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The State of iComics – Jan 2014 |

The State of iComics – Jan 2014

Since it’s been a fair few months since I’ve put out a new update for my little comic reader app project, I thought I’d quickly do an update on what stage it’s at.

At the moment, I’m aiming for finishing iComics version 1.1 (Shiny new picture above).
Some of the major features I plan to have in version 1.1 include:

  • Removing the ‘Rate this App’ spam
  • Moving the ‘alerts’ to a dedicated news menu
  • Comic hotjumping
  • Grouping comics into collections
  • Putting a passcode on collections
  • Displaying comics in a large thumbnail grid view
  • Being able to crop pages for thumbnails (as well as social media)
  • Pulling down on a comic to close it.

I’ve been spending the past few months working on a lot of these features, but they’re all not ready for daily use just yet.

Unfortunately, a bit of a snag has come about. In December, Apple announced that all iOS apps submitted after February 1 need to ‘optimized’ for iOS 7. What this means in practice is that we can no longer submit our apps in iOS 6 mode, and must submit them with the new iOS 7 mode (and all of the UI changes within).

While I was hoping to have all of these features finished in time for the iOS 7 cutoff, with the necessary testing and localisation to go on top of it, I don’t think it’s going to happen. And while I was briefly thinking about dumping it on the App Store as-is, it’s possible I could ruin the app experience for a lot of people.

So, for the time being, I’m going to be looking at the fastest way of converting the app over to iOS 7. I’ve already started building a ‘theming’ system that can configure the app’s UI based on what iOS version is being run in, so if I make sure to use a lot of the default Apple UI styles, it SHOULDN’t be take too much time. In any case, I’m hoping to have most of it done by the end of February.

tl;dr The next version of iComics is coming soon folks! Thanks a lot for your patience! 🙂

(iPhone 5c artwork by Pixeden )