Abbey Code Blog

I'm thrilled to announce the triumphant release of Comickaze v1.3, jam-packed with new features, tweaks and improvements, and bug fixes.

Dark Mode

Comickaze now supports Mojave and Catalina's Dark Mode and system-wide accent colors (Purple is pictured above). The reader window was ahead of the curve here, always being dark, but now your eyes won't be blinded by the light when choosing your next comic (which, by the way, is easier than ever with new controls to skip to the next and previous comics right from the reader!).

Touch Bar

Since getting a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, I've been looking forward to adding custom controls for it to Comickaze. Hopefully when reading on the go, it makes your life a little easier.

Language meta-data

I heard from some of you multi-linguists out there that you'd like to track which languages your comics are in.

Comic fingerprinting

Comickaze is now smarter about detecting duplicate comics as you add new ones to your library. This feature looks at the contents of the comic, so different filenames won't fool it.

Undo support removed

Unfortunately, Undo/Redo had become a major source of crashes in Comickaze, and for the time being I've removed undo/redo support. I'd like to bring this back. If this matters to you, let me know the situtations in which you'd like Undo/Redo to be supported, and I'll work to get it put back in a future release

SO much more

There are a lot more improvements and fixes in this release, which you can read more about (as always) on the release notes page.

The most important change in this version is that it restores Mojave and Catalina compatibility to the Send Feedback menu item that broke with the last release.

In addition, it adds a cool new feature for any of you with folders of images that you'd like to read as comics (thanks to Mark for the suggestion!). Use the File -> Find Comic Files… menu item, and then check the new Find image directories box, and they will be turned into CBZ files on import.

This release fixes a whole bunch of user-reported issues. The bulk of them were reported using Comickaze's built-in issue reporter (which has been included for a while) that pops up automatically1 when it fails to open a comic file:

When you send in an issue this way, I get a copy of the file and I'm able to take a look at what's going wrong when opening it. That led to the following discoveries, addressed in v1.2.6:

Some of you read comics that have images in Google's WEBP format instead of more typical JPG images

Many of you double-click on issues ot open them in Comickaze, which should have worked, but gave an error each time, which is now fixed

Some of you have password-protected PDF comics or CBZ files created with the Deflate64 algorithm, which Comickaze doesn't support, but it wasn't telling you that, and now it does

These, and a couple other user-reported issues have been addressed in this release. So keep the reports coming!

As some Comickaze customers may have noticed (and a few have pointed out), it's been a while since I released a new version. Over the last couple of years, I started a new day job, and was working on a migration and a new release. By "migration" I mean moving to a new house, which has taken a while to settle this time around, due to the new "release":

Reed was a joint project with my wife Christine, with the 1.0 shipping in March of 2017. In the last year and a half, he's required much more maintenance than Comickaze. But fear not, Comickaze still has a bright future, which begins today with v1.2.4.

There are no major new features for this version, favoring a host of smaller fixes and improvements. Most of what I addressed in this release came from customer feedback, which is always greatly appreciated.

Afterglo will be 100% ready for the iPhone X when it ships! Get v1.2.2 on the App Store.

Fixed a crasher affecting some users with libraries stored in a custom location, and improved responsiveness for users with large libraries.

This release fixes a bug I blogged about in March, causing Comickaze to act erratically after adding a certain number of files to your library. It was a bug that Apple fixed in OS X 10.11 (El Capitan), and now that my app links against ElCap, it's fixed. I haven't been able to verify whether it's fixed in Yosemite, but if you're still seeing that bug and you haven't upgraded yet, that should fix it.

I just released Afterglo v1.2! It smoothed out some remaining rough edges, most notably improving the animation when the boots knock together. You can read more about the technical aspects of this change on my blog. It was a fun time, and I hope everyone enjoys it.

Well, it's been much longer than I usually take to release a Comickaze update, but it's finally here. What has it got?

To begin with, it now supports importing info from comics that have been tagged using other apps, as long as they support one of the three formats I know of that are currently in use (ComicBookInfo, ComicRack, and CoMet). This should make it easier to migrate your collection into Comickaze!

Next, I added support for AppleScript. This is something I've wanted to do from the beginning and was finally able to tackle. I'm a huge fan of automation on OS X (you can see a bunch of scripts I've written on GitHub), and can't wait to see the ways you script Comickaze into your workflows.

This release brings full VoiceOver support, and fixes a bug causing the app to sometimes forget the last value chosen for Protection Used.

When iOS 9 came out this past September, it introduced a new category of data into the Health app: Sexual Activity.

The Health app isn't well-geared toward data entry (it's possible, but not pleasant), so I thought I'd write an app to facilitate entering this type of data. It's my first (released) iOS app, and I had a blast working on it. I call it Afterglo:

It's pretty simple, and I plan to grow it over time, as a fun side project1. As always, be sure to let me know what you think

The latest release of Comickaze just hit the Mac App Store, with several bug fixes. Thanks to everyone who helped report and track them down!

This release of Comickaze fixes a bunch more bugs, including some more crashers. But more importantly, it fixes a long-standing issue causing difficulty reading any files with non-Latin characters. If you weren't able to read any foreign-language comics before, please give it a shot.

Most importantly, this release should help make the app more stable for everyone. It's performing more robust error-checking, so problems with comics will be less likely to bring the whole app crashing down.

Also, now when a problem is detected, you'll see this window pop up:

You can also manually trigger it, as described in a new Help article.

I also implemented some requests from you guys, like:

The option to use a solid black background in the reader

Support for year-only release dates (useful for annuals)

⌘F keyboard shortcut to take you to the Search field where you can filter down the list of comics in the library

This release contains several bug fixes, and one new improvement:

The status bar now tells you how many comics are still being added to the library, so you don't need to worry, wonder, or guess.