Hi everyone! I can’t believe 2015 is already nearly over! Jeez!

I thought I’d do a reeeeally quick update on where we’re at with iComics, and what the current goal is. 🙂

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Sorry about the last update being so long ago!

2015 has been absolutely ridiculous for me so far (In a truly good way, that is!).

Thanks to a talk I did on integrating Realm into iComics last year, I’ve started working for Realm, remotely from Perth. This has been an absolutely amazing experience so far, having learned a HUGE deal about how companies operate in Silicon Valley, as well as integrating with a team that operates in multiple time zones. The fact that this all came about as a result of my work on iComics is something I still haven’t managed to process yet. Truly awesome.

In any case, now all of the main excitement has started settling down (Although not for long I’ll wager!), I’ve been looking at the next batch of features and upgrades that iComics needs. Since I’ve been getting quite a few emails asking about updates to the app, it seems a bit of a status update is already long overdue. Here’s some of the major points on we’re were at right now. 🙂

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Blimey. Sorry it took so long to write this! For the last two weeks, it’s been a flurry of updating the site, sending out press releases, and responding to a mountain of user feedback, so I finally got the time to write the release announcement. XD

So! Done! After 521 days since the last update, iComics v1.1 was approved by Apple and made live on the App Store. 521 days is an absolutely ridiculous amount of time between updates to be sure, and I plan to a post-mortem of what happened at some point, but hopefully with the new look and feel, coupled with the new features, most people can agree it was worth the wait. I’ve already started getting some reviews in, and so far, they’ve all been resoundingly positive. Thanks a lot everyone!

Here’s some of the new stuff that’s included in iComics v1.1:

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Blimey. It’s been a fair  little while since my last post on iComics’ development. Since starting the crazy task of re-designing the entire app to the iOS 7 design aesthetic in February this year, I’ve already started to tease a few pictures of my progress here and there along the way, mainly uploading them to my Instagram account. But after a few emails from people asking for some proper clarification, I figured an actual blog post of the current progress might be best.

Alrighty. So here’s how iComics v1.1 is going! 🙂

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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:

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Blimey, I’d been so busy working on iComics these past few days that this completely slipped my mind!

On the morning of September 25, 2012, Apple approved version 1.0 of iComics and made it visible on the App Store. iComics has now been officially available to the public for over a year. Holy crap, that was fast. XD

If I am able to reflect on iComics and its development right now, all I have to say is this: this project has been hard. Bloody hard. Possibly the hardest one I’ve undertaken yet. For something you’d think as simple as opening up an archive file of images and rendering them to the screen, it’s actually WAY complex than what I was ever anticipating when I first opened the project in November 2011.

The app is a constant psychological battle with the user to try to distract them from noticing any load times, at the same time, being a technological battle of co-ordinating multiple concurrent threads, ensuring the next set of pages is ready to go… hopefully without some kind of conflict crashing the app. If anything, this has made me appreciate all of the other comic reader apps on the App Store as well, as they would have all gone through the same thing.

Ultimately, when it came to the design and feature-set of iComics, I’ve ended up pretty much choosing the hard route for every design challenge I’ve faced. I’ve written pages of custom UI code for a tailored look and feel, I’ve re-implemented Apple code from later versions of iOS so it’s backward compatible down to iOS 5 (So I can PROUDLY say that iComics supports ALL iPad models 😀 ), and I’ve spent months developing a multi-threaded algorithm that can cache pages of a comic, simultaneously as the user is reading through it. For each of these things, there was always an easier solution, but I firmly believed that by taking the time and effort to perfect each of them (well… getting them to stop crashing), iComics will have become a great app that users will feel is better than the rest. 🙂

On the App Store, I couldn’t be more happy with the current ratings of iComics. It’s more or less 4.5 – 5 stars in most countries, with many glowing reviews. In any case, simply knowing that I made an app that most people agreed wasn’t a complete waste of their money is enough to put me over the moon. XD

At this point, however, iComics is absolutely no where near finished. While I was really hoping to implement collections quickly, I spent the majority of this year tracking down critical bug reports users were reporting (Mainly involving certain comics loading pages incorrectly, corrupted RAR files, and solid archives breaking) and having what new features I’ve added ruin the threading algorithm again. And on top of that, trying to work out a new design for iComics after Apple dropped iOS 7 on us. XD

In any case, while I can’t promise when the next version of iComics will drop, I can definitely promise that I will not give up until iComics is the most awesome DRM-free reader on the App Store.

Thank you very much to all of iComics’ users! I’m glad you’re enjoying it!