* Disclosure: I work at Microsoft but not on VS Code. I don’t agree with his design decisions and I wish the app was more usable, but I fully acknowledge that nothing else exists and that no one else is willing to do the work to make a better version. Which is why I have tremendous respect for the Calibre developer. The amount of work that would be required would be monumental and the payoff wouldn’t be worth it. There are a lot of bad Electron applications, but apps like Visual Studio Code* prove that as with anything, you can make a really fantastic experience if you put the right work into it.īut it doesn’t matter anyway. My initial design doc was going to be Swift-based and in my “pie-in-the-sky” goal, it would be a native macOS app.īut part of the value of Calibre is that it is cross-platform and so yes, Electron was a strong option because for cross-platform development, I definitely don’t think it is worse than QT or Java. One look at the MobileReads forums (a fantastic resource) for any specific app, and I kind of understand why we don’t have a “good” Calibre that is OSS for paid for that matter. Even then tho, those apps are labors of love where the core audience is both critical and shockingly cheap (I say shockingly b/c many pay thousands on ebooks and ereaders a year - it’s an enthusiast market). There are also some good iOS apps that work with the book server, for accessing lots of ebooks. That said, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that DeDRM is the reason a lot of us use the app - I know it’s a key for me - and that does have an excellent CLI tool.

I even wrote out a spec for a similar app that was built using a more modern framework/usable interface, that some friends and I could potentially build, but the task was so monumental and the return on investment (and I’m not even talking about money) seemed so small, we shelved it. And yet, nothing else even comes close to doing what it does. It’s not just that it’s ugly, it’s that it’s poorly designed. I really appreciate all the work the dev puts into it, but it’s a slow app that just isn’t very usable. As others have said, this is an app I have an absolute love/hate relationship with.

Updated calibre mac 2019