I’ve already mentioned TouchComic on Symbian-Guru in our Update on Developer Challenge post, but I think that writing a dedicated post for it, especially since it has now moved leaps forward, is a must to highlight what a pleasure this application is to use.
You might recall that earlier this year, I specifically asked for a comic book reading application for Symbian as it seemed non-sense to me that no one had used this big beautiful touchscreen with great resolution to allow consumption of comics on the go. Apparently, Jamie Fuller had the same thought, and hence wrote TouchComic. Since the first version, TouchComic has evolved a lot, and now supports tons of cool features. It reads comic books in the known format of .cbz or .zip (containing compressed images in .png .jpg or .gif). You can place these comics anywhere you want on the memory card or internal memory and choose your comics folder from the application itself.
Going through each comic is dead simple, as you have on-screen buttons to move to the next page or the previous page. There’s also a fullscreen option, as well as a fit-to-width toggle so you can either enable or disable it. The newest 1.8 version also adds a nifty function to your camera button allowing you to open a magnifier when it’s lightly pressed. It works on the Nokia N97, and I’ve tried it on my 5530 XpressMusic and found it to work as well.
TouchComic also displays the page numbers on the top of the screen, and remembers which page you were on when you close and reopen it. It supports the accelerometer and switches from landscape to portrait, rescaling the image if the fit-to-width option is enabled. There are many other Settings options so you can go ahead and tailor it to your preferences. Here is a video demo of TouchComic running on my Nokia 5530 XpressMusic:
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TouchComic is only available on Symbian^1 devices (S60 5th Edition), and I have tested it to see it works nicely on the Nokia N97, 5800 XpressMusic and 5530 XpressMusic. In order to install it, you have to first install Python 1.9.7 then get the latest version from TouchComic’s google code page.
Is comic book reading something you prefer to do in paper format, on a computer screen, or do you really like the option to do it from your mobile while commuting or in waiting rooms and such?
