Hasta La Gadget!

Dec 22

MyComics for iPad is Handsome, Minimal Comic Reader

Posted in: ipad, Tablets and E-Readers, Today's Chili

It’s been a while since any worthy comic-book viewers have come along for the iPad, but myComics is most definitely worth a look. The gold-standard for a long time has been ComicZeal, with its huge feature list. Unfortunately, ComicZeal still suffers from a horrible page-turn feel (very important in a comic reader) and an equally lame file viewer.

MyComics to the rescue! It’s minimal in terms of features, but it gets almost everything right. Fire it up and you’ll see a lovely, full-screen bookshelf view, a lot like iBooks, with your comics lined up to browse. And in this view you can do what comic-nerds love best: organize. Sadly, you can’t drag folders into iTunes and have them show up as collections, but you can make collections from within the app. You can also edit an “author” field, along with “publisher” and “title”. Multiple “authors” can be set, so you can add artists and writers, and even letterers if you like.

In bookshelf view, comics are sorted by date added, but in collection view, they appear to be ordered by title. Comics are added through iTunes or via a built-in web-server, which lets you adds books with your browser.

Then we get to the reading part. MyComics works fine. You can tap or swipe to flip pages, and they turn as you’d expect, not with the exaggerated elasticity of ComicZeal. MyComics does take one great feature from ComicZeal, though: it keeps the zoom level between pages, so when you flip, you are sent to the top of the next page, only still zoomed-in.

The in-page zooming is off, though. Pinch-out anywhere on-screen and it zooms from the center into the page, not into the part under your fingers. This is so weird I can only assume it is a bug waiting to be fixed. But then, I thought that about the page-turning in ComicZeal too.

If you’re a comics geek, you should check this out. It will cost you $4.

MyComics [iTunes]

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