The issue is more if we want to do this then if we can. We have had a myriad of hosts issue as it is. If we make it easier for people to download mass amounts of chapter, it could make future problems more likely to crop up.

Regarding user interaction.

My current plan is to just add a "Discuss the chapter" link to the chapter. Which when clicked will take you to a forum topic (or create one if no one has discussed it before). So that should help facilitate discussion.

Probably not going to go with voting either, but instead add a kind of "favorites" system. It will be similar in implementation to reading lists, and mostly just for personal user use (so they can easily find there most liked stories). There might be some places where it will show "most favorited" chapter or something, but it will be used very sparingly and for the most part it will be hidden except for your own favorites.

Users will also be able to suggest changes to tags (and other meta data), that will be submit to a moderator to approve before going into place. This will take some of the burden off of the few of us to tag everything, while not running into all the issue of letting everyone tag or a tag vote systems. One thing that this will need is a document somewhere to explain tag style we are using. But with the tag aliases I plan to implement, it isn't that big of a deal.

Overall I think these features are a good compromise that will improve upon various deficiencies of the reader, while still keeping the focus on reading and finding manga to read.

Here are some ideas I have come up with. Just quick thoughts that might never see the light of day, but some feedback is always nice.

Ability to comment on individual chapters, series, etc, which will show on the bottom of each respective pages.

Some kind of email notification system. So you can follow a series or maybe a group, and it will send out an email whenever a chapter is realized. This can be complicated technically, because once you start sending out a decent amount of email you have to worry about your stuff getting automatically denied bc of spam.

I am not really into social media, but would some people want more social integration? I would never put one of those obnoxious like buttons or anything like this, but maybe just a simple link to email or post to somewhere.

Logged in users be able to blacklist/white list tags. So for instance only chapters tagged with yuri show up on front page.

Improved search support. I definitely know this needs to be improved, but anything specifics of what you would like to see. Maybe give the search a dropdown of results as you type.

MrEngenious wrote

That's currently not going to happen, regardless of us being able to access the back end of the reader.
While the work is annoying, I don't feel like it's too much for me quite yet.
It's also a lot easier to keep people from waging tag wars/trolling as I'm sure some are going to do.

I think a good compromise would be a "suggest tags" feature. Where anyone could submit tag changes, but they would need to be approved by a staff member before they take effect.

MrEngenious wrote

From the shoutbox:
"Zenphor
Is anyone else having problems loading pages 9 and 6 in Ch. 36 of Sasameki Koto? I think there are a couple other trouble pages too. It makes rereading it sad. "

Fixed. I really should just make a script that checks for an broken images.

GendoIkari wrote

I want to restate my earlier suggestion of having author and group listed in chapters on recently added or released.

Yea, I am going to do this. Still deciding on how exactly though.

MousE0910 wrote

I just don't see any reason not to jailbreak, that's all. :-)

Basically comes down to, I don't think the benefits of it are worth the time/effort involved. I work a 10-6 job now, when I was in HS/College I was a lot more willing to waste time on these type of things.

Also I am stickler for good design, even though I suck at making designs myself. I don't like using features that have good functionality but poor design (both UI and UX wise). So that would cut down the number of things I would use with a jailbreak.

MousE0910 wrote

Why not? Jailbreaking isn't illegal and you can get a lot of handy tweaks. Sure, performance of your device may suffer if you use too many tweaks but I use about 15 of them at the same time and still can play Infinity Blade II :D

If I wanted to jailbreak my device, I would just get an Android instead. After having an Android for a while and spending lots time flashing custom roms, trying out twenty million different apps to replace stock apps, with stuff breaking all the time and never being able to get everything to work exactly as I wanted to. I went back to an iPhone where it had nearly everything I wanted, but everything always works and I never had to expend any time/effort to keep it that way.

MousE0910 wrote

BTW, even if you don't manage to get the app on app store, yo can always get it on a cydia repo, no? :-)

I am sure its possible, but I no longer jailbreak my devices so it isn't really feasible.

A way to hide the bar is covered under what I mentioned before with full screen. How I was able to make the app quickly and relatively good quality was sticking to standard high level elements and functions that are in the SDK (or well maintained libraries). Currently I have been telling the app what to do, not how to do it. I could implement these features, it would just take a non trivial amount of time.

At this point my general feeling is that the app works well enough that these features aren't worth my time to implement. I started this app because, I wanted an app to use for myself on my iPad and I enjoy making stuff like this. I think I succeeded on both those counts, so I am satisfied. If this app was actually going somewhere, it would be different and I would probably invest the time. Like if it was on the App Store, I am not sure it would get approved or if enough people would want it to be worth that effort. Or something I can point at being something I created to future employers, but the subject material on the reader probably isn't appropriate to most employers.

tl;dr App works well enough currently, so probably only bug fixes and small changes in the future. I can still distribute it to ~50 more devices before it would need to go on the App Store, so let me know if you want a copy.

biggbran77 wrote

The series Another Kiss, chap. 2, pg. 31 won't load.

Fixed.

Not really sure what you mean by a autospan column. My main point still stands though. That its a 3rd party piece that has been in use for a long time (way before the new site/reader) that mostly works well. So unless there are large issues with it, it doesn't really make sense to totally change it.

For the title tag. I was experimenting with some caching, since the new host seems slower then the old host. It still needs to be refined a bit.

Reading lists is on my list, probably next that will get implemented.

Full screen / changing resize strategies is something I would like to do, but I am not sure if it is going to be worth the effort. They both require a lot of design, and have tons of edge cases that needed to be tested/debugged. They are definitely useful features, but will probably relegated to when everything else I want to do is done and I have some extra time.

If you are getting that, it means its not saving the cookies between sessions. Did you change anything else with your browser that might cause that to be the case?

GendoIkari wrote

There is a serious bug that causes it to crash that I found. If you go to anywhere where there is an unknown listed somewhere, like Groups/??? or authors/??? or any other such place and click on it, it brings you back to the respective menu, but if you click on it again and go to Groups/???/??? or Authors/???/??? the App crashes and sends you back to your home screen.

Fixed that, was actually an issue with the database. Those entries weren't working on the website either.

GendoIkari wrote

The shoutbox is still broken from safari

Nothing we can really do about that. Since the shout box is something 3rd party thats been in use for a long time, and required 3rd party cookied which Safari disabled by default. So really more trouble then its worth to fix it.

Yea, I still need to reskin the forums as well. Since I took this opportunity to upgrade it to the latest version.

Here are the chapters which I know that aren't currently working. I need to transfer these files over manually later tonight.

carat_ch09, tetsunagi_kooni_ch31, rui_rui_ch06, sayonara_piano_sonata_ch01, kamikami_kaeshi_ch01, kamikami_kaeshi_ch02, kamikami_kaeshi_ch03, koibana_onsen_ch49, the_flower_and_the_star_ch01, yandere_kanojo_joker_ch09, yandere_kanojo_online_ch36, albox_eien_o_kaetara_ch01, sayonara_piano_sonata_ch01_1, and all Umisho chapters. these should all be working now

Yay, we are all moved over and setup on our new host!

If you see anything that doesn't work, i.e. broken images on the reader, please make sure to let us know. Somethings might have slipped through the cracks.

Thanks for sticking with use through our downtime, you can get back to your Yuri now.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/29017247/Dynasty.zip here is the latest version. It will only work if you have previously given me your UDID number.

A few new things. Implemented sections for some of the browsing view controllers. should make it easier to find somethings. Ability to show recently added chapters (over recently released).

Do you have any more information about the page turning bug? I mainly use the app on my iPad, and I haven't encountered that at all.

Implementing reading lists is on my list of things to do. Just haven't gotten around to that yet.

For the chapter linking, I am planning to do something like that, but haven't determined specifics yet. My current idea is that there will be an additional page added to a chapter. It will contain various related links, next chapter in the series, the author's page, etc...

Yea, I can put in a random chapter feature. I totally forgot I implemented that on the reader, and slightly surprised people use it a lot.

Viewing a chapter works very similar to the iBooks app, where you can either tap a side or swipe to change pages.

Also I am thinking about what I want to do next, since it currently has a pretty good base atm. On my list are the following.

[list=*]
* Downloading chapters to be able to read them without an Internet connection.[/*]
* Improve display for browsing for chapters. Stuff like adding covers, showing tags (possibly filtering some tags), etc.[/*]
* Support for Reading List[/*]

One thing I was think about was combining offline reading + reading list. So items that are on your To Read list would automatically get downloaded.

If you have anymore suggestions or feature requests let me know.

I decided to make an icon, but I am pretty bad at graphic design. How is this?

(There is no way I created that book graphic, it was a stock icon I found)

Nope, they added some really nice APIs in iOS 5.0 that I am using. So would take a lot of work to rewrite the application to not use those.