The Appcast

The Appcast #55: February 28th, 2010 – Comic Book Reader Apps

This week’s show: Comic Book Reader Apps. We take a look at apps that let you read comic books on your iPhone.

Episodes can be downloaded by clicking the Episodes tab above.

Intro Music: Borderline D.U. Mix from Mixter Two – I Don’t Know What I’m Doing by Brad Sucks.

Show Outline:

Introductions
Listener Feedback
News: Apple’s Disappearing and Re-appearing Explicit Category and other Explicit Pulls
News: Plants vs. Zombies breaks sales records only to be dethroned by Final Fantasy
News: ngmoco buys Freeverse
Notable Apps of the Week
Core Topic: Comic Book Reader Apps

New Apps Discussed on February 28th, 2009:

BattleBotz Lite – Free Lite version or $1.99 – Re-experience old school Amiga gaming with this hex-based, sci-fi strategy game that reminded Bob of Battle Tech from his dorm days. There’s different bots to use, different weapons to use, and several maps to experience. It’s not enough to stand out, but it is a solid.
Transformers G1: Awakening – $4.99 - Take the Transformers license and apply it to the Advance Wars strategy game formula (iPhone gamers will recognize UniWar to be a similar game) and you’ve got the latest Transformers game from Glu. The presentation definitely looks great with a 2D/3D presentation of the playing field and 3D presentations of the battles between the Autobots and Decepticons. However, I just didn’t find it to be any more interesting than previous games of it’s kind, though I did like the added strategy of keeping your Transformer in vehicle or robot mode for added benefits to both modes and the fact that you only get one of each Transformer, so you have to be careful as to which Transformer you use for what purpose. There’s multiplayer, but it’s not online or Wi-Fi based, just pass the iPhone and play. The price is somewhat fair given the license, but I would find it a lot easier to swallow at $2.99. Fun for fans, but I feel like most won’t find the unique unit difference to be enough to stray from UniWar.
Doodle iCopter – $0.99 – A simple helicopter game in which you guide your helicopter along the screen to try and dodge the various obstacles thrown at you. It’s solid, quick, and pull up.
NASA Lunar Electric Rover Simulator – Free - NASA’s latest new and free app is kind of a disappointment. You get some information about the new LER, Lunar Electric Rover, and some pictures and 3D models. There’s a game, or simulation, mode in which you drive the LER around to different places to learn of it’s usefulness. However, the simulation is dull, slow, and just too plain to really hold much interest, though maybe some space fans will find it a little bit more cool? Even though it’s free, it just feels like too little to be worth the time.
Web App Launcher – Free – Collect your web apps into one place in order to launch straight to the app. Comes preloaded with Gmail, Flickr, and other various sites (including ones you can enter such as Google Voice). It’s like a quick bookmark listing, though it is ad-supported. Useful if you use a lot of the web apps.
Rehearsal – Free - If you’re preparing to be an actor for a school play or even a real actor, Rehearsal can give you an easy and professional app that manages your scripts for auditions or real practice. It’s actually been tested by actors on well-known primetime shows like Lost and Desperate Housewives. What you get is a way to maintain PDFs and Word documents, break down the scenes, and take notes on the script with highlight markers. You can even black out your lines and only reveal them should you have forgotten them when you’re practicing by yourself (kind of like a way to test your memorized lines). There’s a function to record yourself performing the lines as well so that you can email the MP3 as part of your audition (this is mainly for voice actors). I found it to be slick, unique, and useful. I even wonder if this would work well for people trying to prepare business or academic presentations.

App of the Week:

PUSH UPS + - (Bob) – $0.99 – An all-in-one app that keeps you concentrated on your exercise routine. The app is intended to scale the number of body reps you will do as you continue to use the app so that you can eventually reach your goal of being able to perform X number of body reps. It is especially useful if you have to pass a body rep count test in the future.
Colorbind Lite - (Kevin) - Free or $1.99 Premium version – I know I’m a bit late on this one, but it’s so good I needed to make sure we put some attention on it. Color Bind is a game, though it’s a casual game that can appeal to all audiences. You roll and fold colored strips of paper over some specified dots and you need to be able to cover the dots correctly. The challenge comes from unraveling one paper roll and folding it over other paper rolls without covering the wrong dots. It’s hard to explain, but easy to understand when you actually try it out. This lite version only has 10 levels, though they really show you what the mechanics are and what kind of game you’re getting. I found the game to be quite challenging and definitely unique in term of logic puzzles on the iPhone. Check it out if you’re a puzzle fan.

Silly Apps of the Week

What the Truck? - (Bob) – Free – Enter the numbers from the side of a truck so you can figure out what’s on board.

Haribo - (Kevin) – Free - If you speak German, then this app is for you! If you like Haribo gummy bears, maybe you’ll like it too? You get a pack of virtual Haribo gummy bears and try to “eat” them as fast as possible by emptying them from the bag. You do so by shaking and turning the iPhone to move the little bears out of the torn corner. Simple, cute, and definitely making me hungry for some gummy bears, it’s nothing special though you might want to check it out for the novelty.

Core Topic: Comic Book Reader Apps

Comic Books are becoming a big part of the iPad future, but just how well do they fare on the iPhone? Of course there’s manga, so we looked into a bit before actually getting into standard Western comics. From those apps, it seems like they split into apps that read your own archived comic book files and apps that serve up downloadable comics from the app’s individual store. We take a look at the different means that you can use to read your comic books on your iPhone and draw some conclusions on what you’ll need.

iComic comic reader – $0.99 – Worked fairly well in terms of loading up your archived comic book files and maintaining the files, but it doesn’t serve up the reading bit very well since you have to do all the zooming yourself, which can be cumbersome on such a small screen. Very simple.

GO! Manga + – $1.99 – Accesses online sites that serve up scanslated manga. Initially there were crash problems, but they have been fixed. There’s a lot of titles available, the ability to keep track of where you were, and rotation lock, though reading was still limited to how well you could manage zooming.
Manga Bear – $1.99 - I decided to check out a Manga-specific reader (Japanese Comics) and found that MangaBear provides a lot of great navigation and presentation in terms of downloading manga chapters to your iPhone. This is a grey area in that these are fan-translated scans of Japanese copywritten material though. The index of titles is huge and you can easily search and navigate to find what you want to read and put into a download queue. The quality of the pages varies based on what scanslation group worked on the mange you’re reading though generally it is readable. MangaBear also keeps track of what you’ve read from your downloaded chapters, though it doesn’t keep track of your position unless you add a bookmark. Navigation and zooming are tough though since you need to be in a “zoom mode” in order to zoom and while you’re in that mode, you can’t change pages. It’s a great resource of manga, but I just wish the reader portion would be improved. I had a couple of crashes and issues with downloads not showing up.
Comic Zeal Comic Reader – $3.99 – If you really want your archived comic book files (CBR, CBZ, RAR, ZIP, PDF) on your iPhone, then Comic Book Zeal probably does the best job of keeping your iPhone’s comic book library synced with the one on your computer. There’s a separate desktop application that converts (actually downscaling) your archived files to something that can be used with the ComicZeal app. The conversion is pretty quick, though you’ll be keeping a bunch of converted files on your desktop as well. The actual library maintenance is quite nice since you can categorize your series and see how many issues you have or where you are in terms of an issue. There’s also a quick reference to recent issues and the ability to pick up older Golden Age or free comic book issues. The use of the app is limited to whether you have your archived comics already though, unless you want to read a bunch of very old comic books. Sync-ing is smooth, effortless, and quick, though it’s an additional step beyond your usual iPhone to iTunes sync. Navigation of each book is what you would expect with the usual swipe for next page, pinch to zoom, and a navigation bar at the bottom (which includes the ability to quickly go to a place further in the book). The zooming is also dictating by a hard tap that can bring you to a certain portion of the page, though it’s not perfect. There’s also an ability to lock orientation, a favorite of ours for any app. If there’s anything that feels short, it’s the zoom, though that’s going to be limited since you provide the books and there’s no logic for seeing where the zooming would be optimal.
Pull Lists – $1.99 - Also a comic book reader where you must supply your own comic book archive files. It also requires a separate desktop app, though it allows syncing over Wif via Bonjour. With Pull Lists, you don’t need to convert any files, though the large archive files will take up space on your iPhone. The desktop app looks a lot like iTunes and is based on dragging-and-dropping. It’s simple and quick, though navigation is more simple as just next page buttons, pinch to zoom, and auto-rotate based on accelerometer.
Comic Reader Mobi – $14.99 - Expensive, but creative and clever. This is another app that lets you load up your archived comic book files, but it includes the missing feature all others need: a smart lens that automatically looks for the proper text bubbles and boxes to zoom in on those areas so you can read and still get a good context on the picture and page as a whole. It works fairly well, except when you sometimes see the image compression around the edges of the text. However, there’s a lot of adjustments you can make to the lens, which seems to be the big selling point anyways. I’ll be honest in that I only checked out the Lite free version where you get a free comic to read and check out the lens feature, so I can’t really say much about the synching or much about the library presentation. I will say though, that the lens feature is incredibly cool and the one step that others like Comic Zeal and Pull Lists really need. At one point this was a $4.99 app, so here’s hoping we see that price come down again.
iVerse Comics – Free - This store-based comic book reader is limited to what you can download from the app’s listing, though everything here is official and proceeds do go to the publisher. Reading is a bit tricky in that only in landscape mode can you actually go through the comic with all text and panels zoomed so you can read what’s going on (portrait leaves pages intact without any zooming controls). It’s quite nice and everything is formatted properly, though sometimes I don’t want to be stuck in landscape mode because it’s hard to hold with one hand. Your comic library is stored nicely in bookshelf view (think the upcoming iTunes book store or Delicious Library) or a list view. Store navigation feels like iTunes and the organization by series and publisher also helps make it easy to get around or know what might be available.
Panelfly Comics – Free - These guys have a big project in plan for the iPad, so I was surprised that I wasn’t too happy with the iPhone version. The presentation of your library is the best of all I’ve seen and it really makes you feel like all the images pop, but the actual zooming and reading navigation is a bit less immediate. There’s double-tap to zoom on a specific portion, and the app does a good job most of the time getting to a point where you can read the text, but the flow of how the image and text is presented is a bit awkward since things aren’t laid ahead with scripting. Navigation through each book is presented in a thumbnail gallery format which actually looks quite nice, though each thumbnail is real small and sometimes hard to distinguish. There’s also an additional view of the PanelFly news, though you need to sign up to view it. Overall, I wish the navigation had some improvement because this is a seriously professional app that just need to get the actual comic book reading part perfected.
Comics – Free – Simply my favorite comic book reader, though this one is also limited to what you can download from their store and for good reason. Comics, from the Comixology folks, actually has pre-scripted zooming that focuses in on the important parts of each panel and text in the manner you would read it in a real comic book. Just swiping brings me to each part that I need to see and it works beautifully in keeping everything comprehensive while making sure you only need to use one hand to read the entire thing. Slick, quick, and with a huge library, including support from Marvel and Image comics, this has been my favorite and will continue to be my favorite in terms of comic book readers that don’t involve using your own comic book files.