When I first used Calibre I thought it was a disorganised mess trying to cram too many features in one app.
Over time I learned to appreciate the vision: it’s not the stereotypical modern streamlined app, it’s the cockpit of a spaceship. It’s AutoCAD for ebooks. I really enjoy that application now, I haven’t even scratched the surface of its featureset.
I heard the author gets very defensive of his design choices: good, I wish we had more opinionated app developers in FOSS.
I like it. I bet a designer would put lots of space around each box and hide stuff under menus and tabs, thus making the full range of options much harder to get at a glance. Like breaking up your giant function into hundreds of tiny functions. Some people prefer to just see everything at once and I think it’s a valid way to do it.
> I bet a designer would put lots of space around each box and hide stuff under menus and tabs
A designer might indeed add more space but not necessarily hide stuff. Design works within constraints, and if the constraint is everything should be visible, then it needs to work like that.
That interface would benefit from more space in areas. Note for example how the descenders of letters (look for “g” or “y”) bleed into the bottom shadow (the “side”) of the buttons. It’s definitely tight. It gets worse with the bold areas. On the top right you seem to have buttons, labels, and a text field, all using the exact same font at the exact same size, all in bold and with no spacing between them. It makes it harder to focus on information, and everything is so close together that you’ll either have misclicks or be slower as you put the cursor in just the right place.
Sure, have that interface for the hardcore users, including those who are going to use the keyboard to interact with every part of that, but it’s not a failing to add more space, and menus aren’t always wrong.
People love making fun of designers, but it’s the toupée fallacy, you notice it when it’s bad. There’s a reason “good design is invisible” is a maxim. Like on every field, there are good designers and bad designers.
At least there are menus, I guess. Some power user tools (eg: vim) don't give much in the way of discoverability. You either internalize a significant amount of knowledge and behaviour, or you hate it and move on.
I like and appreciate both, though I grew up as a Windows power user, and hated vi/vim for many years when I got into *nix. It wasn’t until I saw my boss teleport a block of code elsewhere in a file with a few keystrokes that I decided I needed to learn it.
IMO, Foobar2000 [0] was/is the zenith of bespoke GUI programs from that era. The UI is clean, the menus make sense, it’s infinitely configurable but the defaults are fine, it supports plugins…
Well, that’s a day 1 purchase for me. And I’d rather pay a company that’s built around their product than switching my workflow to the vibe coded Photoshop alternative that’s got all the hype these days.
You need to listen more than the Top 10 charts my dude. The fact that you use Weird Al as an example of experimental musician says it all about your depth of knowledge.
You're still showing how ignorant you are. Even in 1980, Weird Al was pretty vanilla. The spectrum of music is wide, and it would do you good to go and explore it (and while you're at it, try making some!).
After 6 months of unemployment, I am starting to enjoy it again. I don’t use AI.
But I know that if I want to find employment again, I’ll have to eat dirt and get on with the times, or abandon my 20 years old career as a software engineer.
It’s too difficult of a choice for me to make still. Back to hiding my head in the sand, and enjoying my personal projects while savings last.
> unless the Wealth Pump is addressed, and Asabiyyah (Social Cohesion) is restored, either by the Left or the Right.
The first requires massive societal upheaval, the second likely requires the destruction of the Internet or to spend the next 500 years for humanity to learn to function around the incredibly disruptive effect it has on human communities.
And if we wait the Left or the Right to be the ones to save us, we’ll be engulfed by the Sun first.
We’ll find a way out of this mess, surely, but we still haven’t reached the peak of our malaise. Many of us at this point just want to see everything crash down to hope to start anew, and better.
Over time I learned to appreciate the vision: it’s not the stereotypical modern streamlined app, it’s the cockpit of a spaceship. It’s AutoCAD for ebooks. I really enjoy that application now, I haven’t even scratched the surface of its featureset.
I heard the author gets very defensive of his design choices: good, I wish we had more opinionated app developers in FOSS.
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