Author Topic: NANY 2011 Release: DCDisplay (Read 93,394 times)

nharding · « **Reply #25 on:** January 01, 2011, 09:04 PM »

Hi Mouser,

I made the keys compatible with CDisplay, but I will make it reload the mini comic if you press F1 or select Help. The background color will be added once I add in the configuration screen (I plan on making it so that you can reassign the keys), at the moment you could manually modify settings.xml to change options but that won't be required for the final release. The filename sorting took a lot longer than I expected, it is designed to work in cases where people do not name files consistently.

Neil

mouser · « **Reply #26 on:** January 01, 2011, 09:19 PM »

reassigning keys, not important for me, and i have no problem modifying settings.xml, so i will try that -- IF i could figure out where this thing installed its files

the f1 help sounds like a good idea. making X quit and escape show help might also be a good idea.

also i think pgup and pgdn go back and forth pages, which is very good, but im not sure the help says that.

nharding · « **Reply #27 on:** January 01, 2011, 09:39 PM »

Try the Ctrl T 2 page mode which is very nice way of reading a comic, and Ctrl S brings up a settings menu where you can adjust a bunch of parameters for the shader (at the moment the settings are not saved but they will be once I have the database installed, I want to be able to set settings for an individual comic (or page)).

If you view an image larger than the screen, and use space it will scroll around the image.

You can also use the wheel on the mouse to scroll through a comic as well. I'd like to add PDF support at a later date, since Acrobat is terrible

Neil

nharding · « **Reply #28 on:** January 06, 2011, 06:07 AM »

I've carried on working on DCDisplay. I've been adding a check all files mode, it recurses all the hard drives on your computer and examines every archive (zip & rar). It reports any problems it finds, and also any duplicate files (it does an image checksum of all the images in the archive, so if you have cbr and cbz version of the same contents it will match as a duplicate). I use a html template match that I wrote, so you can style the output (there is a simple default template with all fields present in a table.).

It generates a thumbnail of the first page in each archive that can be used in the html output, and it saves the results as it checks the files so you only have to do it once (and then the next time, it will just examine the new files although it will still compare with all the original files). It reports problems it finds, including nested archives (zip files inside another zip for example), thumbs.db inside the archive (no point at all, and increases the size). MAC format zip (MACOSX directory, which causes CDisplay to crash, although DCDisplay can handle it with ease), corrupt images, and malformed archives.

I've also replaced the 7Zip extractor, and now use native C# code to read rar and zip files with no dll dependency. I have a few TB of data that I am testing it with, so it will take a while to run (it's been running for over 30 hours non stop and seems to be working fine), once the report is generated I will update the release with a new version.

Neil

mouser · « **Reply #29 on:** January 06, 2011, 06:20 AM »

cool.

i really think you have to do something about the way this program installs itself. if you need to have it install instead of just running, there has to be some way to do it so that it actually installs and copies files to some permanent place in Program Files\ and runs properly from there. as it is now it seems like it leaves the files where they are but makes some registration somewhere so that you can't move the files and can't run the setup program again without removing it from the Add/Remove list. it's very confusing and i've never seen anything quite so confusing in an installer. not to be harsh but something is terribly wrong with the way this installs -- or else i'm very confused, or both.

mouser · « **Reply #30 on:** January 06, 2011, 06:24 AM »

what should Ctrl+T do? should it show two pages side by side? here it just seems to toggle the zoom slightly between full page and almost full page, always showing one page.

nharding · « **Reply #31 on:** January 06, 2011, 03:21 PM »

I'll have a look at the installer, I just use the Publish command in C# to generate the install.

Ctrl T should show 2 pages at a time (it assumes a page is double page if width > height, in which it skips that page (it also assumes 1st and last pages are double pages as well, so that it's like reading a book with a front and back cover).

Neil

superboyac · « **Reply #32 on:** January 06, 2011, 03:31 PM »

OK, I'm going to ask for a pretty awesome feature request, but I know it's hard to do, so I don't expect it. But it's cool!
http://comicreader.mobi/
That's Comic Reader Mobi. It's the iOS comic reader. What's amazing about it is if you tap on the text bubble of a comic, it will enlarge ONLY the text bubble while everything else stays the same. Isn't that freaking awesome?! So you can read your comic on your computer or mobile device, and you can set it to "fit to page" and just use the zoom to magnify the text. It's really sweet. I know, all these comic readers already have magnifying glass features, and so on, but nothing beats the elegance of this solution.

mouser · « **Reply #33 on:** January 06, 2011, 05:06 PM »

that zoom feature might be needed on a mobile device, but for a desktop reader, it's hard to see the value in it.

superboyac · « **Reply #34 on:** January 06, 2011, 06:17 PM »

Quote from: mouser on January 06, 2011, 05:06 PM

that zoom feature might be needed on a mobile device, but for a desktop reader, it's hard to see the value in it.

I beg do tiffer (politely, of course). Not entirely, but somewhat. I'll explain. I do occasionally read comics on my computer, and while it's big enough to see the text AND see the entire page fit on the screen, SOMETIMES you do want to just expand the text a little more without having to zoom the rest of it. Now, all these readers have that magnifying glass feature, but it's better just to have the text box pop out without having the surrounding magnified. Anyway, it's not essential, but I can almost guarantee that it would increase your reading pleasure greatly and people would love it. It might be more trouble than it's worth to program, but still, just a thought...

nharding · « **Reply #35 on:** January 06, 2011, 06:28 PM »

I plan on adding scanlation support (so you select a word balloon and then you can translate the text), so I'll add it when I start on the scanlation support.

Neil

superboyac · « **Reply #36 on:** January 06, 2011, 06:44 PM »

Quote from: nharding on January 06, 2011, 06:28 PM

I plan on adding scanlation support (so you select a word balloon and then you can translate the text), so I'll add it when I start on the scanlation support.

Neil

Oh snap!! No way, I didn't think you'd go for it. If you do, this will be one of my favorite fun applications ever. The scanlation sounds amazing also.

mouser · « **Reply #37 on:** January 08, 2011, 06:06 PM »

Is it possible to release DcDisplay in a way that just let's it run portably? Or does it have to install because of some XNA requirements?

nharding · « **Reply #38 on:** January 08, 2011, 07:08 PM »

It should run portably, it uses xml file in the application directory to store settings rather than registry entries.

Neil

mouser · « **Reply #39 on:** January 08, 2011, 07:17 PM »

didn't work for me. not even sure what file to launch, tried DcDisplay.application and got some error about security zones or something.

sorry if i'm grumpy.. i've said it before i'll say it again, how microsoft managed to make it so hard to run applications built from their new development languages, and the errors so confusing, i will never understand as long as i live. it just boggles my mind.

nharding · « **Reply #40 on:** January 15, 2011, 07:11 AM »

Ok, should have a new version this weekend. I have the database present (it takes a while, but you can quit and carry on again another time) which creates a html summary which you can browse. It checks for each image to find any corrupted ones, reports any embedded zip / rar files inside an archive, reports number of pages found (it assumes 2 pages if width > height), works out a checksum so it can find duplicates (it's image based checksum, so even if files are renamed and archived in a different format it can still identify it), and also gives the average resolution (some older scans were too low rez and probably need to be rescanned).

I've got a new installer. I'm using native c# code for uncompressing the zip and rar files so I've made it threaded to make the UI more responsive. I've got cross process communication (so if you start a 2nd instance it will pass the command line to the first instance and then exit). Pressing F1 will now load the Readme.cbr file and backspace will load the previous file you were reading.

Neil

nharding · « **Reply #41 on:** January 19, 2011, 01:36 AM »

I've extended the database features, it now generates 3 sets of files rather than just by title (it generates by title, date, & path) and then generates index files that refer to each of those. I've also improved the Browser, so it has BACK, PREV, NEXT, buttons.

Neil

mouser · « **Reply #42 on:** January 19, 2011, 01:45 AM »

looking good!

DeVamp · « **Reply #43 on:** January 24, 2011, 02:45 PM »

Hi there,

It looks like a nice program, but it crashes as soon as I try to start it.

During the first setup, it installed directx9 and XNA.
During the second setup, it says that directX9 en XNA are present.

It's probably something windows. Maybe I should reboot first, so that windows loads XNA correctly.

Do you have any idea?

nharding · « **Reply #44 on:** January 24, 2011, 03:13 PM »

Ok, I'm about ready to release a new version, so I'll put everything in a try / catch block so that it will give more detailed description of the problem.

Neil

nharding · « **Reply #45 on:** February 01, 2011, 06:19 PM »

For those of you wondering where the new version is, I decided to include as much data as possible so I wrote a scraper for Comic Vine to get the details of all the characters and I am using GCD to get lists of all publishers, titles, issues and stories and I'm writing extractor to convert the format. Since the data is not needed if you don't want to use the database (and is also over 100MB in size), I will put that data on rapidshare as an optional download.

Neil

noblejoker · « **Reply #46 on:** May 24, 2011, 04:16 AM »

Quote from: DeVamp on January 24, 2011, 02:45 PM

Hi there,

It looks like a nice program, but it crashes as soon as I try to start it.

During the first setup, it installed directx9 and XNA.
During the second setup, it says that directX9 en XNA are present.

It's probably something windows. Maybe I should reboot first, so that windows loads XNA correctly.

Do you have any idea?

Exactly the same for me I am afraid - not operational at all On Win 7 Home Premium 64
Tried running in XP compatability and run as admin - no go
All the extra look good but need basic functionality first I guess
Good luck with development

nharding · « **Reply #47 on:** May 24, 2011, 05:54 AM »

My development system is Windows XP. I will see if I can find the problem on Windows 7.

Neil