window with 2 tag buttons marked "Mine" and "His." She can press either tag and see only the books she wants to see. I don't know what's hard about that. Later she may learn that by doing it this way (instead of separate libraries, which she clearly said she didn't want) she'll be able to set up the content server and both users can access all their books from anywhere in the world.