Over the years, the community has volunteered time and time again to develop a new UI for Calibre that would at least bear some resemblance to all the other applications we use on our computer. They would do all the work. His response has always been no.

And there has been his hostility to criticisms of security flaws in his code.

Also, there are an infinite amount of people who say they will do something, but won't actually do it. Has anybody who said they could do a UI overhaul actually started it and arrived at something worth sharing? The fear of the creator being "hostile" to your fork is a convenient excuse but doesn't actually stop you from maintaining a UI fork. Shit or get off the pot.

But the first thing you learn when you run a project with contributors is that contributions aren't just free work that you get to mindlessly merge into master. In fact, it's very likely that reviewing the code, correcting the code, managing the people (and their emotions), credentializing in the code, pulling the code/impl back on a viable course, dealing with UI bikeshedding, etc. are far more work than just doing it yourself. And if it's not something you think is worth that effort, then it's definitely not something you want to just outsource to "the community". And after all that, you aren't even guaranteed a UI that's better than what you replaced.

Anytime a UI is updated, you're going to completely modify the behavior or of the people that are using it. So any change someone else is making that isn't as closely tied with the product as he is, is probably going to be suboptimal. Not only from a user experience perspective, but also from his ability to answer questions on the forum as people are asking him questions about how to achieve certain things.

This means that he'll HAVE to be closely tied with a redesign. Which is probably not where he wants to be spending a significant amount of his time.

There's also the added complexity of legacy users that are just book people, that are quite used to the design as it is, so any migration over the new one, no matter how gradual, is probably going to make the product harder for them to use.

I'm not saying I agree or disagree with him, but his reasoning is valid. This isn't a project where you just hand off to someone completely new and let them do what they want. That's how you end up with a broken product.

Also, be wary of judging someone by how they choose to spend their free time. Notice how you haven't actually lifted a finger yourself, just judged others for how they lift theirs with zero skin in the game.

> It could be that while a small number of users are helped by his personal attention on the forum, a much larger number of users are left frustrated by the UI.

This is just speculation. Without data to back it up, I can say the reverse is true too.

Since there isn't a large number of users that are posting about how terrible the UI is(on the Calibre forum), it's probably functional enough and people can navigate it.

Buttons look like buttons, not text. It's better than modern UIs. I fear that if he gives in, this and similar small details would change so it looks nice instead of being easy to use.

It doesn't do all that calibre does obviously but it does most of what I need. It's not per see a fork as it only uses the same database formats and directly call calibre for conversion but it's as close as you get to a "modern" gui on top of calibre.

As usual, the people actually doing the work and the people complaining are strictly different subsets.

Based on what else I've seen about him -- admittedly only this thread -- I would guess that while he would not assist or change his behaviours, he would not actively try to frustrate it.

I think this is fine and somebody who cant accept this needs to go outside and breathe. Sometimes you gotta put your foot down about something until you are convinced otherwise.

[1] http://www.9bis.net/kitty/#!index.md