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I am currently working on back porting quite a bit of 1.7 into the 1.6 branch. Solid archive support and some full screen interface elements are all that really need work now.
1.6.2 will be released once a few localizations are completed with 1.6.3+ being released as more hit my inbox.
Filed by arau at July 31st, 2008 under Simple Comic
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Until recently Simple Comic has relied on hard paths to find files for its session restore system. With the advent of a more comprehensive bookmark manager I felt the need to look into a less fragile way of locating files. Simple Comic now uses BDAlias, which is a wrapper class for OS-X’s alias manager.
So what does this mean for the end user?
Archives can now be freely moved around in the filesystem and Simple Comic will still find them. Archives can even be renamed.
There is a slight architectural problem with loose images, so they still rely on hard paths. Though that too should be fixed in the near future.
Filed by arau at May 10th, 2008 under Simple Comic, cocoa
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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.
Filed by arau at April 29th, 2008 under Simple Comic, cocoa
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Just to let folks know, the most recent beta of Simple Comic contains a Quick Look module that can now view cbr files. Make sure you delete the old cbz only QuickComic plugin from your library directory.
Filed by arau at December 5th, 2007 under Quick Look, Simple Comic
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I can see two glaring problems with QuickLook now that I have messed with it for a bit.
Firstly it is too easy to install conflicting generators and secondly keeping existing generators up to date is a PITA. I might throw together a plug-in manager to mitigate those omissions.
Here is a bit of Interface Builder Porn:
Filed by arau at November 28th, 2007 under cocoa
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I did a quick edit to my QuickLook plug-in to make it work with cbz files exclusively.
For those that don’t know, cbz is an extension used to identify comic zip files. This change allows users to install other zip QuickLook plugins without worrying about conflicts.
The new version can be downloaded here: Link
Users of Simple Comic should probably delete QuickComic from their QuickLook directory as Simple Comic now bundles it. This makes it much easier for me to keep the plug-ins up to date.
Filed by arau at November 28th, 2007 under Simple Comic, cocoa
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Well I neglected to post a blog entry for the release of 1.6. So this one will have to suffice for 1.6 and 1.6.1.
In any case here it is.Download 1.6.1
The localizers really knocked themselves out getting all the changes I made in 1.6 translated for 1.6.1. A round of applause for all of them.
If you have a jonesing for sweet sweet code the Simple Comic’s repository is up to date. Link
As a heads up to all of the Tiger users out there, future major releases will probably be Leopard only. Worry not on the bug fix front however, the 1.6.x branch will continue to be updated.
Filed by arau at November 13th, 2007 under Simple Comic, cocoa
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To get used to the QuickLook plug-in architecture I did what everyone seems to be doing. Namely write a zip inspection module. The mysterious and prolific Hetima has already created one which is available here.
So anyway my plugin uses Hetima’s unzip framework to inspect the contents of any given zip/cbz, ignoring everything but images, sorts those images by name and draws the first to the thumbnail context. Nice and simple. The preview code is almost as simple except it iterates through up to 20 image and creates a multi page preview.
One caveat with this implementation is that the image name sorting slows down thumbnail generation noticeably. If that annoys you feel free to tweak it. I might even add some prefs that can be changed via the command line in the next version.
Download the source code.
Edit:I did a quick edit to my QuickLook plug-in to make it work with cbz files exclusively. This should prevent conflicts with other zip QuickLook plug-ins.Download
Filed by arau at November 12th, 2007 under Simple Comic, cocoa
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During the Apple dark years , OS 8 till OS X, I was a Linux and Windows user. Mainly Linux. Upon the arrival of OS 10.2 I gratefully came back into the fold. So it has been about five or so years since I have messed about with Linux. On the whole the experience was not bad. That said I could not see myself using it on a daily basis. This is due to any number of small issues that cropped up in just the few minutes that I was using it. Here is my stream of consciousness UI critique.
EDIT: This needed to be configured. Got it working. Not sure why it was not configured to allow reversing direction by default.
EDIT: Definitely not true. If anything there are too many exposé alternatives.
EDIT: The CD was not required. Another case of crappy initial defaults. The package manager did not check the online repositories by default.
EDIT: Got the touch-pad working, but it required that I edit a text configuration file.
Anyway there are quite a few other things that bothered me but I can’t recall them. I guess this is just a reminder to me that it is the small stuff that makes or breaks an interface for most users.
Much better now especially since I now have an exposé clone
Filed by arau at October 22nd, 2007 under Uncategorized
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Okay 1.5.3 is out now.Full disclosure I screwed up the localizations and have been doing so for some time by the looks of things. The strings where properly localized by the fine folks who volunteered their time but I neglected to give them enough room in their respective text fields, resulting in clipping. For this reason 1.5.4 will be released on monday.
Filed by arau at October 19th, 2007 under Simple Comic, cocoa
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