Calibre just works and is great, but the user interface needs some work to modernize how it looks and to be less confusing in general. I'd love a fork that follows the Gnome Human Interface guidelines.
Yeah it's wild how the use case for 90% of users is "convert epub/mobi/whatever to azw3 and upload to kindle" and doing that is buried in several right click context menus... I'm comfortable doing it now but it seems as easy as having a left pane for books in my "library" and right pane for books on my device
Haven't used it in a little bit, but from memory most of my flow for this was drag and drop. Drag the source onto Calibre, then drag that to the Kindle logo up top.
I'm afraid that attempts to change it will ruin it, like many other things. Calibre just works and once you've learned how to use it, it's great that it doesn't change on you for no particular reason. I personally wish it remain unchanged.
Considering that it is an amazing piece of software but 90% of the comments on this thread (made up of mostly technical users) are about its user interface, it should be obvious that there are some problems.
People shouldn't have to learn how to use its complicated interface. The killer feature is managing eBooks, not rocket science.
There is nothing at all about the Calibre interface that needs to be the way it is. What's so interesting is the way it apes an old version of iTunes, one which nobody would've considered the pinnacle of UX, and still manages to complicate and bury things in unexpected places.
Yes, they all need to be learnt. How odd that an excuse for failing to reduce complexity?
There are well-documented user interface design guidelines to follow, both vendor specific and general ones made by experts like Jakob Nielsen.
Well-designed user interfaces lend themselves to user experiences where the learning curve is low, not steep, sometimes coming close to flat.
The only excuse I can fathom for those who prefer the learning curve be as high as possible or never be lowered is resentment that their own efforts to scale the same mountain of learning the UI themselves.
I call that technical elitism. It says “I worked hard to learn how complicated interfaces work, everybody else should be held to the same expectation”. No, they should not.
There are some huge UI warts, so I only use it to convert e-books.
1. I can't figure out how to change the styling of the book viewer.
2. Whenever I search, then try to hit backspace to modify my search terms, it tries to delete the first search result.
I've never met a UI for which I didn't have to google how to accomplish some things, even macOS'
Completely self explanatory UIs don't exist. In the olden days they required manuals. Now we have online help and google at our fingertips, fortunately.
Unlike jokes, UIs are not an end unto themselves. I'm more than willing to accept a somewhat ugly or cumbersome UI if the underlying tool is as good as Calibre.