[GUI Plugin] Kobo Utilities

[PeterT]

The current maintainer has plans to move to the serial number based ID.

[Majutsushi]

Originally Posted by TheOnceAndFuture

Hello I've been trying to use KoboUtilities and I have some questions and feedback about two things that came up that I'd like to share.

Unique device names in profile device dropdown

My partner and I have two of the same device. It's great that KoboUtilities allows you to setup profiles so that each device can sync to a unique set of columns in Calibre. However, when selecting the "Device this profile is used for", it's impossible to know which to select because the devices have the same label.

I tried to do the following, but ultimately I ran into issues:
- In the 'Devices' tab, add your first device.
- Go to both profiles and set that same device as the device for that profile.
- Eject that device and connect the other device.
- Go to the 'Devices' tab and add this new device.
- Go to the profile corresponding to whose device this actually is, and TAB to the 'Device this profile is for' dropdown. DO NOT CLICK IT WITH YOUR MOUSE. Tab over to it and press SPACEBAR — the currently selected device should be the device you initially set it to, thus the other one (the one that is not selected), should be the new device. Use the up/down arrows to select that device, and press ENTER.

This approach in theory should work, but it would be nice if the dropdown simply included a unique identifier for devices (say, the serial number) to make it easier. The reason why I say "in theory should work" is because I wasn't actually able to get my annotations from my second device, which is the next issue.

You can rename devices in the device list, and the new name should show up in the profile assignment dropdown. Would that solve your issue?
At the moment you can only rename the connected device, but I can have a look into renaming non-connected ones as well. I'm also about to release a new version that shows the assigned profile in the device list.

Issue retrieving device metadata with multiple profiles
While I have been able to successfully retrieve metadata from my device, such as 'reading location', which oddly appears to be a filename, 'rest of the book estimate', 'time spent reading', 'last read date', I cannot get it from my other device. I am not sure if this is a separate issue or related to the first issue.

To create a simple environment, both my devices only have a few annotations for 1 book (a different book on each device). I connect one device to calibre, select "Store/restore reading positions", and it pulled the relevant metadata from my 1 book. I safely eject the device and plugin the second device and try the same thing but I am unable to retrieve any data. And oddly, the first time I tried it actually just retrieved the same metadata as the first device, as if the first device was still connected (it wasn't—the second device was). However, I am unable to replicate the behavior and now nothing happens when I try to retrieve metadata from the second device.

In fact, in the process of writing this I'm trying again to pull the metadata, but it doesn't pull from either device now. The behavior is inconsistent and I'm not seeing any errors popup and there doesn't appear to be anything notable in the debug logs (it shows various koboutilities.action entries but nothing indicating an error or retrieval issue per se).

Are other people having issues with this or is it just me?

As far as I know metadata syncing should work fine, so I would need to see the debug logging to get a better idea of what could be the problem. Make sure that settings like "Only if more recent" aren't the cause of the behaviour you're seeing.

Backup annotations file does not appear to work

In my library, I added some annotations to a book. I connected the book to my PC/Calibre, and am able to successfully view those annotations with "Copy annotation for selected book". However, when I try to use "Back up annotation file", no file appears to be created.

Thanks for reading

As I understand it the "Back up annotation files" feature only works for EPUB books, not KEPUB, because the mentioned files are written by the viewer that is only used for EPUB files. For KEPUB books you would have to use the "copy annotations" feature. That could maybe be made a bit clearer.