Technology

I'd say what he actually did was deflect the question and refuse to acknowledge that it was about appearance at all. He just talked about function over form, and that it works well and is intuitive.

I actually agree with that, I like the big buttons, and context menus usually have whatever I'm looking for, but you can take the deflection as an admission he knows it's ugly and doesn't think it's even important enough to directly address.

I mean honestly just a beauty pass that softened the colour palette and gave it a less harsh appearance overall would make a big difference. He could even just create a skinning system, that's one way that this has been addressed in the past, and it's a job an engineer should be able to do just fine.

First off, I didn't know the guy's name is "Kovid". It must have been a very weird five years for him.

Second, this is an amazing piece of text and I will show it to people to explain why having engineers make design decisions is often a terrible idea.

I genuinely believe there is a strong correlation between FOSS projects getting structured and well funded enough to hire designers and their chance of taking over as the default choice against commercial projects. If UX designers were as interested in volunteer work as engineers the software landscape would be completely different.

I have a sizable collection of legitimately procured ebooks, it's not that rare if you prioritize it.

But I agree, it's not about hardware. There are plenty of super premium eink displays these days. I don't even want integration with a eink reader at all. I'm happy reading off an OLED screen in a tablet. All I need is convenient library, management and display software that will handle both text and comic book formats.

Everybody seems to be trying to mimic the Kindle ecosystem with all its quirks and hardware dependencies when what I really want is book Plex.

If you download your books, how do you read them in other hardware? Aren’t they all drm locked?

Well, "logical" is a bit of a stretch. After my second or third round of trying to use it for all my DRM-free ebooks I was quickly reminded that a) it insists on copying all your books into a separate folder for some reason, and b) its reading UX is atrocious. The thing is unreadable on my tablet by default and it won't even try with comics, instead just prompting you for an actually usable app to do the reading part.

I am sure it was made to deal with a legitimate use case, but man, is it not my use case. Which, to reiterate, is I own a bunch of ebooks and comics and want to read them sometimes.

I hear their selfhosted web app may be better at this, and I've also taken a peek at kavita, I've just been too annoyed by having to go point a docker container at my library when the books are just sitting there and I can just open them. It really feels like it should be more straightforward and convenient than that.