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> icons are beyond meaningless What? How? “Add Books” is a book icon with a plus sign. “View” is a magnifying glass. “Remove Books” is a recycling symbol. “Pre

> icons are beyond meaningless What? How? “Add Books” is a book icon with a plus sign. “View” is a magnifying glass. “Remove Books” is a recycling symbol. “Preferences” is the usual settings-esque gear icon. “Device” is an e-reader. “Send To Device” is an e-reader with an arrow. I’ll grant you that some are vague, like “Download Metadata” being a globe, but the other major part you’ve glossed over is that all of these have their titles directly underneath them. There is no need to guess as to what they do. > menus are nested and super-specific I fail to see how that’s bad. Tree-like menus are extremely intuitive, and prevent having 50 items in a single column.

Macha 2y ago
I wonder if this is a difference in perspective between people who use it as an ebook library manager and as an ebook reader. The ebook reader UI is terrible. Like how do you jump to a page: 1. Right click on the book to get menu at the top of the window. 2. Click go to 3. Pick which type of "go to" you want ("location") 4. You now get a full screen UI with a single input box 5. Now you get to enter a page number. Other ebook readers, even the crappy DRM-encumbered web apps, give you a slider. --- Also rendering a page is very slow, so you scroll to go to the next page, and apparently nothing happens for quite some time. Also it takes two ticks of the scroll wheel to paginate, even in the absence of any internal scrolling. So you're wondering if the page is rendering or if you need to scroll more and potentially overshoot. --- Opening the bookmarks UI reflows the page, potentially pushing what you wanted to bookmark out of sight onto the next page.
- nottorp 2y ago
  > The ebook reader UI is terrible. I don't think the reader UI is there for ... reading books. At best for checking out what the conversion steps did. I just drag books to it, sometimes edit the titles and then export them to a Kindle. When the Kindle gets fully locked down I'll get a Kobo or whatever is in fashion and works well with Calibre at that time.
- sceptic123 2y ago
  No, it's just not great UI. It is functional, but that is not the same as good.
- sgarland 2y ago
  Oh, that may be entirely possible. Yeah, I don't use the reader at all. For one, I hate reading books on a computer. For two, agreed, its UI isn't great. I'm entirely referring to its use as a library manager / ebook converter.
9dev 2y ago
Permanent deletions use a "recycle" symbol, advanced search a cogwheel columns a stylised greek pillar (creative at least, that one), while download cover and input options share a downward chevron icon. There's lots of instances where the icons do more to distract you than help usability. Titles are shown underneath main toolbar actions, but not in the statusbar or modal windows, for example. > I fail to see how that’s bad. Tree-like menus are extremely intuitive, and prevent having 50 items in a single column. Stuff like "Edit metadata > Merge book records > Merge only formats in first selected book - delete others" feels extremely intuitive for you? Calibre tries to cram every workflow under the sun into tree menus, because it's the easiest way to make commands accessible in a GUI. Meanwhile, stuff like the book details panel is completely underused. And we didn't even talk about metadata plugboards yet. I love Calibre for being the Swiss army knife of ebook management it is, but sometimes I want to have merely a humble knife to spread butter on my reading habits; something that lets me intuitively CRUD an ebook library without forcing me to think whether I want to add files to my book records, add data files to my book records, or add from folders and sub-folders.
- sgarland 2y ago
  > Permanent deletions use a "recycle" symbol So does Windows. > while download cover and input options share a downward chevron icon This may be version-specific to be fair; I checked 7.8 and the latest, 8.0.1, and the two icons are differentiated in both. In Preferences, "Metadata download" is a cloud with a downward arrow, whereas "Input options" is a downward chevron. > Titles are shown underneath main toolbar actions, but not in the statusbar or modal windows, for example. Mine definitely does for all of those. Are you sure you don't have something configured differently, or perhaps there are differences in OS default behavior (I'm on MacOS)? > Stuff like "Edit metadata > Merge book records > Merge only formats in first selected book - delete others" feels extremely intuitive for you? Yes. "Book records" definitely sounds like metadata to me, so that's where I would look for it. The "Edit metadata" menu has 7 options on my build. Of those, only "Merge book records" expands, and it expands into 3 options, including the one you mentioned. There may also be age differences at play here, specifically with respect to what GUI era your formative computing years were in. I got into computers in as a kid in the 90s (DOS, then Windows 3.1, 95, then a mix of Linux distros and successive versions of Windows). Calibre to me looks and feels like a slightly fancier version of programs I grew up with. Nero Burning ROM [0], foobar2000 [1], and of course, WinRAR [2]. Microsoft Office design peaked with 2000, IMO. 2003 was technically fine, just that it adopted XP's visual styling, which I found appalling. In contrast to dense UIs, we have modern web apps. If I want to change the appearance, is that under Profile, or Preferences? How do I get to either one? Do I click on the vaguely person-shaped icon, the hamburger icon, or do I have to go Home first? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Burning_ROM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Burning_ROM [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar2000 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinRAR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinRAR

Macha 2y ago

I wonder if this is a difference in perspective between people who use it as an ebook library manager and as an ebook reader. The ebook reader UI is terrible. Like how do you jump to a page: 1. Right click on the book to get menu at the top of the window. 2. Click go to 3. Pick which type of "go to" you want ("location") 4. You now get a full screen UI with a single input box 5. Now you get to enter a page number. Other ebook readers, even the crappy DRM-encumbered web apps, give you a slider. --- Also rendering a page is very slow, so you scroll to go to the next page, and apparently nothing happens for quite some time. Also it takes two ticks of the scroll wheel to paginate, even in the absence of any internal scrolling. So you're wondering if the page is rendering or if you need to scroll more and potentially overshoot. --- Opening the bookmarks UI reflows the page, potentially pushing what you wanted to bookmark out of sight onto the next page.

nottorp 2y ago
> The ebook reader UI is terrible. I don't think the reader UI is there for ... reading books. At best for checking out what the conversion steps did. I just drag books to it, sometimes edit the titles and then export them to a Kindle. When the Kindle gets fully locked down I'll get a Kobo or whatever is in fashion and works well with Calibre at that time.
sceptic123 2y ago
No, it's just not great UI. It is functional, but that is not the same as good.
sgarland 2y ago
Oh, that may be entirely possible. Yeah, I don't use the reader at all. For one, I hate reading books on a computer. For two, agreed, its UI isn't great. I'm entirely referring to its use as a library manager / ebook converter.

9dev 2y ago

Permanent deletions use a "recycle" symbol, advanced search a cogwheel columns a stylised greek pillar (creative at least, that one), while download cover and input options share a downward chevron icon. There's lots of instances where the icons do more to distract you than help usability. Titles are shown underneath main toolbar actions, but not in the statusbar or modal windows, for example. > I fail to see how that’s bad. Tree-like menus are extremely intuitive, and prevent having 50 items in a single column. Stuff like "Edit metadata > Merge book records > Merge only formats in first selected book - delete others" feels extremely intuitive for you? Calibre tries to cram every workflow under the sun into tree menus, because it's the easiest way to make commands accessible in a GUI. Meanwhile, stuff like the book details panel is completely underused. And we didn't even talk about metadata plugboards yet. I love Calibre for being the Swiss army knife of ebook management it is, but sometimes I want to have merely a humble knife to spread butter on my reading habits; something that lets me intuitively CRUD an ebook library without forcing me to think whether I want to add files to my book records, add data files to my book records, or add from folders and sub-folders.

sgarland 2y ago
> Permanent deletions use a "recycle" symbol So does Windows. > while download cover and input options share a downward chevron icon This may be version-specific to be fair; I checked 7.8 and the latest, 8.0.1, and the two icons are differentiated in both. In Preferences, "Metadata download" is a cloud with a downward arrow, whereas "Input options" is a downward chevron. > Titles are shown underneath main toolbar actions, but not in the statusbar or modal windows, for example. Mine definitely does for all of those. Are you sure you don't have something configured differently, or perhaps there are differences in OS default behavior (I'm on MacOS)? > Stuff like "Edit metadata > Merge book records > Merge only formats in first selected book - delete others" feels extremely intuitive for you? Yes. "Book records" definitely sounds like metadata to me, so that's where I would look for it. The "Edit metadata" menu has 7 options on my build. Of those, only "Merge book records" expands, and it expands into 3 options, including the one you mentioned. There may also be age differences at play here, specifically with respect to what GUI era your formative computing years were in. I got into computers in as a kid in the 90s (DOS, then Windows 3.1, 95, then a mix of Linux distros and successive versions of Windows). Calibre to me looks and feels like a slightly fancier version of programs I grew up with. Nero Burning ROM [0], foobar2000 [1], and of course, WinRAR [2]. Microsoft Office design peaked with 2000, IMO. 2003 was technically fine, just that it adopted XP's visual styling, which I found appalling. In contrast to dense UIs, we have modern web apps. If I want to change the appearance, is that under Profile, or Preferences? How do I get to either one? Do I click on the vaguely person-shaped icon, the hamburger icon, or do I have to go Home first? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Burning_ROM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Burning_ROM [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar2000 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinRAR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinRAR