Feature Requests

[Pigumon]

Hi, I thought we should have a nice solid place to do feature requests.

I posted this on the old blog, but...

My biggest request so far is a manual "SORT" option. Maybe that's not the best word for it..

Basically you have a big event like... Marvel's current SECRET INVASION. An excerpt being:

Secret Invasion #3
Avengers: The Initiative #14
Captain Britain and MI:13 #2
Incredible Hercules #118
Marvel Spotlight: Secret Invasion
Mighty Avengers #15
Ms. Marvel #28
New Avengers #42
Secret Invasion: Fantastic Four #2
Secret Invasion: Runaways/Young Avengers #1
Secret Invasion: Who Do you Trust? One-Shot

ETC.

These are all different titles & series, yet they all form a single storyline. Currently you'd have to put 001 in the name of the first part of the story, then continue doing that, and that's just silly.

There should be a kind of "event" category and also a "sort" subcategory. I think it would be useful for older titles like Iron Man whose actual first issue is Tales of Suspense #39. This sold be sorted as #1 and the first issue of iron man would be 61. It would work well for comics that keep restarting.

I guess TAG could be use as and event name, but the sort option is still needed, or am I missing something?

What do you think?

[whodean]

I'd like the desktop icons which CBL turn into pictures of the cover of the .cbr to be compatible with QuickLook in Leopard (10.5)

[Pigumon]

Do you mean you want the icons to be higher res so they look nice in quick look? or do you want to be able to open them in quick look?

As they are, you can do the whole quick look cover flow with the icons, it's pretty awesome. I wish they'd incorporate that mode into CBL. =O feature request!

[Richard Leonard]

I'd like to be able to print lists or export lists into a word processor or spreadsheet.

Further - being able to save the metadata into each cbr/cbz file so that if books need to be reimported at a later time (example- from an archive DVD/CD).

This way I can build a disc of ebooks, shelve it for a later time, clean up the internal database - and reimport or simply re-read the books directly from the archive.

each disc becomes an indexed, electronic "Long Box" or "Short Box".

It would be incredible - to be able to build an electronic "copy" of my existing physical books - create a disc that matches the physical contents of the box, and have a printed list that details the books.

Thoughts?

[Jerome]

Here is my request list. These are just a few things that would help me better manage my comics.

* I want to be able to specify a default set of columns, so when I add new list/smart list those columns are populated (instead of needing to add and remove columns every time I add a new list).

* Have ComicBookLover rename the comic files on the hard drive to reflect the series/volume/issue specified in CBL (like how iTunes renames the music files).

* My writer/artist entries are not remembered. When I enter a series it is remembered by CBL; it would be great if the writer/artist fields worked the same way.

* Not sure if this is even doable, but it would be helpful if, in addition to being able to hide pages, CBL could remove pages (such as ads) from actual compressed archive file.

* And, as others have stated, being able to save the metadata info in each cbr/cbz file would be very helpful for archival purposes.

Those are just a few suggestions on what would make CBL an even better application. Fantastic work so far!

[Pigumon]

Yeah, it sounds like everyone wants metadata. Maybe there needs to be an actual .CBL file with metadata (like MP3). This would be a great feature, but... then would it be compatible with other comic book readers (i.e. WINDOWS compatible readers). I guess a free opensource standard could be started...

As far as removing pages, until that feature's implemented, you can unarchive the file like normal, delete the pages you don't want, but make sure you re-archive in STORE "compression" mode, so you don't compress the file again and basically destroy the quality of the .cbr files.

[Jerome]

Yep, that's what I do now to remove pages within an archive file.

[CaptHowdy]

I wish Comic Book lovr would have the option to automatically move & rename files when they get imported into the program, just like Itunes does. It would be great to be able to specify a Comics folder and it to be nicely organized automatically like Itunes does my music.

[Comic Book Guy]

Now that a QuickLook plugin is available with the latest beta of Simple Comic, I'd like to remove the thumbnails that CBL added to my CBR files. Is there any easy way to do it? I tried CocoThumbX but it doesn't seem to work with CBRs.

[Chris Jones]

Here are my suggestions for improving CBL:

1) The ability to change the contents of a cbz/cbr. I hate ads and I hate it when the first page is a scanner logo page. I would love it if CBL would allow you to go into an "Edit" mode to physically delete pages from the archive. Even better, the ability to choose a page, and have it go through all archives, looking for that same page, and deleting it.

2) The ability to convert all PDF's and CBR files into CBZ files. I'd love it if all my comics were in the same format.

3) The ability to show page resolution as a sortable column. This would make it easy to determine which comics are lower res. (especially helpful in removing duplicates)

4) I second the previous suggestion to have CBL autosort the comic files ala iTunes. I have my comics sorted OK, but it would be great if CBL could handle it and make it better.

5) Let's say you have 50 Gigs of comics. How do you back it all up? I originally just burned DVDs. But a limit of 4GB per disk means a whole lotta DVDs. (Better if you use double layer DVD, but still a pain) I now have been creating a duplicate copy of the comics on a large external harddrive. It would be nice to have CBL handle the backup to that second archive...

6) Metadata. Man I can't wait for that, but god is it going to be royal challenge to add all that data. Hopefully you will make it easy to edit metadata to large batches of comics.

7) I second the suggestion from a previous post about some method to organize "events" Let say I want to list out the chronological order of appearances for the Blue Devil character. Will that be possible with Metadata?

OK, enough for now... Thanks for such an awesome program BitCartel. Keep up the good work.

Chris

[Henrik N]

#5 sounds a little outside the realm of a comic reader app. Perhaps I misunderstand you, but couldn't you use Time Machine, rsync or some other dedicated backup solution?

About metadata, some kind of online database, perhaps hosted by Bitcartel, would be really nice. So a MD5 hash of a cbz/cbz (or some other identifier) could map to metadata. If user A has added metadata to a file, it's sent to the online database. If I later get the same file, that metadata could be retrieved.

[Henrik N]

My feature requests:

#1

I'd love to be able to go directly from picking a comic (in a file browser or the CBL library) to reading it full screen, and then from full screen right back to the library. Currently CBL shows the non-full-screen window as an intermediate step, which breaks the flow for me. At the very least, ctrl+W should probably go straight to the library and not show the windowed comic (and preferably Esc or clicking the "Exit Full Screen" button should do the same). There could be an "Open in Window" menu/context menu item if you do want to do it occasionally.

#2

Navigation when reading is currently a little bothersome. Left/right arrow would be nice; command+arrows is more complicated and can break the flow. Navigating between comics with command+</> is decent on a US keyboard, but with e.g. a Swedish layout, going to the next comic (which is probably more common than going to the previous comic) is command+shift+<; they share a key. Making keyboard navigation customizable would probably be a good idea. Personally, I'd like plain arrows for changing pages and perhaps something like command+option+arrows to change comics. When reading on a laptop, I like to just click: in CDisplay, I had one click go to next page (or fold), two clicks back one page, three to next comic.

These two issues are pretty big to me. I used CDisplay on Windows, and while CBL has a lot going for it, I do find myself missing the ease of use of CDisplay, and how the app got out of my way so I didn't notice it while reading. That's the best kind of UI.

Minor feature requests:

#3

Would be nice if from Full Screen, you could hover to the top to see the menu bar (iPhoto does this).

#4

It would be nice if hovering the top of the screen in Full Screen could also show something akin to the drawer; similar to Full Screen viewing in iPhoto. This might really do away with the need for windowed mode altogether, for a group of users.

#5

The magnifying lens toolbar icon could change to indicate whether it was on or off.

#6

Dragging a folder (full of comics) to the CBL dock icon says "The comic Foldername is empty"; would be nice if it would import the contents. Dragging to the library works as expected.

And some bugs I noticed. Wrote these down several months back, though I'm not sure there's been an update since, so they may still apply:

Bugs:

#7

The first image in the artwork viewer doesn't show: it's just a dashed border around black. If I change the sort order, the comic that used to be first shows fine, and the one that is now listed first is missing the image. Opening the comic makes the image show. If I change source, though, it disappears again, even when I change source back. The image displays fine in the single-comic artwork viewer (under the source list) and if dragging.

#8

One time I saw saw parts of the menu bar over the top of the full screen view (Time Machine menulet, MenuCalendarClock, possibly Spotlight).

[Pigumon]

I've got to agree with all of Henrik's points. I think CBL has been around long enough to have a nice major upgrade. Fullscreen needs to be improved especially #1. that's been a big beef with me though I just realized I never mentioned it here.

I think there should be editable Keyboard shortcuts. Why not leave it up to the user?

The whole COMMAND + key shouldn't be used for regular controls, I mean, the arrows are completely useless without the Command key! That's weird. Sort of like having to hold the menu key on the remote while hitting forward or backward. Space bar is fine to advance, but no way to go backwards.

Mostly I wonder if CBL is actually going to be updated again. Certainly it's the best viewer for Mac, but that doesn't mean there's not a lot of room for improvement.

The majority of these requests wouldn't be hard to implement.