Usability Request with suggestions.

[Deftonesrule]

Hey, let me open by saying that i think calibre is a great start in a software area that has not seen much light lately. This is the first one i think works well and am looking forward to using more as the software develops.

Here is my idea.

I think calibre should run more like itunes. Hear me out.

In itunes you have an entire list of songs which the software finds locally on your hard disk. There is only 1 menu on the "songs" tab. It only shows songs that are on the hard drive itself. In order to know if a song is on the ipod, there is a check mark next to it. Yes i know calibre has check marks, but these checkmarks of calibre's are only graphical, not boolean (yes / no) options.

My suggestion then would be to make 1 master list of all the books within calibre's folder. Then having an checkmarks to the left of each title that the user can "tick" which tells the software which books to add and which books to remove from the device.

Now this should not happen live. There is the option of pressing "D" on calibre to automatically upload a certain book but this is bad practice. I think calibre should use another function which itunes uses which is a "sync" button.

When the user presses the sync button, they commit to the changes they have made, and calibre should do these things in the following order:

1. look for books the user unticked then remove them
2. look for books/data the user renamed and make the edit
3. upload ticked books onto the device.
4. assign the collections (groupings)

As for as collections (speaking for the kindle dx), i don't think users would mind resetting their kindles each time after a sync in order to get that type of ease of functionality.

The above ideas, i think, would make calibre easier to use. A separate menu, which only shows whats on the device can be used for editing collections or groupings.

Well, i hope the creater of this software was reading this. Thanks for the time and i certain hope you take a look at the itunes interface. It is very simple and easy to use, is skinable, and provides great cross platform functionality and usability.