Good day,
I decided to write here mainly because I'm thrilled with your delightful comic reader, and I had a few questions and a couple of suggestions concerning its future development. I presume many of these things have been raised before, but I think it couldn't hurt to mention some of them again.
First, let me say that the Windows version performs wonderfully. It's as stable as they come, I've had no crashes, no hang-ups, even with very large files that made even my trusty CDisplayEx cringe! That stability and dependability is the main reason why I want to stick with your reader, but there are a couple of snags that still make me want to fire up CDisplay on occasion.
The library. I realise that scraping with ComicVine is still in beta, and that in general, it's too much to expect the process to be spot on, but I've found that YACReader excels in the process of scraping. I was able to tag my library much faster than with ComicTagger or ComicRack. The fact that YACReader also involves my folder structure and has lovely presentation options finally made having a library make sense. I do have a couple of complaints that I hope you might bear in mind when developing the library features in the future.
The biggest issue for me was mainly, where are the sorting options? This question drove me mad. Once scraped, there's no way to reorder by issue, title, series, filename?! I was certain I was missing something! I scoured the web and the program for almost an hour trying to figure it out. If the scraped values, or even manually added ones didn't reflect on sorting options, what were they there for? IMHO, this needs to be overhauled. There are no benefits from scraping, no value in adding the info, if sorting is always based on "assign current order to comics", which in reality just overwrites the issue numbers. I had two comic book episodes with five issues each, placed in one folder, correctly scraped. Due to the lack of sorting capabilities, there was no way to prevent YACReader to place them both in parallel (first issues together, then the second, etc.). So I was, in a way, forced to adopt a folder structure not necessarily to my liking.
That's the reason I hide the lower navigation panel in the Library. But, having done this, I felt like there ought to be a popup dialog, presenting the plot or some of the info, if scraped from ComicVine. This would add to the interface, and make use of the visually appealing features already implemented in the library. If I'm wrong in any way about the sort options, please let me know!
Aside from this, there are only a couple of small-ish features that I'd like to see in the reader portion of the app, which is also pretty great as-is! I would ask what were your thoughts concerning image related tweaks, like a thumbnail generator, sharpness, various resize algorithm implementations, (automatic) colour/white balance correction, and stuff like that. I realise that those are all long term features that require a lot of trial and error, but I wanted your opinion on them.
I hope that you continue developing this amazing app, in the stride and direction you seem to be.
Cheers!
