I've been working on an iOS application for a long time and I finally released version 1.0. The app is called Comic Book Collector, it's an app made for iPads.
What is Comic Book Collector?
Basically, it is a digital bookshelf that lets you arrange and display your digital comic book collection. Right now, most of the time you have your digital comic book collection inside some kind of file browser. You can sort it by release date, alphabet or author, for instance. But that's it. All of your comic books are just elements inside a list you have almost no control of. That's what I wanted to change with my app. Here's how it works:
Basic concept First of all, there still is a "traditional" file browser. It's where your comic books are stored. Think of it as having many boxes full of comic books in your room. The fun bit is taking them out of those boxes and putting them inside a bookshelf next to your couch or whatever. You have complete freedom over how and where you want to place and display them. And that's exactly what you can do with the app, only on your iPad instead of your room. File browser Inside the file browser, you can create folders and comic book files, just like in any other file browser. A comic book file is an element that represents a comic book. You can give it a name, a type and add other meta data to it (author, publisher, ...). Then, you can connect it to an actual comic book pdf or cbz file (that's optional. You need it to read the book obviously, but you can also connect an image of the cover to it, for instance. Or you don't add anything at all). Racks (bookshelves) Now comes the main part of the app: The bookshelves (which I call racks because it's shorter). You can create as many as you want. Inside a rack, you can add rows and items. A row can be a title, an image, a nested rack (when you tap on it you jump into another rack)or an item holder in which you can place items. An item can be a title, an image, a notes block, a color block or a comic book item. There are two variations for comic book items: There's a cover item and a spine item. A cover item shows the cover of a comic book, whereas a spine item only shows its title (like a real spine on a book). You can connect these two item types to a comic book file inside your file browser. Each comic book file can be connected to as many items as you want. Each item has its own reading progress of the connected comic book. Everything inside a rack can be easily added and moved via drag&drop. I've put a lot of work into this system. I had to build it from scratch because iOS' Drag&Drop feature don't quite work in this case. Therefor, it's not perfect but I'm constantly improving it.
Customisation While there are quite a few item and row types that let you design your own individual rack, I've also added a system to change the appearance of each of the item/row types. There's a template editor where you can change the look of them. Over time, I will add more and more customisation options to the template editor.
Importing Comic Books Currently, the app supports the pdf and cbz file format (and technically also zip because cbz is just a renamed zip archive). I will add support for more in the future. There are two ways of importing files:
Using the File Importer: Copy the files into the documents directory of your iPad (using iTunes File Sharing). Then, open the File Importer inside Comic Book Collector.There, you can simply import those comic books.
Using iOS' Drag&Drop feature inside the file browser: Inside the file browser, simply drop the files and they will be imported. Alternatively, click on a comic book file and drop it onto the marked area to connect them.
One important distinction
Originally, this was not supposed to be a "tracker" app to track your (probably physical) collection. It was supposed to be the actual place for your digital comic book collection. The place where you put the comics, display them, arrange them and read them. The "what do I have in my collection"part was not the main idea of the app. It rather is the "placing my comic books inside a digital bookshelf that I created"aspect*.* However, I realise that this could be a nice addition to the functionality of the app. The foundation is already there, and I'm going to work towards it, because there is one major flaw in the concept of my app: Most publishers don't offer pdf/cbz versions of digital comic book purchases. You can only read them inside their own applications. So you need to have some way of tracking those comic books as well. You can already do that in the app, basically, but it still needs improvement.
Let me know what you think. If you have ideas or any kind of feedback, feel free to send me a mail.
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