Ivan Soto

I just wanted to share some screens of my upcoming Android project, a manga reader. It still doesn't have a name as I'm not quite sure if it will just focus on mangas, comics in general, or if it will become a fully featured eReader at some point.

Anyway, here are some screens of the current look of it.

Main screen with favorites mangas

In January I started in a full-time position at Incite Marketing as a Web Developer. Incite is a local marketing firm with more than 10 years in the field and while my job involves working with a CMS, I had to switch to Expression Engine so I won't be doing much work in Drupal, hence you won't see me posting about it too often. The reason is because I'm spending my extra time working on my Android projects.

As I posted before, I started building an Android app for reading comics. It still doesn't have a name but so far it's working pretty well with reading manga from OneManga.com. Although, thats no the only way to get comics, I also plan on giving the ability to read from ZIP, RAR and CBR files.

Another one of my projects is my Drupal administration theme Cleanr. So far is doing well, with over 130 sites reporting they are using it.

I'm also getting a Nexus One in the next couple of days, so with having an HTC Magic and a Nexus One I will be making my Android apps to work better on both devices. I will be posting pictures of my phone soon. 

 

Ok, it's more like a book, pdf, online manga, offline manga reader. Why? Because I tried different applications on the market that could allow me to read online manga and I didn't like any of them.

What are the features?

• 2 zoom levels
• Ability to create favorites
• Cool interface.
• Tablet and phone friendly
• Will open ZIP files or files in a directory besides the online mangas.
• Can list all unlicensed mangas from OneManga and favorite them for easy access. (It won't store any file on the actual device)

So far the requirements are Android 1.5 and that's it. Maybe in a near future I may have to drop support for it as it can't handle multiple device densities correctly.

When and "how much"?

When it gets to a stable point and It will only be ad supported as I can't sell applications from within Canada.

Here's a very alpha screenshot showing the list from OneManga.com
 

Update Feb 20, 2010
New screenshot showing a more finished UI.

Today I was reading the comments on the article "Opera: Apple, Ubuntu should include browser ballout screen too" and like always, everyone was commenting about how unsuccessful Opera is, hence the article. It really is and anyone that works on web development will know how good Opera is, but at the same time knows why it's not their main browser.

I don't want to find _the_ cause why Opera fails to get a piece of market share, I just want to give my personal opinion on why Opera and any other software that doesn't use native controls fails to impress me.

If you are developing applications for Android and you want to make the menu look kinda like the native applications, you can use these icons or, even better, use the layer style and use your own shapes. These icons were used for Twit2go and you are free to use them in your application.

It's been a few days since I released the very first version of Twit2go (and my first non-web application) and I'm very happy to see that people is actually enjoying my app. The feedback provided by users is what really drives to continue building any kind of free software and so far I'm getting some really good ideas and users are actually reporting issues. On the Android Market I'm getting a rating of 3.56/5 which is very good considering all people with broken phones blaming developers, hehe (And the fact that it's my first app). It's not that what they say is not valid but I can't give any kind of support to comments like "Your app crashed everything on my phone, uninstalled" - 1 Star And that's something the Android Market suffers a lot.

Since a while I've been talking about this OS and how I liked the way it can do multitasking. And now the more I use it the more I like it, so I decided to start building an application for it and give the OS a complete try. I bought the first Android device, the G1 from HTC and even when it's not the best phone out there, it comes with Android OS so that's enough for me. I started building this Twitter application knowing nothing of Java, which maybe was a bad idea but I managed to get this running in less than a week. As a web developer it's kind of hard to start understanding how phone or desktop applications behave but I'm getting used to it now.

As many know I have high hopes on Google's Android Platform and even when the G1 is not the very best piece of hardware I decided to order one from Ebay. I know I can apply as an Android Developer, pay the $25 fee and order a Dev G1 from Google, but I really wanted the white one, which is only on T-Mobile. After a few days and CAD$560 I received my phone and I must say: It rocks! :) Here are some pictures:

From Android G1

The box is nice and you can almost see the 8GB microSD card that came with the phone (nice deal!)

Right now I have an iPhone 1st gen and while it was a really good device at the begining, right now is really buggy and to be honest the lack of multitasking between applications or a decent notification system makes it an awesome phone with iPod capabilities, but not a computer. Not to mention the crappy apps you can get from the App Store. In the other hand Android looks good, more like a computer than the iPhone. It reminds me the blackberry I used to have, connected to Gtalk and Twitter and a few other applications at the same time.