Comment by thepoet
3 hours ago
Hey, author here. NickelMenu is terrific and Cobalt uses it to show the menu item in the default Kobo menu. It's just that Cobalt and NickelMenu are not the same in terms of project goals.
I created this as I could not find anything existing that gives the capabilities I wanted. I read several things downloaded over web apart from books on my Mac and phone, which I would prefer to do on an eInk display. Search papers on arxiv and read them offline later, Substack, even spending a lot of time on chess puzzles, monitor my Claude/Codex remotely, generate explainer audiobooks and listen to them on my bluetooth speaker etc.
The longer battery and the display makes some use cases really shine and I wanted to create apps for my own Kobo and potentially helpful for others as well.
I admire and support your effort, but the title makes it sound like you couldn't run apps in the past.
Nickelmenu deserves a mention in the opening paragraph and a differentiation of what this new piece of software brings to the table.
Thank you for the kind words. I will add a page to the project explaining the differentiation.
NickelMenu is a mature project and perfect at what it does, we just have different goals. NickelMenu is designed to extend Kobo's stock interface. Cobalt is designed to be an app platform like Android has for example. I wanted app creators to just write their app logic and not build things like a UI toolkit for their apps, app lifecycle and rendering support (framebuffer drawing, partial eInk refreshes, touch input handling etc.), bluetooth handling, sensor and more. Anything launched through NickelMenu like KOReader or Plato have to implement these on their own.
AFAIK NickelMenu command actions spawn arbitrary shell cmds that inherit root from Nickel, we avoid it by running apps as separate unprivileged processes with declared capabilities like network, storage, audio, fronlight etc.
I also wanted to provide ability to quickly build apps with the SDK and our simulator to test apps on before putting it on the real device, an app store to get new apps over the WiFi after the initial USB install.
This was more oriented on making my life easier, say I have an app idea that I want on my Kobo tomorrow and how quickly can I bring it live on the device. The 'you can run apps' I wrote was meant to signify anyone can now create apps using the SDK without bothering about the device specific bits and publish them and install it via Cobalt's app store. I hope this clarifies things.
Awesome
Time to start a F.A.Q section on the website. You could that comment almost verbatims for the question : "How is that different from NickelMenu"