I have begun active development of Simple Comic again.
Aside from some tweaking the only features I really want to add are a decent persistent bookmarking system and some nice Core Animation page transitions.
If anyone wants additional features post em’ here before SC reaches release candidate status.
EDIT: Just finished a basic implementation of the bookmarking system.
Comments (28)
I don’t know if someone has suggested this before, but the CBR viewer in Windows (CDisplay) scrolls the page in 1 press of the space bar no matter what the height of the page. In Simple comic, this takes 2-3 presses depending on the width. It would be nice if the program could take the page height into account and traverse the page correctly.
Also, CDisplay also scrolls two page formats correctly by going down then diagonally upward and then downwards again by pressing the space bar. This is missing in Simple Comic.
I’m sorry if this seems like I am complaining. I like this program a lot and have been using it for a while now (the QuickLook plugin was a very pleasant surprise). Thanks for all your great work. The 1.7 beta seems to be very stable.
AC,
SC bases its vertical spacebar scrolling on the visible area in the scroll view. Which means it might take more than one whack of the spacebar.
The idea of going back to the top of the page but with horizontal movement is a good one. I will try to implement that some time soon.
I am unsure of what you had in mind for the bookmarking system. I was hoping for some type of itunes like library function where you would have a separate window for listing all your manga/comics etc. So you could just click on the manga you want and it would bring up the last page viewed regardless if you closed the window out the first time. Regardless I love this program and it’s become my default. Thanks for your hard work and time.
Xarix,
Here is an image of the bookmark system as it is right now.
http://twitpic.com/1pbp
How about a option to not track anything for the “Open Recent” menu? Never been a fan of that menu in any app, otherwise all I can say is at least with most recent beta, you cant delete/eject a disk that had a comic you opened with SC. As it will say its still using it yet you closed the window with the comic…
Maybe use arrow keys for next/prev page? and have a mode were you can use them to go around a page at fixed width (up down goes up down, left right changes pages?) that would be totaly nifty
Infamous
I am actually getting rid of the Open Recent menu-item and replacing it with a History menu, which optionally clears itself on exit.
The arrows do that currently in the beta. To enable it click the pref labeled “Scrolling Page Turn.” The internal beta has it on by default and has removed the pref.
Hmm, didn’t know that
. Though you really have to push down the arrow keys for it to go one page… Maybe have a “normal” quick page goes one, but if you hold down (like right now) it “scrolls”?
Any chance you will be sending out beta’s for 2.0!?!? Be awesome!
Hi again. Just a small quirk – on my system, as long as the quicklook plugin is generating images for the CBR and CBZ files, it does not allow me to rename the files in Finder. What happens is that when I press Enter/Return on a file to rename it, it goes into edit mode and almost immediately afterward returns to the original (non-editable) stage. Once the thumbnails/quicklook is generated, the rename function returns to normal.
Could someone else check to see if this is reproducible on another machine.
Infamous,
The 2.0 beta is not nearly ready. Too much to do.
AC,
Noticed the same thing earlier. I believe that the bug is on Apple’s side. I should probably file a bug.
Thanks for this app, really is my favourite comic reader for the mac!
A big feature I would like is the ability to automatically go to the next chapter in a book. Often the manga I get I download into folders of images often labeled like “YYYYYY – CHAPTER 1″. It should be easy for the program to look for Chapter 2, 3, 4–different folders–without me having to use the Open command each time. Would this be at all possible?
That and bookmarks would make it perfect.
Hey, just wondering if you were planning an app for the iPhone/iPod Touch. There isn’t any comic reader available at the moment, so even a very basic one would be nice.
Hi, thank you for such an awesome application! If I ever come into some money I will donate for sure! I don’t know if a comment that’s only praise is appropriate, but I think everything is pretty perfect. I thought the chapter skip idea was cool, you could use it when you open a whole series at once with several files. I don’t think it’s exactly necessary though.
Anyways, thanks for the great program, there are none better!
First I want to say thanks for a great comic archive reader.
I have two requests:
1) Add an option to disable the blacklight shutoff when Simple Comic is displaying in full screen mode and the front most app. I use Caffeine for this function currently but I often forget to turn it off.
2) Add an option to open the next archive in the current directory when you reach the end of the current archive. I admit it, I’m lazy and was spoiled by this feature in the Windows only CDisplay.
@mike RE: #1 wow that sounds like a bug. I had not realized fullscreen mode stopped a laptop from sleeping.
#2 That has been requested before. It conflicts a bit with opening multiple archives at once. I might enable it only when the user only has a single archive open at once.
@ARAU
RE: 1) I guess I wasn’t clear enough. My issue is that the screen dims while reading due to inactivity (maybe I’m just a slow reader
. I’d like to keep the screen from dimming while in fullscreen mode like video playback in a fullscreen video player. The screen dimming/sleeping would enable normally when not the front most app or not in fullscreen mode.
RE: 2) I normally read one archive at a time in fullscreen two page mode (thus issue number one). So that the one open archive limitation would be fine for me. I’m just lazy but when I sit down to read multiple issues in sequence, I have to open each one individually as I finish the last one. I really miss CDisplay’s ability to simply open the next archive in the current directory (or the previous one).
New #3) Have you given any thought to color correction (yellow reduction mainly) for scans of older material?
Again thanks for a great reader (and thanks for the response). I tried several different readers when I first switched back to Mac. Yours is the only one I use now.
Love the enhancements in the 1.7 beta but would like to suggest one more minor one at some point. The icon(s) for documents associated with Simple Comic are indistinguishable from those of generic documents (blank white sheets). If you could come up with an icon or set of icons for the formats supported by Simple Comic it would be just that much better.
Ok I didn’t notice you did that for archives, as I store comics as optimized PDFs. Very cool change but if you could add one for PDFs as well I’d certainly appreciate it.
I have a request for icons. it would be great if the file’s icon, once opened, would replicate the cover (or first image) inside the cbr file. I had found this handy to be a handy tool from another app to remember if I had read an issue or not and of course for organizing reasons. Is this something coming up? it would be great if it had the cover and a small SC badge over it.
@Websnap
The quicklook plug-in already does something like that.
I recently improved the plug-in by decreasing render time, though it has yet to be release.
“some nice Core Animation page transitions”
Oh, yes please! The dissolve transition a la Preview’s Slideshow mode would be heavenly. ^_^
Hmm, I’ve done a bit of reading and isn’t image transitions better suited to Core Image or are they one and the same?
I’d personally really like it if the QuickLook plugin showed more than 30 images. Like an unlimited number.
It would be very useful to people who collect images (not necessarily comic book scans) in the cbr/cbz formats and then catalog those collections in an app like DEVONthink Pro.
@kalisphoenix
I did that originally but doing so causes a major speed hit to occur. Due to Quicklook’s design the whole comic must be rendered prior to being displayed.
Thanks for the reply, Alexander. Would it be possible for me to grab the most recent source of the QuickLook plugin and compile my own version (I didn’t see it in your source repository, although I might be dumb)? I do almost everything in DEVONthink, so the speed hit doesn’t bother me (and almost all of my collections are between 30 and 40 images anyway) — but I can definitely understand it not being friendly to people just flipping through in the Finder.
Alexander, I figured it out — it seems my only problem with the source code you provided previously was that my image names were not zero-padded… so I’d see image 1, 10, 11, 12… 19, 2, 20, etc. No need to bother you further. Thank you again for your reply and the work you’ve done. The app and plugin are great
Wonderful! thanks – quick notes on 1.7 beta (211) just started using SC in the last week or so…under 10.5.7
Not sure if it’s a bug or feature – when launching the app or opening a file – old previously viewed comic opens on it’s own or behind the new one. It’s unexpected- annoying if you didn’t like what you last had open though handy if you forgot what you were reading and wanted to finish it
Feature I’d most like to see added:
The two finger trackpad zoom as seen in Preview, Safari etc..
Love the app. Been reading old 40s and 50s pulp SF with it.
Don’t know if it’s my setup of the app, but no matter which direction I spin the scroll wheel on the mouse, the app only scrolls through the pages in the forward direction.
Would also love it if the pages would flick over like a real book, when changing pages. But that’s because I’m a geek.