Comic books, or Manga in Japan, is my favorite thing since I’m a child, I love to collect comic books, and every little friend shares their collection, eating snacks, discussing the plot, arguing which character is more powerful…What a happy childhood ~~😗
I bought an iPad pro in 2019, I convince my self that I will use it for academic purpose but damn me, it just becomes my movie player 🤫
One day I’m really run out of my movie list and decide to read some comic books on it, then I found most of the comic viewer software in AppStore doesn’t suit my requirements:
- Open DRM-free comics directly(ZIP, CBZ, RAR, CBR…).
- Import comics from my PC, NAS.
- Only extract the required images from the archive file, not all of them.
- Optimized layout for different kinds of comic books.
- Correctly handle nested files so I don’t have to organize them by myself.
- …
So I told my self:
Why not learn some iOS development skills, and make your own comic viewer?
And here it comes, the KedaManga, my first iOS app dedicated to reading comics.
Basic features
Just like many comic viewers, KedaManga supports some functions naturally.
Read mode: Page by page, or continuous.
Read direction: Left to Right, Right to Left, Top to Bottom, any way you want :)
Image pre-process: KedaManga will split a big image into two small ones(Portrait mode).
or merge two small images into one(Landscape mode)
Nice page curl animation
A nice page-turning effect that makes you feel like reading a real book.
Access comics on servers
KedaManga is designed to make reading comics easier, not just about the way of displaying them, but also the way you get them.
It allows you to fetch your comics from WebDAV, Samba, FTP, and iCloud server.
Your comic collection can store on Mac, Windows, or Linux computers, KedaManga can access them directly!
Upload comics through HTTP server
You can also share comic books by starting a local HTTP server:
Other devices can open this address in the browser, and upload/download resources.
It’s really handy!
Read directly on the server
Developing KedaManga gives me a chance to really understand how some file formats works, ZIP, PDF, RAR…. and my favorite format among them is ZIP.
The guy who invented ZIP is a genius, I spent a lot of time understanding the ZIP file format specification, then I finally realize why ZIP is the most popular archive format across the internet, you can preview the ZIP content without download the whole archive!
Here is how a ZIP file looks like from technical pov:
As you can see each file in the ZIP is positioned one after another, and there is a central directory at the end of the ZIP which told you the offset & length of each individual file.
With this info and a server that allows you to download only a dedicated part of a file(WebDAV or Samba server for example), I implemented a “Stream” reading mode:
As you can see, a 2GB ZIP file in the server can be open almost instantly, and while you are browsing pages, KedaManga will download the dedicated data for these pages only, which saves you a lot of bandwidth and disk storage!
File formats
Currently, KedaManga supports these file formats:
ZIP, RAR, PDF, CBZ, CBR, EPUB, Folder
And you can nest them too! Put ZIP inside RAR, then put RAR into a folder? No problem, KedaManga can take care of them for you, pan from the left edge of the screen and you will see a nice navigation menu.
Image formats
KedaManga currently supports images with JPG, JPEG, PNG, GIF, APNG, WebP formats.
More are coming…
Password book
Inputting passwords could be the most annoying thing in the world, it’s getting worse when you need to do them on mobile 🤬!
KedaManga can’t help you avoid passwords, but it can help you remember them 🤓, and every time you open a new comic book that requires a password, KedaManga will try all these passwords first before asking you to input a new one!
Keyboard Control
With the new iPad release, it’s getting common that people connect and use a keyboard with iPad devices, here are some useful shortcuts you can use while in KedaManga:
The「Zen」mode
When you are reading a real book, you may lay down in bed, play some soothing music, drink hot coffee, or something else…
Now I can’t buy you a coffee when you’re reading comics on KedaManga 🥴, but I do develop a 「Zen」mode to help you concentrate on reading:
I hope you will enjoy it, and more sound and effects are in development.
App store link
The End
KedaManga is my first iOS app, though it did take a lot of my spare time, I will keep it limit-free for a while.
If you love comics and want to give it a try, I would be more than happy to hear your feedback! 🥰🥰🥰