Appreciating the Utilitarian Aesthetic

I find it interesting that I will get so much satisfaction from executing a task at the command line where I experience only text and a certain amount of invisible magic, and then turn around and be disdainful of a graphical interface that doesn’t appear super-slick or modern.

I spend a lot of time managing my electronic books and music collections on MacOS. Over the years I’ve used a lot of tools for this and it turns out the ones I’ve settled on, the most powerful and feature rich, are not the prettiest things I’ve ever seen on a computer screen.

For tagging music files, I start with a Python CLI tool called Beets⤴︎ and of course there are no expectations for a stunning visual experience there.

Next I clean everything up and maintain a local database with a GUI application called Yate⤴︎ by 2 Many Robots⤴︎. This application does anything you can conceive of doing to a music file and is extremely stable. My collection surpasses 350K tracks. I haven’t found a single shiny app on the App Store that does anything but die poorly when faced with a large number of music files. Yate doesn’t have a lot of fancy chrome but it works so well. It bugs me when I see it criticized for not looking modern enough.

Which brings me to the popular Calibre⤴︎ e-book library manager built by Kovid Goyal. Oh boy. This is not a great visual situation. But the power. There is no app even remotely close to doing what Calibre can do with an e-book collection. The organizational capabilities are extensive enough to keep the most obsessed PKM^[1] fanatics from ever actually reading a book. This app is cross platform and like Yate, not found on the Apple App Store.

These apps are not visually beautiful but their functionality certainly is. So much so, that I’m starting to experience a certain amount of distrust of overly beautiful applications. Sure you look good, but can you do this…?

My emerging affection for these utilitarian tools probably comes from an increasing aversion to being part of massive market controlling silos. (Yes. I’m on Apple hardware. I’m aware of the hypocrisy.)

Oh before I forget, I should mention a music player that has saved me from ever having to open the horror that is Apple’s native Music app (although it constantly tries to insert itself in my business.) Swinsian⤴︎. Also not on the App Store, I include it here not because it’s ugly, it’s not, but because it’s awesome. Plays any format and can search/filter large collections like a champ.

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1. Personal Knowledge Management ↩︎