We will appreciate any feedback you might have after trying version 1.8, especially Panels View.
Thank you
Sharing a page works great. I tested few different comics and sent some photos back and forth between my iPad and iPhone.
Panel view works on some pages some of them get skipped completely. I tested doom patrol volume 1 I will link a video. I do think a zoom out feature after each panel view would help with knowing what page your on when a page is skipped you don’t know which panel is on what page.
I didn’t get to test iTunes file share yet. But I did want to ask in the future if you plan to support network sharing like smb or ftp I have a hard drive plugged into my home network and it would be nice to pull comics from that into the app.
Hey victor and dani, I installed the beta and gave it a few spins. First let me say that “panel view” is THE function I have been waiting for since I had my first (quite lame) comic app on my first iPhone (almost 10 years ago…), so big THANK YOU, it´s amazing you finally are doing it!
Great job, it´s working pretty well most of the time. My first thoughts and discoveries after a few days:
-
It would be great if the function remembers the last panel of a page when I disable panel mode to see the full page and then switch it on again. Right now I always have to start with the first panel of a page again.
Or maybe tapping on a specific panel (when in full page view still, just having switched on panel mode) could lead me to that panel directly? -
On the cover and the intro pages of a comic (with big title letters, little symbols etc) panel view goes a little too crazy, wanting to show single words of big written titles etc. Would be good if it leaves pages “untouched” if they are not actually contain panels. But I get the difficulty… in some comics some panels don´t have frames and it´s hard to distinguish.
-
I experienced that one time a (text) panel that is positioned right below a picture panel (but with an own frame) was not recognized and simply skipped by panel view. I exported that page for you (with the awesome new share function, thanks for that too!) and marked that text panel with light blue arrows (didn´t put a circle around it to keep the panel frames intact in case you might want to use it to test):
By the way: the share function was not evoking questions about copyright concerns? Not wanting to wake up sleeping dogs though 
Guess it´s just assumed that if you can import non DRM protected material into an app that there are no copyright concerns involved anyway…
I will continue testing and if I notice other things or have more suggestions I will be back here.
Wow, @silberschwarz, thank you so much for all the feedback!
-
You are absolutely right. This is something that is yet to be implemented, but we can add it to the next iteration. Anyways, you can pinch-in (as if you were zooming out) and the full page appears. We still have to polish that interaction a little bit, because sometimes the page jumps a few pixels, but it should be fairly usable. Nevertheless, remembering the last panel is a must.
-
Yup, we are aware of this issue. It’s pretty tricky to work around, as the panel detection is not based on finding framed content, but isolating zones of information. It’s a pretty complex process. We’ll probably write a blog post about how we do it when the feature is released. Anyway, the idea is to keep working on improving the detector accuracy. Hopefully, we’ll find a way to work around those cases.
-
Thank you so much for the attached page. It’s super helpful, as we can create a specific test for this page and tweak the algorithm to solve this problem without breaking other page models. Let’s see if we can fix this one
About the DRM and copyright-protected content… You have a point. But we think we are safe. We don’t offer any way of downloading or accessing copyright-protected content. And the couple of options that we offer to share content (share a comic, or share a page) are limited to a private and momentarily share. You can’t broadcast content.
Panels can’t either break any DRM protection, so we assume that our users are legitimate owners of the content they hold in the app. 
Please, keep sending us feedback. It’s really valuable 
I tested out issue 1 of William Gibson’s Alien 3 and it did each panel by panel perfect. I did notice this particular comic had white boarder around each panel I’m curious if that helped with the accuracy I’m not sure how the coding works. But I can upload the comic privately if you want to see what I mean
Hey Dani, I am glad my feedback was useful, and thanks very much for your enlightening answers 
I was testing a bit more (though not crazy much as I unfortunately don´t have as much time as I would like for reading comics haha) and found another page that got messed up:
Apart from PV showing almost every letter of the title separately, it showed that as the first view of the actual panels:
No idea why, as it has clear borders etc… but you can test yourself.
And while skipping through the panels of the first pages of that comic I noticed that I would really love to have the option to set a limit of zooming for the currently open comic, as some panels (especially those that are slim so they can fill a big part of the screen and get zoomed a lot) really get too much zoomed for the quality of the scan.
Sure, some comic´s scans are better and some are worse than others, but if it´s not crazy hi res (and resulting in taking a lot of space on the device and in RAM) it often gets zoomed to the point it´s not pleasant to watch anymore. So I would suggest a zooming limit (and maybe even saved for each comic in the library once you have set one).
Not sure how to implement it in the GUI in a clever way though…
The most intuitive way would be if one could set it when seeing a panel that is too zoomed. So maybe with a 3D touch command that evokes a zoom fader that sets the zoom maximum.
Another idea: An “auto detect zoom maximum” (detecting the quality of the panels, or just by resolution) would also be an option, that could just always be running by default. It´s maybe even easier than the manual fader.
What do you think?
That is great to know @Greg thanks for letting us know 
It sounds like that border helps. The panels detection separates areas of information (colors). The more contrast of colors between different areas, the more accurate the algorithm can “know” those areas should be two separate elements. You can send us any file that you want to panels at produktstudio dot com.
Thanks for the page and the feedback @silberschwarz. It is really helpful.
My guess is that the scan shadow on the left part of the page is causing the problem. It’s not easy to tell the shadow colour and content the page apart. That is causing the algorithm to connect the two left panels as one. On a different step of the algorithm, those two panels (now one) will be connected to the one at bottom right, because they outlined polygon intersect with it. As the left big panel is bigger than the other panel… the algorithm assumes that they belong together and merge them into one. Then, on the next step, it will merge the upper right one also.
Having this page is really valuable as we can use it to tweak the algorithm to avoid this. Also, we can play around to see if we can remove the scan shadow before analysing the page. 
thank you so much for sharing this.
About the excessive zoom: Yes! I completely agree with you. Is something that I’ve been thinking about lately. My idea to solve this problem is more close to your latest suggestion. Defining the maximum zoom factor a panel can support. That one should be pretty easy to implement. Instead of filling the full screen with a panel, that panel will appear centred and zoomed until its max.
I’ll try to add this to the next beta. Let us know what you think about it when you get to try it.
Thanks for the answer and the interesting insight again! Yes, it was only after submitting my feeback that I was also noticing that shadow, thinking this could be the culprit here. If it would be possible to eliminate false interpretation because of those things too it would of course be a big achievent - as I can imagine how difficult it is to code all of that and figure it out.
Looking forward to the zoom feature then! Thank you, I am glad you like the idea!
For obvious reasons I have not installed the beta version of the program because I suppose that when I do it I run the serious risk of the books that are already exported to the application being deleted, so my question is simple, when will be available version 1.8 of the program in the app store so I can be able to update and use the desired feature panels view and see how that works on my tablet device.
Really awesome new features! The share function doesn’t show up for me for some reason… but I love the panels view! However I feel like there could be some minor improvements and I also found some bugs.
- When in landscape mode, pinch-to-zoom centers on the right side of the screen.
- It would be nice to also change panels by swiping instead of tapping on the left or right side.
- The app crashed when double tapping on a page when in panels view.
- After tapping the PV button, I’d like to jump right into the comic and not have to wait for the info box to disappear (or is this a hidden loading screen…?)
- Some manga with colored backgrounds don’t get recognized at all (even though the panels are clearly visible and have high contrast) some examples
- Finishing a manga results in a crash when reading in right to left mode
- I’m having problems with manga that need to be sorted in logical order since pages are named so that it’s sorted like “1, 10, 11,…, 2, 20, 21…”
Additionally, an auto progress / page turn option where it goes to the next panel or page after a specified amount of time would be awesome!
Hey Dani,
just wanted to tell you that the automatically defined max zoom factor works really well, it´s great like that.
Same as stacph I noticed that the page sharing function disappeared in that new beta though.
Noticed that when wanting to share a few more examples of PV not detecting as desired with you.
Anyway, here are three more examples of different “circumstances” that made detction difficult obviously:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lyvfq4y6928wwqq/Panel%20view.zip?dl=0
Hi there,
Great app, the best comic book reader I could find on iOS. In the beta, I particularly appreciate the new panel view. It works mostly great except for issues similar to those already mentioned.
A couple suggestions:
-
A big usability improvement imho would be to implement a quick way to toggle panel view on/off. I mean (or did I miss something?), it is a bit cumbersome to use 3 taps to enable/disable panel view.
-
Unrelated to the beta, would it not be easier (from the user’s perspective) to use iCloud for synching instead of relying on third-party like Google?
Hello everyone,
I just wanted to say thank you to all of you for all the feedback we are receiving.
I just wanted to say that it is taking us a bit longer than expected to answer all your comments (we are a bit busy) but we read and take into account all of them. Version 1.8 is not only about Panels View but a few other new features. We are also changing the business model as well (don’t worry, if you have paid to remove adverts it will be this way forever).
I hope we can have a new beta version available very soon. Also, we will be answering all the feedback and suggestions.
Thank you again and don’t hesitate to send us more feedback!
1 Like
I just realized with the latest beta I can no longer import comics via web server. Even after I restore purchases or do the buy again it still shows those features as premium.
Edit. Had to air drop from iPad store version to iPhone beta version
Thank you @Greg for letting us know.
We were not supposed to push those changes yet, our fault. We are just finishing adding the last part of Panels 1.8, which is converting panels to a free/premium model.
We will try to publish another beta during this weekend or early next week so you guys can keep using it.
Sorry about that.