What made Marvin so great?

[ParotidApps]

I’ve been reading a lot about how Marvin still has a dedicated following, despite being discontinued. I remember downloading it a long time ago but I never ended up using it much. Since it’s no longer available to download, I thought I’d ask on the forum: what made Marvin so great?

Was it specific features? The design?
What do other apps lack that Marvin had?

[Turtle91]

I think the basic concept stems from the developer, Kris, making Marvin (and other apps) because he enjoyed it rather than because he was trying to make tons of money from it.

• There was no subscription plan. He had a 1 time purchase of $5 and had some basic functions if you wanted to donate more...basic things like color themes, nothing that changed the functionality of Marvin.
• You always got a fully functional app, nothing locked behind a pay wall, for testing the app.
• The app supported the latest standards: most of ePub3/CSS3 that was available at the time.
• The app did not lock users in to a walled garden to maintain/download your books. It was open to a greeeaaat many sources like: OPDS, Dropbox, Cloud picker, web browser, itunes drag and drop...
• There are a TON of settings to personalize the way the book is presented, not just font size and margins....what items show up in the menus, what is displayed in the headers/footers...how much room is taken up by the headers/footers... color/texture themes...page turn styles...how the author and book list are sorted/displayed...geotagging...passwords...kid locks...
• other reading experience options...web lookup of words/definitions...brighten/dimming plus quite a few other gestures...
• custom menu creation...
• highlighting
• bookmarking
• exporting
• syncing (although there are some that will say it didn't do everything THEY wanted it to do in this area...no matter how specialized their request)
• text-to-speech with multiple voices/languages

Just tons of options to suite 99.8% of the users out there (there's always the .2% that are never satisfied)

Aaaannnddd...the coup-de-grace .... 98% of Marvin still works just fine! (Even if you can't get it on the Apple store) Not many apps continue to just work even after not being maintained in a while.

[ParotidApps]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

I think the basic concept stems from the developer, Kris, making Marvin (and other apps) because he enjoyed it rather than because he was trying to make tons of money from it.

• There was no subscription plan. He had a 1 time purchase of $5 and had some basic functions if you wanted to donate more...basic things like color themes, nothing that changed the functionality of Marvin.
• You always got a fully functional app, nothing locked behind a pay wall, for testing the app.
• The app supported the latest standards: most of ePub3/CSS3 that was available at the time.
• The app did not lock users in to a walled garden to maintain/download your books. It was open to a greeeaaat many sources like: OPDS, Dropbox, Cloud picker, web browser, itunes drag and drop...
• There are a TON of settings to personalize the way the book is presented, not just font size and margins....what items show up in the menus, what is displayed in the headers/footers...how much room is taken up by the headers/footers... color/texture themes...page turn styles...how the author and book list are sorted/displayed...geotagging...passwords...kid locks...
• other reading experience options...web lookup of words/definitions...brighten/dimming plus quite a few other gestures...
• custom menu creation...
• highlighting
• bookmarking
• exporting
• syncing (although there are some that will say it didn't do everything THEY wanted it to do in this area...no matter how specialized their request)
• text-to-speech with multiple voices/languages

Just tons of options to suite 99.8% of the users out there (there's always the .2% that are never satisfied)

Aaaannnddd...the coup-de-grace .... 98% of Marvin still works just fine! (Even if you can't get it on the Apple store) Not many apps continue to just work even after not being maintained in a while.

Thanks for the very thorough reply! Lots of good info.

[ilovejedd]

I've actually been using BookFusion for reading recently. Works mostly fine but just recently, I needed to use the search function within books and it just wasn't as useful as Marvin's. Marvin's text search implementation beats both BookFusion and Apple Books.

I'm still impressed by how much Marvin did a lot of things right close to a decade ago.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

I've actually been using BookFusion for reading recently. Works mostly fine but just recently, I needed to use the search function within books and it just wasn't as useful as Marvin's. Marvin's text search implementation beats both BookFusion and Apple Books.

I'm still impressed by how much Marvin did a lot of things right close to a decade ago.

Marvin also did a number of things wrong that the author refused to fix.

There is no perfect program. Look at the poor souls trying to keep Marvin alive when it should be laid to rest. With every new major version of iOS/iPadOS it gets worse.

[Turtle91]

Yes, Kris refused to fix some things you thought were problems. That’s called creative license…. He didn’t want to take his program down the path you desired.

And, as has been stated before, you don’t use Marvin. You have no idea what the current iOS 26 issues are, or how to fix them. So why do you keep sticking your nose into the subject?

That was a rhetorical question, I don’t really want an answer.

[peaceridge]

The only reader that comes close for me is Mapleread SE (I use it for cataloging and then transfer to Marvin for reading) - if I could just get rid of Mapleread's line in the middle and make the margins smaller - oh and not have to restart it everytime I add books from OPDS so I can get back to the catalog list.

[KLF]

Originally Posted by ParotidApps

I’ve been reading a lot about how Marvin still has a dedicated following, despite being discontinued. I remember downloading it a long time ago but I never ended up using it much. Since it’s no longer available to download, I thought I’d ask on the forum: what made Marvin so great?

Was it specific features? The design?
What do other apps lack that Marvin had?

User interface. Swipe swipe swipe for pages, tap for menu.

It is fast (it was fast even in iPad Mini 2). Page turning was smooooth.
For us who like to read at night, in a dimmed room, the extra dimming feature was excellent addition.

Considering that I never used "fancy" features mentioned earlier, they did not bother me either like in some other apps touching the screen results in a menu structure that could launch a space shuttle remotely.