“Comics” released on the App Store
The thing about most comics is that they’re bigger than the iPhone’s screen, and pinching and zooming in on every page just isn’t ideal. I’ve been playing with an app called ‘Comics’ by Iconology, inc. and it’s showed me that it’s possible to have a really enjoyable reading experience even on the iPhone’s small-ish screen as long as you have the right formatting. What Comics does is use a set of specially formatted comics so that you scroll dramatically through every panel in an issue. This way you see content in a size that’s just big enough to fit onto the screen, but in a way that’s flexible enough to allow for the large spreads you often see in comic books. Sometimes you’ll start of zoomed into a portion of a huge panel, and then you’ll tap next and end up zooming out to reveal the rest of the picture. If that sounds a little confusing, I’ve included their promo video and some thoughts after the jump to show you what it’s like.
There are a 20 publishers with over 40 comics out right now. As for the price of the reader, it’s a mere $0.99, and most of the paid comics I saw in there were $0.99-1.99 in price. There are plenty of full issues offered for free, though.
I’m still wondering if they can’t get those prices lower, but I’m not sure it’s because my internal price gauges have been destroyed by the App Store, or I just haven’t bought comics in a while. The prices for the digital copies do seem better than their digital counterparts, but that should be the case for digital copies anyway. I’ll be playing with the app and should have a review up pretty soon. Here’s the video in the meantime:
you should check ComicZeal…it´s the best comics reader on the iphone
I actually prefer the "pinching and zooming" approach to reading comics on the iPhone. I find that when I read them in landscape mode, I hardly have to zoom. From what I've heard, "Comics" (what a confusing name to refer to the program and not, you know, comics) will support this as an alternative in the future. With the panel per panel method I found that for some comics I constantly had to switch from landscape to portrait mode and back again which quickly became annoying. I do think the actual store itself and the initial selection of comics are pretty good.
@Mark Gerrits — err the "Comics" part was my fault because I wante to highlight the fact that it was actually called Comics and not just tlaking about comics…maybe a stupid idea and i'll take away those quotes
Ditto on the landscape/portrait witching, so sometimes I jsut stick to one orientation to keep things simple…but text does get a lot smaller.
@antonioj
y'know I think I just might — esp if I can get my own comics on there.
Nono, don't get me wrong, my problem was with them naming the app Comics. It's a silly name that just begs for this kind of confusion