Having used Panels for a bit, I have some feature ideas/requests that I think would make it even better of an application:
Split Page View
Some comic files, especially older ones, will have a full two-page spread for each individual image. It would be nice to have the option to split wide pages when reading in portrait mode.
Cover Selection
Similar to the above, some titles, including those on recent Humble Bundles, have first pages with full wrap cover art. It would be a nice option to pick either a select page in the comic file as the cover or a selected half of an image. The ability to select an external image would also be nice, but the first two are probably going to satisfy 90%+ of the cases where a non-default cover selection is needed.
I think the Split Page View options is interesting. We’ll give this a thought and see how can we implement it without complicating the UI too much.
About the Cover Selection… we are not very sold on this idea. I understand the issue, but it’s actually the comic editor’s fault. It’s agains the CBZ/CBR standard to put anything other than the cover as the first image in the file. Full wrap covers, alternative covers, or other arts should appear after the cover or at the end of the file. We couldn’t automatically work this around in the app because there are landscape comics that would appear with the cover cut in half. So the only alternative, as you suggest is to provide some kind of UI to select the section of the cover you want to show, or allow you to select a different image/page.
We don’t want to add such amount of complexity to the app just to cover an edge case. It’s not just the development time, but having a piece of UI that only a small % of the users would use, on a small % or their comics.
Additionally, we conceived Panels as a content consumption app, not a content server. We assume that all the content inside the app is ephemeral, and you shouldn’t put a lot of effort in tweaking your library with such a fine grain detail.
Our recommendation is that you edit your comic files before adding them into Panels so they show the cover you want.
We’re planning to add support for defining a custom cover art for Collections though. (Probably without any UI inside the app)
I completely understand that cover image selection is a very niche thing, although I figured it was worth at least asking.
While I understand the application isn’t meant to be a long-term storage, it’s a bit annoying when one or two of the comics I add to read have “broken” covers. I even see this problem on comics from various Humble Bundles (and Kodansha should know better).
It’s not really like CBZ or CBR (or the other variants like CB7, CBT, etc) is a documented standard though. It’s just a normal archive file using a fancy extension that was popularized by CDisplay long ago. Perhaps there should be a formal spec, but there really isn’t one.
I do appreciate the response and I’ll just look into workarounds since it is a rare need anyway.