Calibre Connector

[pwalker8]

Calibre Connector is up on the app store where it's been for a few weeks. It's been through a couple of iterations with the original January version being rewritten using the SwiftUI framework rather than the UIKit framework, then a couple of bug fixes and enhancements. If you downloaded the early version, the current version is likely more useful.

The app is free and is basically a hobby project to provide much of the functionality provided by the original excellent Calibre Companion. I have a somewhat different spin than the standard Calibre UI and I set it up to automatically download all missing books when syncing rather than manually pick them since that's the way I prefer things to work.

The documentation is at
https://www.phillipwwalker.net/

The link to the opensource project that I created for it is at the bottom of the under the hood page. Anyone who wants to download the source and use it as a starting point for their own projects is more than welcome to.

[Terisa de morgan]

Thank you for it, I've got some more tests to do

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

Thank you for it, I've got some more tests to do

Thank you for testing and making suggestions.

[mstevens]

I'm stuck on "Reading Calibre book list" for an hour with no progress indication on my iPhone. My iPad does appear slowly to be loading data from the library.

3229 books on a Calibre server running in raspbian on a raspberry Pi. There's no difficulty opening the server webpage either on the local network or across the internet. Calibre Connector on the iPhone almost instantly found the sole library, so I think it is connecting to the server and pulling at least some data from it.

Any clues what might be going on here?

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by mstevens

I'm stuck on "Reading Calibre book list" for an hour with no progress indication on my iPhone. My iPad does appear slowly to be loading data from the library.

3229 books on a Calibre server running in raspbian on a raspberry Pi. There's no difficulty opening the server webpage either on the local network or across the internet. Calibre Connector on the iPhone almost instantly found the sole library, so I think it is connecting to the server and pulling at least some data from it.

Any clues what might be going on here?

The program uses the json interface which means that the entire database is sent in one big dump. It generally takes about 20 seconds on my system to get past the json dump and start downloading books. How long it takes on your system depends on the number of books and the speed of your system.

The initial load for a 3000 book library can take some time. My 4700 book library takes about a half an hour for the initial load.

If you go to the FAQ on my webpage, I give a technical explanation of what is going on and why the initial load takes so long. That's the weak spot of the program. Hopefully this year's iOS update will let me make it more robust. I wrote the program for my use and use it every day, so I go through the sync/meta update process every time I buy a new book. The good news is that once you do the initial load and get all your ebooks onto your mobile device, downloading a couple books only takes a couple of seconds after the json dump.

On your iPhone, it sounds like it isn't actually connecting. Did you go through the initial load process on the iPhone? i.e. scan for server, load libraries, save parameters, initial load? As I mentioned above, you should see progress in less than a minute.

[Dopedangel]

Hi I saw this on hacker news so I thought I would post here. And if you ever would like to build an android app it seems you can do it using swift.

Show HN: Skip – Build native iOS and Android apps from a single Swift codebase