So a few weeks ago I bought my first tablet, a Amazon Fire HD 8" that it was cheaper than usual on Prime Day. My main use is to use it as comic reader.
After trying 4 or 5, I finally chose Comitton, so this is what this thread is about, recommending it, as I don’t think it’s very known. It was the only one to cover my user case:
-Ability to access Samba share drives, AND being able to read directly comic files from there without having to make a local copy, streaming them.
-Ability to copy files from share drives, if you want.
-Speed. It isn’t the prettiest app, in fact it totally looks designed by an amateur with a functional but minimal UI instead of having a super slick frontend. But it is just fast, in both using local and network drives, showing contents of folders, in opening a comic of hundreds of Megabytes, and passing pages once you are inside one.
-As I said, the UI is functional, and intuitive.
-Good range of features, for example it has a godsend ‘eliminate white margins’ feature to maximize reading space, soften & sharpen postprocess filters, auto boomark features, quick access to selecting another page of the comic by dragging, different scale and view modes, etc.
-Very customizable, if you go to options you will see a long list of things to tweak, from custom colors to folder views, to advanced memory usage.
…Checks this out at Play store, hits install button…
Permission: microphone.
huh? …Back. Read description…
Operated by the Breath Noise.(Experimental stage)
Short Breath : Next Page
Short Breath x 2 : Previous Page
Long Breath : Scroll
Short & Long Breath : Reverse Scroll
Installed. My wife is gonna be so annoyed! …giggling insanely…
ComicRack is good: it’s also fast opening big comics and scrolling through pages, it uses full screen, it has a border removal feature, and the UI is also ok. But it doesn’t have native SMB connection, to download or to open up comics directly.
Of course, it doesn’t need one because the single ComicRack feature that defines it: it’s designed to pair up with the ComicRack windows/mac client and sync comics from there.
This has two downsides: One, it’s more convoluted as you need to have installed an application in your computer and all properly setup. Second, you need to pay for the app to have wifi sync. And the ‘sync’ downloads all the comics you want to read I believe, while I don’t need to download them if I want, I just open them from the network if my computer is on (and even that isn’t needed, if I connect my external hdd to the router, it has SMB share feature).
Comicrack has also a strange limitation, and it’s entirely designed to handle packages (cbz, cbrs, djvu, pdfs, etc). It can’t open a simple folder full of jpgs. Other readers including Comitton can do it.
It also has some good parts: you can read on desktop and on your other devices, and the last page read will be synced across, and ComicRack offers tons of extra information per comic, extra ways to organize big collections, update of web comics, custom lists, etc. It’s a powerful application.
