Hi! Congratulations on the huge milestone update for Panels. This is Joe, the guy with an 860GB library on a 2018 12.9” iPad Pro. When I updated and launched Panels, it did the “You have a very large library, this my take awhile” message and then I could see titles flashing by at blinding speed at the bottom of the screen. But it only took less than a minute before the Library presented itself (I expected longer because my collection numbers in the thousands), and scrolling was very laggy, but I expected that - figuring it was rebuilding it’s library of cover icons. I scrolled all the long way to the bottom, lagging all the way and noticing empty collections here and there, but expecting the lag to vanish and the random empty collections to appear full once I’d scolled the entire length and rebuilt the cover art icons). This was not the case. The behavior remained. So I quit the app (quit all apps, actually) and rebooted the device. This had no effect on lagginess or on those empty collections.
I have made a little 4 minute YouTube video showing you the app experience that resulted from upgrading so that you can make an informed assessment of how this upgrade affects people with vast libraries (or how it affected me, at least). The video is located here: Panels Dysfunctionality - YouTube
Thank you so much Joe. Thanks for the video.
We tried contacting you a few months ago to test the new version with your library before releasing it, but you must have not seen our messages
We don’t have 900GB of comics or a 1TB iPad
But we will try to simulate you case, maybe with smaller comics.
Could you share how many comics you have in total and how many folders?
Approx 31,600 titles in 905 collections. I know I won’t live long enough to read them all but it is really fun to create an ocean to swim in. I am planning to trade up to a 2Tb iPad in the coming year and my current collection will fill it. I hope you can make Panels function on that scale.
I’d be happy to grab Testflight off the app store and be your guinea piglet.
Hi - I’ve spend a about a few hours with Panels today kicking the tires, and this is what I can tell you so far:
The laggy scrolling you saw in my video is now smooth. That bug is squashed.
The seemingly random empty collections (that were full of comics prior to this major upgrade) are still empty. 35 of them. I am curious to know what happened to the files. They were stored on-device and I’m concerned there are now invisible orphaned files taking up storage. I’ve made a list of the empty collections so I can determine if what I am looking at is the result of a one-time malfunction that happened when I launched the new library system for the first time and the state remains the same, or if the set of voided collections changes, increases, or decreases.
Typing even a single character into the search field freezes the app. Sometimes it crashes before I lose patience and force quit it. I’ve yet to see it unfreeze. Will do further testing to see if I can make it, in time, unbind itself and display the typed characters. I’ll use a stopwatch for this.
When a comic is open onscreen, frequently gesturing for a page turn, close, or a tap to view all pages makes the app unresponsive (without executing the action). After several seconds of unresponsiveness the comic will close and return me to the library (a sort of mini-crash). I will gather data on what percent of the time this happens.
When a comic is open onscreen (and the aforementioned bug does not occur). Tapping to see the row of pages reveals missing pages - gaps - in the row. This happens frequently but not always. These pages are not actually missing and can be read. (see screenshot). Again, I will gather data on what percent of the time these gaps happens.
Occasional taps/scroll-swipes in the library go unnoticed by the app, simply trying again works.
Occasionally opening a collection reveals dotted outlines instead of cover art within. Closing and reopening solved.
A long-standing itty-bitty bug that would bother only me is: One-page comics randomly show as read. Some do. Some don’t. Choosing “Mark as Unread” has no effect. I realize that one-page comics are the province of obsessives like me that like to put spacers with text on them to delineate the area of the library that is devoted to, say, underground comix, but it’s how I organize and even now that I can do collections within collections, I am sure I will still be using this organizational method to some extent (for example, it’s very useful for denoting complex reading orders: telling you to stop here and go read something else in another collection and come back - is just one of many uses this organizational technique has). I use the green/purple theme and random purple lines under these single-page .cbz markers is so annoying I have to forego showing reading progress, which is a big fat bummer. If you could fix this for little ‘ol me, I would be most grateful. (I turned reading progress back on for the screenshots so you can observe this annoying phenomenon and understand why it peeves me so).
Also, maybe I’m just missing something here, but I could not determine how to move a collection made within a collection back out to the main library. While playing with the new nested collections feature I buries some comics three levels deep and cannot find it within the UI to redeploy the deepest collection to the top level library.
I’ve given you a lot to unpack in the meantime I’ll continue to look for issues. This site only lets me upload 5 screenshots and there’s more so I put them on my server.
Now that Panels is more or less functioning correctly for me, I’m wondering if you could tell me the fate of my missing comics. I have 35 collections that are empty but should be full of comics. I know I could replace them with duplicates I keep on my Mac, but I’m concered that the files still exist and have become orphaned and invisible, taking up storage on the iPad. The emptey collections have not changed during use (no new emptys, no return of missing issues). This state of affairs was the result of the first upgrade that introduced the revamped library system. Any insights appreciated. Thanks -Joe
I checked all Panels’ collections titles, the iPad’s files app, and iCloud, and also connected the iPad to my mac and clicked “iPad” under loctions in the finder window sidebar (which brings up the sync screen), hit the files tab into the place where it lists every app on the device and came up empty. There was neither a folder within Panels there our outside of it in the main list of apps. I tried to think of everything, but I may not have looked in the right place, where would this folder be found? -Joe
Using the demo version of iExplorer, I was able to dig a little deeper, and while I did not find a folder called “Lost+Found,” I was able to note that this app displays the contents a normal collection differently from a collection that appears empty in the library. You’ll see in the screenshot that the contents of the collection “Crush & Lobo” that the file’s icons show only the little arrow badge indicative of an alias and that their files sizes are measured in bytes. So I’m beginning to suspect that any cross referenceing I did (and I’ve done a lot of that), is now invisible. Some of cross-referencing will be easily restored - I know I’ll probably find the Crush and Lobo titles in the main Lobo collection, for example. But it’s the many many times I found an author featured in an anthology and crossreferenced that to his/her folder that will only be revealed by going through iExplorer with a tweezers for days to fully resore my collection. Is there a quicker way? Thanks. Screenshot attahced. -Joe
In other words, i suppose, is there a way ot make the aliases display their cover art. The migration seems to have not taken aliases into account. -Joe
Ah!! that is very useful!. Let me dig into this. We recently detected a flaw in our symbolic link implementation and they can break very easily. I think the problem is that they are broken and the app is not showing them because it can’t resolve the original file correctly.
Please do not delete the links or try to work around the problem. I think I might be able to fix it on our end.
We just released a new beta that adds a lot of changes regarding symlinks. I hope these changes will solve the issue you were having. The app now auto-fix the links and it should now appear on the Library.
Joe