Hey everyone!
I just released my very first app on the App Store.
I started iOS development more than a year ago because it's something I always wanted to do. My only app idea was a bit of an ambitious one and I had to learn a lot from scratch. Swift, iOS, ML... That's why it took a long time, but it's finally here. Now comes the even harder part of trying to find users for it 😬.
The app is called Smart Comic Reader and the Smart part refers to its ability to automatically detect panels in a comic, then zoom in on it and move between them. The idea grew out of my frustration with reading comics on my phone that were not optimized for a small screen like that.
You can import any comic in the most common formats you can find them in: cbz, cbr and pdf. Then just open it, double tap on the first panel and start reading. By tapping the sides you can move to the next panel.
Because I'm using Core ML, the panels do not have to have well-defined edges to be detected or anything. I tested it with a lot of comics that are really all over the place with their art style and how they display panels. I'm amazed myself sometimes with how much it gets right. Of course, it can never be perfect, but the app is designed to always keep the user in control. It intentionally doesn't cut the panels out so you can always manually pan and zoom if needed (which really might be very rare, depending on the comic).
For now I'm keeping it free, trying to get a user base going. I want to make it a payed app later, although that's a hard sell these days. Another option is that I'll add some pro features later (but I'll have to figure out what those would be).
Here is the App Store link, if you'd like to check it out:
App Store Link
I also made a nifty website (thanks emilbaehr for getting me started with a template):
smartcomicreader.com
If you don't own any comics to try it out with, here is a free one. It's a cbz version of David Revoy's webcomic Pepper&Carrot and it's licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, so I'm happily using it to promote my app:
Pepper&Carrot
Let me know what you think and what could be improved, I would love to know.