Arianna

We have plenty of image and PDF viewers but we don't have enough ebook readers. This may be because they have specific requirements that aren't common to PDF and image viewers, such as library management and adaptable reading views, and far fewer potential users. Calibre is the exception, because it's an ebook reader and librarian that solves these and many other problems, but it can also be overwhelming and unintuitive when all you want to do is read a book. Which is where this new Arianna application succeeds. It's a small, minimal ePub reader built for the KDE Plasma desktop from Qt and Kirigami, and it's perfect if you have a small collection of books you'd like to read when the time allows. It won't remove DRM, doesn't require a theme to be installed, and won't send books to your e-ink device, which is the whole point.

The 1.0 release of Arianna comes at an early stage of development, which is why in many ways it can't compete with Calibre. But it can compete on aesthetics, especially for reading. Only ePub files can be imported, after which they're listed in the library view. This will show a thumbnail of the cover, and the library can be sorted by author, by series number, or by keywords attributed to the books in your collection. It's exactly what most of us need. Keywords could be used for "romance," "detective," or "mystery" stories, for example, and selecting a book will open the reader view. This is the best part of Arianna because the text is rendered beautifully, making it very easy to read for long period even on a monitor. You have control over the font and font size, as well as whether the colors are inverted. This is particularly useful if you use a dark theme, because the text would otherwise be light on a dark background, which isn't too good for light-sensitive or aging eyes. Another great feature is the simple progress bar, which is often missed from ebook readers. This helps you understand where you are in the book, and helps provide you context in terms of your progress, much like feeling pages and their shifting weight does with printed versions.

Project Website

https://download.kde.org/stable/arianna/

Arianna is a great example of what the beautiful KDE Kirigami framework's capabilities.

Fediverse client

Sengi

Now that the dust has settled (a little) on the great Twitter takeover, with its third-party API closure and the clamor for all things Fediverse, it's a good time to consolidate and look at Mastodon alternatives. Several have been able to seize the momentum behind the recent attention to develop quickly, including the brilliant KDE Plasma client, Tokodon, and Sengi. Sengi is particularly unique because it's a Mastodon client that attempts to recreate the look and functionality of TweetDeck, which was itself an evolutionary window on the world of Twitter. It was TweetDeck's column view that made it so unique and powerful because each column could display the real-time results of a hashtag, search result, user, list, or timeline. Users could configure their own real-time window on the world in much the same way a stockbroker might track their investments. This is what Sengi does for Mastodon.

TweetDeck was initially a third-party client for Twitter, eventually bought by Twitter, and more recently either quietly abandoned on the desktop or considered ripe for a subscription-only option via a browser. This makes Sengi an important project because it's attempting to bring TweetDeck's unique perspective on social media to the Fediverse, and it's already succeeding. You can add one or more accounts; add columns for your local timeline, your federated timeline, your lists, and searches; and it has live and manual updates. If you love data and would rather follow events, lists, and hashtags than specific users or instances, this is the best way to get the most out of Mastodon. Being built on Electron, it can feel a little resource intensive, and you can't currently change fonts, adjust the text density, or tweak the theming, but these are all options that can hopefully come later. For now, Sengi is one of the best reasons to jump to Mastodon, and helps the platform to feel like a legitimate Twitter alternative.

Project Website

https://nicolasconstant.github.io/sengi/

Sengi also works with Pleroma, a well-established Activity Streams alternative to Mastodon with some unique features of its own.