ComicBookLover is NOT Snow Leopard Compatible at least not Totally

[Dolphbucs]

Well, now we know why Simon and the others at BitCartel have been so silent about CBL for so long. I tried to fire up CBL this morning and although it will load fine and display all titles on the main page, it would no longer sort my titles by Genre, Publisher and Series properly. I would click on a Genre or Publisher and it would display no comics in the cover viewer. Plus it was very very sluggish even scrolling through the covers on the unsorted view. I tried all the old tricks I had bee using under Leopard .... emptying cache, etc. but nothing worked. So I thought that maybe it was a corrupted database. So I deleted the CBL folder under Application Support and the plist files and still the same issues. I then tried starting from scratch ... imported some new comics and assigned Genre and Publisher data to them and ... nothing. The data is not assigned to the comics. I then tried loading my CBL database onto a machine with Leopard and ... works fine. There is a little bright side. The reader functionality does still work well and CBL can still be used to generate cover thumbnails of the cbr and cbz files. But the whole point of CBL was that it was iTunes for comics .... and that functionality is broken.

[Dolphbucs]

On a side note, I have suspected for awhile now that BitCartel has known there would be issues and has halted production of updates to CBL because of it. I started to notice a change about 6 months ago. I had an issue with a corrupted CBL database ... I could not get CBL to run properly under a certain user acct ... but it worked fine under the others ( and yes I checked out that route with the new issues ... same on all users accts ). So I contacted CBL through the Bitcartel site. In the past Simon had always gotten back to me in a couple of days at most. That time nothing. So I tried again ... still no response. I then started to notice that even though Simon had posted here in Oct 2008 about new features they were working on he hadn't posted here since ( a gap of about 8 months I recall ) Simon finally did reply here saying that he just "didn't want to over promise and under deliver " and that they only had so many programmers to go around. I thought this was quite revealing ... they seem to have enough programmers to work on and update their other apps but CBL ( which has not been updated at least since Feb 2008 ) doesn't seem to have received any attention ... not even any blogs about it on their RSS feed

If it sounds like I am a bit upset with them it is because quite frankly I am. Everyone understands that software comes and goes, but at least have the courtesy to not leave your users hanging. I have a massive Digital Comics collection ( over 35,000 titles ) .... if I had known CBL would be left to rot like this, I could have more easily used the time to organize those files using finder instead of wasting the countless hours I spent building a CBL database that won't work anymore.

OH and BTW, if you go to the ComicBooklover website it says "Requires Mac OS X 10.4 - 10.5." another telling sign I would say .... Why don't they simply just make a post to their blog admitting that CBL is not Snow Leopard Compatible?

[James Bellanca]

I have to agree with Dylan (below) - I also am not experiencing these issues. Though I definitely want to see CBL updated with new features like persistent tagging embedded in files, etc., it is stable and working in SL for me.

[Dolphbucs]

BTW I have found that you can still edit the Title of the comic, Volume #, and Issue # and that will be saved correctly in the database ... just as long as you do not try to view by Genre, Publisher or Series.

[hoffman99]

Sorry to hear about your problems with CBL (running Snow Leopard). The only issue I have is inputting the publishing date manually, it doesn't work. I only thing I can think of is I only have about 6,000 titles compared to your massive 35,000.

I know what you mean, I wish Simon would give some update about the future of CBL. As I stated before CBL is one of my favorite apps on my Mac and wish there was more development for the OS 10.6 version.

On another note, has anyone heard anything about Longboxs' Comic Reader? It certainly looks promising and hope it comes out this fall like they said it would.

[hoffman99]

Sorry for not proof reading my post, "I only thing I can think of is I only have about 6,000 titles compared to your massive 35,000"

What I meant was, the more my hard drive fills up with comics the slower CBL runs at least that's what I notice (I have about 60gigs left on my hd).

[Dolphbucs]

Like I said above, on my systems ( a 3.06 ghz 24" iMac and a 2.4 Ghz MacBook Pro each with 4 GB RAM ) it doesn't work even if I scrap the CBL database and plist files and start fresh. The only thing I haven't tried is to run it as administrator instead of standard. I'll try that and post back. Also, I did an upgrade in-place SL install ... did you guys do a clean install?

[Dylan Winslow]

I just did a straight-ahead standard install.

[hoffman99]

I did straight ahead upgrade SL install and I have a 2.4 iMac with just 1 GB ram. You have a large library, wonder if you reloaded some your comics just to see if it runs any better. If CBL runs the same way with the smaller library then it may be a corrupt file somewhere in your system.

[Dylan Winslow]

I know this won't be helpful to you, but I have Snow Leopard and CBL 1.3 (which, as far as I know, is the latest version) and I'm not seeing any of these issues. I really don't know what I'm doing and you aren't, or vice versa, but I don't think it's specifically a SL-CBL conflict.

[Dolphbucs]

Yup, running 1.3 ( build 821 ). It would also be helpful if BitCartel would give us a list of all files created by CBL .... I wonder if CBL places a system file somewhere that can become corrupted ... I know I can't find where the cache file is located.

[Dylan Winslow]

CleanApp lists these files:

/Applications/ComicBookLover.app

/Users/Dylan/Library/Application Support/ComicBookLover/

/Users/Dylan/Library/Preferences/com.bitcartel.comicbooklover.plist

/Users/Dylan/Library/Preferences/com.bitcartel.comicbooklover.LSSharedFileList.plist

/Users/Dylan/Library/Caches/com.bitcartel.comicbooklover/

[Dolphbucs]

Thanks for your help guys ( Dylan and hoffman ). I really do appreciate it. As you can see I thought an amendment to the discussion topic was in order. In the last few hours I first tried deleting all the files Dylan listed ( I already knew the location of every one except the caches ), downloaded a fresh copy of the app, and tried it again. I did what hoffman suggested and tried reloading a sample of the comics ... same issue ... when you try to enter Publisher, Genre etc and then try to view by those lists up top, everything goes funky and comics start disappearing in CBL ( originals unharmed thank goodness ). I even created a brand new Admin acct and tried to run CBL under that ... same thing.

Hoffman's info about his iMac eliminated one possibility. I was thinking that it might have something to do with 32 bit vs 64 bit architecture ( the original Core Duo Intel iMacs were only 32 bit ) but since his is a 64 bit machine ....

So, I'm back to it being a system file corruption. Either it is a file that CBL places at the system level ( outside the users folder because I have the same issue no matter what user acct I am running ) or a file that is changed by the Snow leopard upgrade. But then what would be the odds that two of my computers ( don't forget I also have a 2.4 ghz MBP as well as my iMac ) would have the same corrupted system file.

Unless, something happened with my CBL database file, possibly due to the size of my library, so that when I run CBL using that CBL database ( /User/Library/Application Support/ComicBookLover/ ) ... which I did share between computers ... it corrupts a system level file somewhere. Odd though that out of the 270 apps I have installed on my systems, only CBL seems to be affected and odder still that this would only surface after the upgrade to Snow Leopard ( it must have affected a system file which is now different than it was in 10.5 ).

The only way to find out would be to do a clean install of one of my machines and then try running a fresh database of CBL under a fresh install of Snow Leopard. But even if that works, there is no guarantee that when I build my library up to full size that the same trouble won't happen again.

Therefore it's time for me to punt. Using Snow Leopard's new extra large icons, and using CBL to at least bulk set file icons to their covers, I can use viewers like Jomic and Simple Comic together with an organized file structure and finder to get by quite well.

I just wish BitCartel would keep us better informed to help keep this type of kluge to a minimum