Manage your manga

Rick Murray has released an update a couple of updates to Manga, his application for reading high quality Japanese literature Japanese comics from mangareader.net.

Version 0.37, released on the 16th August, saw a rewrite of the window positioning code (to eradicate some “weird glitches and nonsense”), and the addition of a gag to the ‘busy’ window to stop it beeping. It also gained some UI enhancements, such as the ability to Adjust-click the manga description (even if it’s currently blank) to open the description page in a browser, and there is now a bookmarking facility via a toolbar button – although there is only one bookmark, specific to the source material, but it does mean you can bookmark a specific page in that material.

Version 0.38, released the day after, gains a library facility via a secondary application directory called MangaLib. Clicking ‘Add to Library’ on the manga reader window should allow Manga to store your selected comics for offline reading, as well as allowing you to start reading without the delay of image fetching. This version also brings with it an improvement to the fetcher multitasking, and some related fixes.

Version 0.37 is available from !Store and via Rick’s home server (which may be offline in some circumstances). Version 0.38 is only available from the latter.

In an email about the new version, Rick also mentioned that he’d dropped “an annoying teaser message” on the RISC OS Open forum. I’m not a manga-reader, nor therefore a Manga-user so I can only guess as to what he means, but looking at his post announcing version 0.38, he mentions “looking in the big list of manga for H → Hyakumanjou Labyrinth.” A quick trial run of the application shows that the big list, found by clicking menu over the application’s main window, is divided up into alphabetised submenus (and some of these are themselves quite long) – I wonder, therefore, if Rick is hinting about short-cut keys to go straight to individual submenus? Or if I’m completely misreading things that might be obvious to someone who does read the material or use the application?

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