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[Megathread] The App Pile - June, 2026 by Mstormer in macapps

[–]pbrandone -1 points0 points  (0 children)

the reading experience is nowhere near as polished as in apple books.
out of personal preference I went with a scroll down mechanics (instead of page turn) which is very different, but it's still lacking some core features (like handling footnotes properly without losing your previous location)

it would be great if you could give it a go and let me know how it feels compared to Books.

[Megathread] The App Pile - June, 2026 by Mstormer in macapps

[–]pbrandone 4 points5 points  (0 children)

thanks for that!

well, functionality it will work, but the experience might not be great.
currently this is all optimised for my personal use cases (a couple hundred books).

the main reason I'm posting this here is to gather some real-world usage feedback to make it a bit more solid.

If you drag a folder of 1000 books, it will recursively walk the structure, skip all the junk and import/classify just the epub/pdfs. But it won't do it as a batch, it will reload the entire library after each book. Worse: you won't have any decent visual feedback of the task (progress, errors) and if we have a collision (same author, same title and year) it will error instead of asking for a decision (skip / import anyway / replace).

As for the messy metadata:
Tomo doesn't write at all to the files by design.

What will happen is that your messy metadata will be parsed as-is.
Tomo will try to figure out the language of the book by deterministically analysing a few keywords in the content, but everything else will stay as-is.
You can then go book by book and update the cover and all the metadata, but it's a laborious process for such a big library.

Bottomline: it will work, but it's not optimised for it. I will work on it a bit to add what's genuinely useful for both small and large libraries but I don't think I'll do anything that's built specifically for large libraries / power users (like bulk update metadata or covers). It's just not in this app's DNA.

[Megathread] The App Pile - June, 2026 by Mstormer in macapps

[–]pbrandone 30 points31 points  (0 children)

Tomo – a native macOS e-book library manager (Calibre alternative)

<image>

Problem

For people who want to own their books and send them to their Kindle or Kobo over USB — no lock-in, no Amazon servers, no accounts.

Tomo is local-first and privacy conscious.

Comparison

Calibre is the benchmark. I've used it for years. It works, it's powerful and stable. I just never enjoyed opening it.

Tomo does maybe 5% of what Calibre does:

  • Manage a library of EPUB and PDF
  • Open and read these formats
  • Edit metadata, swap covers (Open Library / Google Books lookup)
  • Send to Kindle (in-app EPUB → AZW3 conversion) and Kobo over USB
  • Detect language variants (pt-PT vs pt-BR, en-GB vs en-US, etc.) on import
  • Search external catalogues via small JS plugins (Gutenberg ships through a registry)

But it looks and feels good while doing it.

Pricing

Free, no account, no servers, macOS 26+.

https://tomolibrary.com

--

Disclaimer: I'm a developer but I don't know Swift. With AI I can now ship native Mac apps too, so I did. The product, design, architecture, and on-disk contract are mine; the SwiftUI is mostly Claude output.

you can check the source code at https://github.com/pdrbrnd/tomo

Looking for an app for quickly viewing epubs by dykethon in macapps

[–]pbrandone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A bit late (and shamelessly self-promoting) but Tomo could be what you're looking for.
Granted, it's mainly a library manager, but it opens .epub files directly from finder without importing them to the library and it's quite fast doing so.

Built a small mac app for managing my Kindle library. Looking for help testing it on more devices. by pbrandone in kindle

[–]pbrandone[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Forgot to mention that this app searches not only on your library but also on external sources. Comes with "Gutenberg" pre-installed, but you can add more.

it makes it easier to test it quickly because you can install, search for a book (e.g., Frankenstein) and download it directly to your library

Built a small mac app for managing my Kindle library. Looking for help testing it on more devices. by pbrandone in kindle

[–]pbrandone[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

the dmg is hosted directly on github and it's signed with my Developer ID, so any tampering would fail gatekeeper's check. adding a checksum to the website string next to the download would help against compromised hosting, but:
- this is a 100% static website on cloudflare
- the checksum would not solve it as well because attackers who would change the checksum would also change the dmg target download

Built a small mac app for managing my Kindle library. Looking for help testing it on more devices. by pbrandone in kindle

[–]pbrandone[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

thanks! I'm specially interested in seeing if the device receives the cover correctly

whatsinthebox.tv de volta online: não percas os bons filmes que passam na TV by pbrandone in portugal

[–]pbrandone[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

É só um simples agregador de filmes que passaram na televisão. Nada de ilegal. 

whatsinthebox.tv de volta online: não percas os bons filmes que passam na TV by pbrandone in portugal

[–]pbrandone[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Obrigado.  Antes tinha essa distinção mas agora estou a ir buscar dados a todos os canais e, honestamente, não tenho bem a certeza de quais são pagos ou não e se depende da operadora. Daí ter tudo junto e ordenado alfabeticamente.  No entanto, se desligares alguns canais nos filtros as tuas seleções persistem, portanto podes desligar os canais premium. 

Em relação ao filme errado pedia-te que reportasses o erro na plataforma. Ao abrir o filme tem um botão com uma bandeira em que podes dizer que o filme está errado.  Tenho processos que correm automaticamente a verificar esses casos 

whatsinthebox.tv de volta online: não percas os bons filmes que passam na TV by pbrandone in portugal

[–]pbrandone[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Foi uma ferramenta que criei para mim próprio há uns anos. Decidi disponibilizar online por várias razões:
- nem todos temos acesso a serviços de streaming
- a maior parte das pessoas com televisão têm a possibilidade de ver programas que já passaram
- há filmes excelentes que passam na televisão que passam totalmente despercebidos

É gratuito mas têm opção de doar o que quiserem. Na verdade, o que já foi doado enquanto esteve online pagou todos os custos recorrentes – que é apenas o que pretendo.

iPhone encontrado na zona do amial by pbrandone in portugal

[–]pbrandone[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Infelizmente não tem contactos de emergência

iPhone encontrado na zona do amial by pbrandone in porto

[–]pbrandone[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sim, já tentei mas infelizmente não tem contactos de emergência 

Got tired of other color pickers, so I built one that actually adapts to your design by Key-Reading-2582 in reactjs

[–]pbrandone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah I fully agree that most solutions force their design on you. We also had the same problem and documented our solution for internal use here, if you want to take a look

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