Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Art Book (Our New Comic Viewer!)

M

MadcapStudios

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 13, 2010
30
0
Website | Twitter | Facebook | Youtube

Hey guys!

Our app has been available now for a couple weeks, but I'd really love some feedback. :)

Info and demo videos can be found here:

www.ArtBookApp.com

Or:

Get it Now in the App Store!

The main thing to keep in mind is this:

It's currently $2.99 with four built-in comics. Soon we'll be pushing an update that will lower the price to free (no more built-in comics), and it will gain our In-App Book Store, with free and paid content from several big-name comic publishers, with new content every week.

If you want to try it out for free, we also have single-book apps as well. Here's "The Heretic" issue 1, by Joe Phillips, for free:

The Heretic - Issue 1

Screenshots:

1.png
2.png
3.png
4.png
5.png


Press Release:

San Diego, California, 01/11/10 - Madcap Studios, a software company that specializes in iPhone Software and free Web Apps, today announced that Art Book - a digital comic book viewer for the iPhone and iPod Touch that offers a viewing experience specially tailored for portable devices - is now available on the App Store.

"Our goal in developing Art Book was to create a mobile comic viewer that isn't limited by its mobile format, but can actually flourish because of it." said Eric Reedy, President of Madcap Studios. "Other comic viewers try, but due to poor inter-book navigation, disorienting page views, or hard-cropped panels, it's hard to say any of them come close."

"We knew that if we were going to build a comic viewer for any platform, it had to provide the best viewing experience possible regardless of display limitations. With that in mind, the answer was clear: Rather than require manual navigation, wouldn't it be great if the app could present the comic to you?" Nate Friedman, VP of Madcap Studios added, "Well Panel Mode does just that; automatically guiding readers from panel to panel, on a timer or at the touch of a button, from start to finish."

In addition to Panel Mode, Art Book also offers support for seamless two-page spreads, and features and a scrollable in-line page picker, all wrapped in an easy-to navigate user interface.

Art Book is available now on the App Store for $2.99, including four issues of Joe Phillips' "The Heretic" for a limited time. Also available are single-book releases of Art Book - distinguished by their [ArtBook] tag in the App Store, these lite apps include only 1 book, and are priced from free to $0.99. With the upcoming release of their 1.1 update, Art Book will be free, and include an In-App Book Store, turning your iPhone or iPod touch into a virtual comic shop. Single-book purchases can be consolidated into the full Art Book app at no cost, and new content from several major publishers will be added to the store each week.

For more information on Art book, please visit www.ArtBookApp.com, which just launched earlier today.
Click to expand...

Get it Now in the App Store!
 
Also I'll give out free promo codes to the first 5 people who ask for one! =)

(going to need an email address to send to :p)
 
MadcapStudios said:
Sent. :) You can delete the post with your email address in it now. I would do it through PMs, but there is a post minimum. Enjoy!

Edit: 4 left!
Click to expand...
Thanks so much. Hopefully this will be scalable also for the upcoming **cough** tablet.
 
bleeper said:
I'd like one too, please.
Click to expand...

Sent! Enjoy! :)

3 left!

jmccray said:
Thanks so much. Hopefully this will be scalable also for the upcoming **cough** tablet.
Click to expand...

We just finished a pass to ensure the whole app is resolution independent. Of course there's no way to REALLY know until us devs get a version of the Simulator.app that supports that screen size / OS variant. ;)
 
Added some screenshots to the first post.

Edit: Still have 3 promo codes left to give out. :p I can only assume the thread title isn't enthralling enough.
 
Metsfan7450 said:
I'd love to try it out if you have any promo codes left. I'll provide feedback and leave an itunes review. Can you download DC comics?
Click to expand...

Sounds good! :)

Currently it only includes the 4 built-in books. As I said in the first post, the in-app store, and access to additional content will be coming with the 1.1 patch.

As for DC comics, they haven't yet made the move to Digital.

Soon I hope. ;)
 
promo code?

oh cool! i saw this on youtube a month or so ago.... i'd love to give your app a shot.

[deleted] - Thanks! I'll have a look at it this evening when I'm off work.
 
Reveiw

Cool, I tried it out. Read through issue 1 and 2 of "The Heretic" so far. Pretty cool series. Well drawn! As for the app, you're right it's WAY better than any of the other comic readers. Even better than panelfly! I can't WAIT for you guys to push the store update so I can just use this app instead! :D
 
I'm just wondering whether Image comics has gone digital, it would be great to see a list of comic companies that support digital formats.

Feedback: I was thinking that Stanza like controls for pages would allow for a screen without controls, just the comic images. Tap the right side of the screen to go forward, the left side to go back, and the center to bring up the controls, although I guess that might be harder to implement if you've got zoom. I guess double tap could be zoom in and zoom out though. Just one idea.
 
Hes Nikke said:
Cool, I tried it out. Read through issue 1 and 2 of "The Heretic" so far. Pretty cool series. Well drawn! As for the app, you're right it's WAY better than any of the other comic readers. Even better than panelfly! I can't WAIT for you guys to push the store update so I can just use this app instead! :D
Click to expand...

Wow thanks! :D
 
Gokunama said:
Feedback: I was thinking that Stanza like controls for pages would allow for a screen without controls, just the comic images. Tap the right side of the screen to go forward, the left side to go back, and the center to bring up the controls, although I guess that might be harder to implement if you've got zoom. I guess double tap could be zoom in and zoom out though. Just one idea.
Click to expand...

We tried that before, but determined visible controls were the way to go for the following reasons:

• Consistency - You never want to be unsure of what tapping a part of the screen will do.

• Sense of orientation - We want readers to be able to take over manually at any time. It's easy to get disoriented on a comic page when you're being panned around quickly, and it's great being able to swipe and zoom around if you miss something, or forget what the first panel said for example.

It was really important to us that we retain the sense of physical Comic Book pages.

(Despite the buttons being on top of the content, we designed the panel mode controls to fade out to only 30% opacity when untouched for more than 2 seconds. When you tap one, it lights up to full opacity, before fading out again. We found this works really well, and is extremely unintrusive. When you hit "play", the panel mode buttons disappear entirely while the app presents the book to you. To bring them back, just tap the screen once.)
 
New features in 1.0.5:

• Settings toggle to display the Full Page before and after Panel Mode walks you through the panels.
(with these disabled, pages will flip directly into the first panel)

• Settings toggle to retain the Zoom Level while reading manually.
(with this enabled, any time you zoom in or out, the book will remain at that zoom level, from then on)
 
Wow, we are up to our EARS in comic book PDFs right now. :D

We're working our butts off to have it ready within the next week or so. (We may skip 1.0.5 straight to 1.1.0)
 
MadGoat said:
Will this app allow importing of my own cbr, otherwise it's pretty darn useless to anyone.
Click to expand...

Glad you mentioned it.

**snippet** [ removed info about unreleased products ] *snippet*

You'll find that our content is priced the same as similar apps, but provides higher quality / higher resolution pages, which are hand-cropped to ensure quality, and includes support for seamless 2-page spreads. In addition, our Panel Mode feature walks you through those books one panel at a time, on a timer or at the tap of a button.

So no, it isn't useless, and it's about to become a whole lot better!

:)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back