Software Update: Caliber 1.206 Beta

No new stable version of Caliber has been released this week, but a beta release of version 2.0 can be picked up. Caliber is an open source and cross platform ebook management program. Among other things, it can look up all relevant information and cover images, and convert e-books to make them suitable for the various types of e-readers. Furthermore, the program can convert newspapers, magazines and news articles based on RSS feeds into e-book format, and books can be purchased from well-known web stores. In version 2.0 has, among other things, switched to Qt5 for user interface and there are improvements with Android devices under OS X.

Beta testers for caliber 2.0 needed

Caliber 2.0 is ready for testing. It is based on the next generation of Qt (the graphics toolkit caliber uses). This will bring many benefits to caliber going forward, but before I release caliber 2.0, I would appreciate it if some of you could help beta test it. Some of the major new features in caliber 2.0 are:

• Support for Android phones and tablets on OS X, caliber should now detect and connect to them, just as it already does on windows and linux
• The caliber command line tools no longer need a running X server on linux, so no more need to use xvfb-run
• Thanks to bug fixes in Qt, the caliber viewer and editor no longer have problems with embedded fonts where the font family name inside the font does not match the name used in the @font-face rule.
• Qt has changed the look & feel of its widgets (buttons/scrollbars/boxes/etc.) to a new “Fusion” theme that is supposed to be more “modern”. As with most things UI related, I suspect some of you will like the changes and some of you will not.

Most caliber third-party plugins have already been ported to work with caliber 2.0 and indeed this beta has been used and tested by many people already, so you should have no problems. But just in case you do, it is perfectly safe to uninstall the beta and go back to the main caliber release, if needed.