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…
