iComic v3.0 source code

xmlguy — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 14:16:44 GMT

I'm making the full iComic source available, including the Dashboard version, which was not published previously.

For those of you that are into Objective C and want to tinker with it, here it is.

I confess to being a beginner when it comes to Cocoa and Objective C, so the gurus out there may find a million things wrong with what I did here.

I even had big plans after the Dashboard version to make a version that looked/behaved like iPhoto. I also toyed with making the plugins support auto-update off the server, so a server would support an available plugins list, and have the list of possible subscriptions be pulled from that list. At that point, moving to a full server-based subscription model becomes trivial (where the plugin runs on the server, and for any given comic on any given day, we figure out the image url one time).

Alas with all of this, my ambition and product vision was in no way matched by my ability to translate it into Cocoa code. I guess that means I'll have to stick with .NET after all.

iComic 3.03

xmlguy — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 23:20:18 GMT

The first version of iComic is v3.0, as it is really just the next major version after iBert v2.1... It is a complete rewrite of iBert, but it has so much user feedback rolled into it, it didn't seem right to have it go back to v1.0

iComic 3.0 Features

Easy to use interface, works like Apple's Safari browser.
Subscribe to your favorite web comics, then collect the latest strips from them.
Easy to use tabs to flip between the comic you subscribe to.
Open architecture, supports plugins written in the Perl language.
You can find iComic plugins at our YahooGroups forum.
A plugin may return a single image or a whole set (such as from an archive page)
Windows sizes to fit the comic you're viewing.
Add comments to a strip, then find a strip based on your comments.
Add strips you like to a list of Favorites.
Drag-and-drop from iComic directly into other applications such as Mail.
Only downloads the strips if you are connected to the Internet — quite modem-friendly.
Windows and menus available in English and Japanese, with more languages to follow.