Take a look at the video demo below. None of the features look anything NEARLY as cool as the iPhone ComicReader app (now called Infurious) featured in the previous post, but maybe it’s too early to tell.
Looks like the competition is heating up! Let’s watch Clickwheel, ComicReader (Infurious Comics) and iVerse go head to head in the battle for best iPhone comic book reader! This is the best scenario for iPhone users because it will force these developers to aim for the best or they’ll die on the vine.
The developers at Blue Pilot software have created a comic book reader application especially for the iPhone that will allow cartoonists and comic book creators to create and distribute iPhone comics, and offer them for sale as apps through the iTunes store!
According to the Blue Pilot Software website, “Comic Reader is our generic comic book reader. This allows any indie comic writer and artist to set up and publish their comics to Apples AppStore. Having the ability to view not only the final content but also, pencil drawing, line artwork and colour layers.
This application has been specifically designed and written for the iPhone and iPod Touch and as such lends itself to the full experience and ease of use synonymous with Apple’s technology.”
The demo video below shows the power of this app with the iPhone comic called Murderdrome. With the possibilties on display in the video, this could be a great app for reading comic books on your iPhone, as well as for creating rich and unique comic book content especially for the iPhone. As a cartoonist and a comic book lover (and a rabid iPhone user), I’m pretty excited about this one!
iPhone Comic Book Reader app from Blue Pilot Software
I just found out about this and I’m gonna find out more as soon as I can. But in the meantime watch the demo video below of the upcoming Murderdrome comic book as viewed on Blue Pilot’s ComicReader application for iPhone.
The iPhone Manga Converter from MangaWare is an interesting app that lets you prep comic files on your computer that you can upload to a web server and view anytime on your iPhone.
The process is very clever, but hard to explain…that’s why they’ve included a demo video on their website. Looks kinda freaky. I tried it out last night and after a short learning curve, I was able to read some old comics on my iPhone.
iPhone Manga Viewer application
The process works very nicely as long as you have your own web space available for uploads. Basically, the software allows you to turn the pages of your comic book scans into individual little web pages that are automatically optimized exactly for the iPhone. Once the conversion process is done, you need to upload the folders to your personal web server using FTP or your web host’s file manager. Once that’s done, you (or anybody else you share the url with) can type the url of your web space directory right into your iTunes web browser like this:
http://yourdomain.com/folder
The interface allows you to view a little index page where you can see all the pages of the story.
This is the index page as you see it on your iPhone.
From there you can start reading at any page, and use little icons in the screen corners to go forward or backward through the pages.
A more advanced option allows you to chop up the story into individual panels which will fill the screen space when tapped. This is a good idea, but I was not able to get the program to auto-detect where the panel shapes are…probably because the pages I have scanned in are in color and not as high-contrast as the pages used in the software example.
Take a look at the demo video and see what you think…
