We just released a new Beta with some important redesigns.
Readers
We’ve redesigned the readers to make them snappier and more scalable in the future.
The animation to present the readers’ controls is now much faster, and the current page stays visible. Thumbnails are now at the bottom of the screen.
Additionally, when you change the reading mode, you can immediately see the effect without closing the menu.
The reading now section has also been redesigned. Currently reading comics now appear in a horizontal carousel with big covers.
The rest of the sections have also horizontal scrolling allowing us to show much more content than before.
The zoom lock has a new UI now. If you zoom-in, a new pop-up banner appears allowing you to lock/unlock the zoom.
We think it’s less intrusive and more intuitive.
Didn’t see it in the bottom of my screen!
I totally agree that it’s a lot better than the previous one (took my a while to find the previous one where you had to click on the top right without going to the thumbnail view )
Don’t know why I didn’t saw it, but it’s clearly a better presentation than before, kudos!
A couple (I hope) constructive remarks about the new zoom lock :
For a first time user, the button to lock the zoom perhaps doesn’t appears long enough (time to see it, and then to click it).
Even if it’s not directly related to the button, the biggest issue for me : if you lock the zoom, switch to another app, and back to Panels, the zoom will be back to the default unzoomed value, which can be quite irritating (IIRC, previous versions will keep the zoom at the same level while switching back and forth from Panels).
Unlocking zoom is perhaps a little more complicated than before (either un zooming a little, then clicking the button, or un zooming the full way), but not sure about that. It may just be the time to getting used to it!
For a first time user, the button to lock the zoom perhaps doesn’t appears long enough (time to see it, and then to click it).
100% agreed. We need to increase the timer.
Even if it’s not directly related to the button, the biggest issue for me : if you lock the zoom, switch to another app, and back to Panels, the zoom will be back to the default unzoomed value, which can be quite irritating (IIRC, previous versions will keep the zoom at the same level while switching back and forth from Panels).
This must be a bug. We’ll look into it.
Unlocking zoom is perhaps a little more complicated than before (either un zooming a little, then clicking the button, or un zooming the full way), but not sure about that. It may just be the time to getting used to it!
Yeah. The new zoom lock tries to be as interface-less as possible. We think it’s a pro-user feature, and most users won’t even use it. Given that it’s a pro-user feature, we believe that pinching to remove the zoom lock entirely is a good-enough™️ way to disable it. It will probably stay this way unless we find a better one. Let’s see what the rest think, but we are happy to keep it that way because it’s a feature that is not for the vast majority of the users. I hope that makes sense.
A couple other things (sorry to not put everything in the same post, I put them while I discover them) :
The zoom lock is now staying if we close/reopen the book. I think it’s new, and it’s absolutely great! But it allowed me to find a way to reproduce a preexisting, but quite hard to reproduce bug. If I lock the zoom, close the book and reopen it, on the first page swipe, the new page will be oddly small in the upper left corner of the screen. Swiping back and forth again, and all will be good again. Perhaps a little clearer with this video. Absolutely not a show stopper bug, just wanted to let you know.
While the new thumbnail view in the reader is an immense advancement compared to the old one, the solid black bars at the top and the bottom may be a little inelegant. Wouldn’t a little transparency makes them a little less hurting? That’s off course a totally personal point of view.
Again, I really love this beta build, and (for my usage), a huge improvement! Love to see you continuing to improve this already great app.
My main gripe is burring the reading direction to a submenu.
I do most of my reading in bed, before going to sleep so every time I turn to my left or right side I have to change the reading direction.
It would be great to have an option for both left and right side tap to go to the next page (as in now long dead ComicRack app) or at least some fast gesture to change reading direction in one tap.
I know that this is very niche use case but I can’t be the only one.
;- ) =
Suggestion - maybe change the aA icon to some kind of a wrench or something like that. My initial reaction was - why and how would I want to change font size in a comic.
First of all, thank you everyone for giving us such good feedback.
@foux thanks for the video. I definitely saw that bug some times but it was really hard to reproduce. I am glad we have found a way, we will look into it and try to fix it.
About the black bars, we will look into that too. We have made many changes over the last months to that screen until we were happy with the results. Initially it made sense for the top bar to be solid because there were many options and transparent bars were harder to read depending on the comic page. Now that it is much simpler it may make sense to add some transparency/blur back.
@pax0707 that’s interesting. The way we always think about RTL vs. LTR is for manga vs comic, not for navigational purposes. We will give it a thought about letting users decide which gestures should trigger moving forward/backward.
And about the icon, it is becoming a standard in reading apps to use the “Aa” (see Apple Books or Kindle), but I kind of agree that those apps have font controls in those menus and we don’t. We will reconsider that decision. Thank you for raising that point.
I am trying to replicate this but I can’t. @Dani pointed out that maybe you are rotating the device while you are in another app? (rotating the device resets the zoom lock).
We’d appreciate if you can give us a way to reproduce it so we can get it fixed. Thank you!
@foux by any chance are you using iOS 14?
I am still not being able to reproduce it which is weird… Tested in iPhone and iPad both in real devices and simulators (all using iOS 15 though).
Some small things like the Downloads progress indicator that @pax0707 reported was already in production and it’s unrelated to the changes in this version. So will be addressing them in the next release.
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