Silverlight based Comic Reader

[comicreadermobi]

Hi there! I originally made a post at GoldenAgeComics, and they mentioned your site, so I thought I'd talk to you guys too.

I made a silverlight version of my app to let people try it out before buying it, but I realised that with a little bit of extra effort, I could modify it to allow any website to use it to display their own comics! You know, get a little more awareness for my program, and make the world of online comic reading a whole lot better in one fell swoop :p

To give you an idea of how it works,
Instead of looking like this:
http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/preview/index.php?did=16078

It would look like this:
http://comicreader.mobi/CRM3/Baffling.html


Its completely free for you to use, and you don't even have to sign up to put it on your site. You can just go here:
http://comicreader.mobi/OnlineReader.aspx
and fill out the info to get an embed tag on the fly.


I'm really excited about the possibilities, and I want to make it happen. So if theres something I can do to make the process a little easier, or a little better, let me know, and I'll be glad to help

[Yoc]

GAC could use a working preview feature.
CRM didn't mention one has to install Microsoft's Silverlight for this to work.
I'm quite happy with our current Preview feature so I wont be trying it but thanks for sharing CRM.

Anyone else that tries it please let us know what you think.

[comicreadermobi]

were you not able to try it because you didn't have silverlight installed? Because it is worth giving it a shot.
The program lets you do true full screen, caches the next page, and even lets you zoom in on specific sections. Plus you can use the arrow keys, spacebar, and even the mousewheel to change pages.

In short, it makes the experience just as good, if not better than if you had downloaded the comic and loaded it up in your own reader

Plus its not hard to format the embed tag in a way that falls back on the web version if silverlight is not available.

Eager to hear your thoughts

[Yoc]

I'm a FireFox person CRM, I stay away from MS as much as I can.
Your features do sounds pretty nice.  GL with the app.

[Yoc]

CRM was nice enough to give me a copy of his reader that wouldn't need Silverlight to run it.
I downloaded it, checked I had the required .Net 2.0 or higher and tried it.

I got several error messages which I figured was easier to take a screen shot of than type them all out.
So CBR - here's what I saw if you had any advice-

http://img827.imageshack.us/img827/9856/comicreadermobi300winxp.jpg

Oh where it says "Finish other layer first!" it actually said "Unable to find entry point 'glGenFramebuffersEXT' in DLL 'opengl32.dll'.
I'm running WinXP Pro sp3 on a very old Dell Latitude D800 if that helps.

Thanks for your efforts CRM.

[John C]

Quick notes for the general case.

I'm not a fan of Silverlight on principle (the idea of desktop-like web pages sends chills down my spine), but technology-wise, my impression (as a programmer and occasional user of it) is that it's more stable than, say, Flash.  And Firefox is pretty good with disabling or dumping plug-ins, so of the things you could install, it's low on the worry list.

For the error boxes, you might have luck with just a CTRL-C to copy the text to the clipboard.  It'll also catch what's rolled off the screen, which is nice.  Sadly, I only found out about that recently, despite having worked with Windows since the Dark Ages.

[comicreadermobi]

yeah, thats a very odd bug. Your dell must not have the opengl capabilities necessary to run it hardware accelerated. I'll see what I can do about fixing it.

And yeah, Silverlight is the only reason the online reader can even exist. Rebuilding one in flash would be a massive effort without a lot of reward, but thanks to silverlight I can make an online reader with very little modifications to my code

[Yoc]

Hi CRM,
I recently installed nVIDIA ForceWare video drivers 8596 with a hacked INF file.
Dell stopped supporting the built in video card on this back in 2006.
I suppose my using the hack might have something to do with the errors generated.

John, Ctl-C only works if you can highlight the text first.  The error list created by the app doesn't allow me to highlight anything.  Ctl-C was the first thing I tried to use.  Ctl-A highlights 'All' and Ctl-V will paste any copied text as well.  Just in case you missed those.

[comicreadermobi]

I went ahead and put up a possible fix. Can you redownload it and report back?

[Yoc]

Hi CRM,
I went back and tried to download it.  The link says it's ver 301 but when i download it it's still the same 300 file.
You can email me if that's any easier for you.

-Yoc

[comicreadermobi]

Sorry about that. Still working out some kinks unfortunetely.

Go ahead and download it again, and you should be good to go

[Yoc]

Hi CRM,
That helped a lot, thanks!
How about we continue this via email?  There are still a bug or two to cover.

-Yoc

[comicreadermobi]

Sure thing

[Yoc]

you've got mail. 

[John C]

John, Ctl-C only works if you can highlight the text first.  The error list created by the app doesn't allow me to highlight anything.  Ctl-C was the first thing I tried to use.  Ctl-A highlights 'All' and Ctl-V will paste any copied text as well.  Just in case you missed those.

No, no.  I knew about the keyboard shortcuts/accelerators.  What I didn't know was that the pop-up boxes are special.  Give it a shot.  It copies the title, the message, and the titles on the buttons.