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Old 05-15-2014, 05:20 PM   #16
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I have not found anything amiss at all apart from, as I have mentioned, some Store reading apps do not snap properly and share the screen with it. However, they are not ones that I would choose to use myself, plus I suspect the problem may lie with them given that MS's own PDF reader and Freda (and some others) work perfectly.

Regarding the low rating by the one respondent I would suspect that they just did know what Calibre was and were expecting an app with its own library (in which case they would have been stymied from the start trying to open a database). As far as I have found the app works exactly as you claim it does. Or maybe one of the strange denizens of web reviews who just cruise around getting their weird kicks by giving negative reviews to everything just for the sake of it.

When I get home at the weekend I'll relocate a PC to the USA and give the app a good rating in the Store.

John

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Old 05-25-2014, 12:34 AM   #17
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I downloaded it tonight but found the only cloud I could get to is OneDrive. I have an OPDS repository for HTML/OPDS (calibre2opds) on my website which one can get to from some readers or just go there with a browser and download, but my only offsite backup of the library itself is on livedrive. Not on OneDrive. I'm copying the library to a portable drive now and will try it tomorrow with a connected portable drive.

I'm confused about support for the cloud on Windows 8.1 (my desktops are 7) but here's how another app looks and how Calibre Library looks. Other apps tend to show the following choices: OneDrive, This PC, Libraries, Homegroup, Network which Calibre Library also shows. But Book Bazaar Reader (my favorite because I can copy and paste from it) shows, after a line below the above sources, the (other) two cloud storage places that I have apps installed on this computer for: ASUS WebStorage (it's an ASUS Transformer tablet) and Livedrive. Livedrive is my primary back/storage location because I have unlimited storage with them for a very good price.

So I would suggest you need to support other cloud options and one would hope that would be a simple change.

I would argue against your trying to make a reader. Too much work to make one competitive. There are some very good readers out there. I use several. Besides Book Bazaar Reader, Freda has text to speech which is quite good and I use Microsoft Reader for PDFs.

From the beginning with the tablets (my husband has an Android) I didn't like the readers keeping their own repositories. Especially with the ridiculously small storage available on tablets, if I start reading something with one reader and decide to switch for whatever reason, there's another copy! And so far it's so difficult to find out what's where and how big everything is in Metro-land (Tile-World). That being said, I got the thing to be a tablet not a computer, so I live almost entirely in Tile World. (My real notebook is very large and very heavy and capable of doing anything I need to do with my photography when we travel, which is a lot.)

My guess is I'll go with OPDS or downloading from the same source with a browser, but this is an interesting alternate option and I'll play with it tomorrow.

Regards,
Judy
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Old 05-25-2014, 03:36 PM   #18
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As a test, I shared my local folder and that works great. I seem to have broken it pointing it to a cloud location. Even through a reboot it comes up, displays an empty page (empty meaning no content from the database), and closes. I can't swipe up on the bottom to point it at my local calendar.

When it was running with the local db, I noticed that I can't tell what file type exists nor which file type it decides to use. It looks like it prefers to use mobi to epub by the app it opens. My readers don't display the file type either, something I hadn't noticed before.
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Old 05-25-2014, 05:53 PM   #19
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As a test, I shared my local folder and that works great. I seem to have broken it pointing it to a cloud location. Even through a reboot it comes up, displays an empty page (empty meaning no content from the database), and closes. I can't swipe up on the bottom to point it at my local calendar.

When it was running with the local db, I noticed that I can't tell what file type exists nor which file type it decides to use. It looks like it prefers to use mobi to epub by the app it opens. My readers don't display the file type either, something I hadn't noticed before.
The following on PCs, but should be the same on a Windows 8.x tablet.

I find that the file type is given by the default reading app's icon for the each book's file type in Calibre Viewer's display of the library. However, I generally only keep one file type for each book, where one has multiple file types of the same book experience may differ with respect to identification and its preference for opening to read.

I cannot comment on the cloud as I do not use it for Calibre, but regarding getting a blank screen with a local drive db the only occasion I have experienced that is if I have had Calibre running as well as Calibre Viewer in which case the library Calibre has open will not view in Calibre Viewer as the db is locked. This has had me perplexed a couple of times until I remember that I had not closed Calibre after a session with it . Your problem may be different, of course.
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Old 05-26-2014, 11:10 AM   #20
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Yes, I concluded from the reading icon what it was. However, more and more reading apps can read more than one type. I often have multiple file types and mobi is not my preference for my downloads. (I made the mobis for the Kindle reader which my husband preferred up to recently.)
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Old 06-01-2014, 12:57 AM   #21
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Originally Posted by AnotherCat View Post
The following on PCs, but should be the same on a Windows 8.x tablet.

I find that the file type is given by the default reading app's icon for the each book's file type in Calibre Viewer's display of the library. However, I generally only keep one file type for each book, where one has multiple file types of the same book experience may differ with respect to identification and its preference for opening to read.

I cannot comment on the cloud as I do not use it for Calibre, but regarding getting a blank screen with a local drive db the only occasion I have experienced that is if I have had Calibre running as well as Calibre Viewer in which case the library Calibre has open will not view in Calibre Viewer as the db is locked. This has had me perplexed a couple of times until I remember that I had not closed Calibre after a session with it . Your problem may be different, of course.
When a document has multiple formats available, each one will show up separately. Calibre Viewer has no bullt-in preference. This is on purpose. It does mean that if you happen to have sixteen formats of the same document, each one will list separately.

For cloud storage, I have to admit that I had not looked at that. For me, this was about making these my libraries browseable while offline. I will test that out and see how it goes. I will say that it uses the standard file-picker, which is built by Microsoft, and which has its limitations. I doubt it knows how to handle ODPS. Again, I will look at cloud storage and see what I can do about that.
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Old 06-29-2014, 12:59 AM   #22
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MartyB, as a suggestion to get around the editing capabilities, maybe a calibre plugin that knows where to find your copy of the database, and can import changes. I don't know how trivial this would be, but it is a solution that should weed out the more non technical users, and those that just want a viewer.
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Old 08-13-2014, 08:45 PM   #23
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New user feedback

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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Old 08-30-2014, 05:58 PM   #24
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Kristi K View Post
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
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.

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Old 09-01-2014, 10:03 PM   #25
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Update 1.5 is now in the Store. It fixes a threading bug that caused the app to hang on startup with some libraries -- depending on CPU speed and size of library. In addition, the app can now handle multiple libraries, has a rudimentary implementation of series, and has sorting options. Please let me know if you have problems with the updated app. I did as much testing as I could -- on ARM, x86 and, x64 -- but it's hard to anticipate the many scenarios that are possible. It should also be more robust when files go missing (e.g. libraries on external drives, networked drives, and so on).
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Old 09-02-2014, 04:42 PM   #26
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I didn't have to "relocate" to the USA to get it this time. Thanks .
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Old 09-02-2014, 10:52 PM   #27
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I didn't have to "relocate" to the USA to get it this time. Thanks .
That's right. It was one of the fixes I left unmentioned ...

Please let me know if you have any issues. Also open to suggestions for further improvement. I had one request for a cover view.

The internal organization -- where it keeps local copies, since it can now handle multiple databases -- has been changed. I added logic to migrate any old metadata.db that you were using previously into the new system. It should be seamless.

Last edited by Marty_B; 09-02-2014 at 10:56 PM.
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Old 09-09-2014, 09:10 PM   #28
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Marty, This app is great! I bought it today to use on my win8.1 tablet.

Until now, I have been running Calibre on my desktop and pushing books to either a Kindle 2 or an Android tablet.
My biggest gripe with the Kindle (and the Kindle app in Windows) is that there is no easy way to read the book descriptions without going to each book page on Amazon. I can get the description and a lot of other info on the Android tablet by using the Calibre Companion app, but I would rather just use the Windows tablet where I do my other windowy stuff.

As far as feature requests...

In Calibre, I have a custom YesNo column called Read which I set once I have finished reading a book. I also added it as a Virtual Library for #read:false that shows up as a tab at the top of Calibre. Do other users have something similar? It would be nice if I could filter the books in Calibre Viewer to hide the ones I have read.

A way to re-size the cover image and/or description section (seeing the book descriptions is my favorite feature

The ability to tap on the "Tags" label to switch between Tags/Series/Authors

A cover browser or cover grid view (like in Calibre) that just shows larger cover images with the highlighted book title/info/description/etc in a (re-sizable) section to the right or below.

Thanks!

Last edited by bluej; 09-12-2014 at 09:07 AM. Reason: deleted Sort button from feature requests... It already exists! This app is great. :)
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Old 09-11-2014, 12:08 PM   #29
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Yeah, I use that as well.
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Old 09-12-2014, 03:30 PM   #30
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Marty, This app is great! I bought it today to use on my win8.1 tablet.

As far as feature requests...

In Calibre, I have a custom YesNo column called Read which I set once I have finished reading a book. I also added it as a Virtual Library for #read:false that shows up as a tab at the top of Calibre. Do other users have something similar? It would be nice if I could filter the books in Calibre Viewer to hide the ones I have read.

A way to re-size the cover image and/or description section (seeing the book descriptions is my favorite feature

The ability to tap on the "Tags" label to switch between Tags/Series/Authors

A cover browser or cover grid view (like in Calibre) that just shows larger cover images with the highlighted book title/info/description/etc in a (re-sizable) section to the right or below.

Thanks!
Thank you, I'm glad you like it. As for requests:
1) working with custom columns is going to be tricky. I have no way of guessing who uses what column and for what purpose. Mapping those custom columns is also going to be challenging. I'm more likely to expand options with tags (showing, hiding, and so on). That way, you would be able to tag a book as 'read' and then ask my app to hide anything tagged as 'read'.
2) the "ability to tap on the tags label" to show series, authors, or tags. I have been considering that, and I've made some progress there. It wasn't part of the last update, but will likely be part of the next one.
3) I've had multiple request for a cover browser. That will be the core of the next update. It is coming.
4) Resizable panels: I want that as well and I'm figuring out how to make that happen.

5) this one wasn't requested, but I am also working on a search function that will work across libraries. I need that myself.
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