After a much longer run as a private beta than intended originally, the digital comic book store and comics reader called LongBox has finally opened its doors. The public beta is available for Windows and Mac, and although it's still quite rough in some spots, it represents a major breakthrough for the print-centric medium. The default main window of LongBox is a massive comic book information feed. When you open LongBox v0.5, you'll see a massive information overload. The layout uses boxes to keep the busy display from getting too chaotic, but the varying shades of blue don't keep things as separate as they could be. Just because this is comics doesn't mean you're going to come across a lot of primary colors or ziptones here, but some of that old-school feel may have helped here. In the upper left box, you'll see a horizontal scroll of featured titles. Below that is a newsfeed from the comic book news and reviews Web site Comic Book Resources. The Blackbox is a comic creator spotlight, with the debut concentrate on Steven Niles, perhaps best known as the writer of 30 Days of Night. It is not functioning currently. The column on the right is devoted to your LongBox stats on top and a scroll list of comic books being published for the current week. The stats counter wasn't working in the version I tested but should display your purchased comics, comics subscriptions, and comics loaded on your current device. That's a hint at what's to come for LongBox, which anticipates an iPad version, an Android tablet version, Xbox support, and support for other handheld devices. Comics downloaded through LongBox are shared to your account in addition to being stored locally, so you'll be able to read them on any LongBox-supported device without having to download them a second time. Sitting above all the noise is the LongBox navigation bar calmly. Next to the home button is the Library, where comics you've downloaded reside, followed by the Store, the Reader, and the Options button. The default view shows the comics as free-floating covers with the title and issue number above the image and a mouse-over link to the publisher facts below it. Mouse over a comic and two options appear. The "i" will open an information box that includes a synopsis, a link to a preview, a wishlist option, and a purchase button. The " " will add the comic to your shopping cart. There's also a list view, which contains a dedicated preview window and a more text-centric approach. Accessing the store will require registration, a free process. Because the comics are free for the brief moment, no credit card information needs to be revealed at this right time. Through the Options menu, users can want to log in when LongBox starts, or to enter their information manually. Here you can switch skins and change your start screen from the primary window to the reader, store, shopping cart, or last viewed screen when you start LongBox. The shopping cart lives on the right edge of the top navigation bar, along with your wishlist, featured LongBox specials, and the Help button which opens a PDF. There's a search bar that anchors the two sets of buttons that becomes a recently read list in Reader mode. It appears to work fine from all screens except the default window. The LongBox library contains comics you've purchased through LongBox. The Reader mode opens to a blank screen. You can click on the Reader button to open up the default system file browser again, although the Reader does support drag-and-drop for non-LongBox formatted CBZ and CBR comics. In the Library window, however, you'll see an interface that looks like the LongBox Store but with page navigation controls at the bottom. Mouse over a comic and click on the icon that appears to open it. Comics that you haven't read before will open smoothly, but types in the middle of being read are more sluggish. More often than not I had to mouse over the navigation buttons to get the comic to appear. Several times I had to click on a nav button, or in the black space where the comic should have been, to get it to appear. In Reader mode, the shopping help and cart buttons are replaced by supplementary navigation buttons. There's a bookmarks button, known to be not working at the right time of writing, and a "double" button that opens pages two at a time. This is a well-designed and essential tool for comics, which often use a two-page spread to highlight story moments that call for emphasized action. There's a Manga button, which can be utilised for Japanese and Hebrew comics that are published in a right-to-left reading order, and a Zoom button that offers three kinds of viewing. Panel zoom focuses in on the comic at panel width, while page zoom is more of a mid-length zoom, but still bigger than the default viewpoint. Free zoom works like a magnifying glass, large enough in order that you can see an entire panel in the frame. The scroll wheel can help you move the page under page zoom, and clicking on the magnifying glass zoom icon will toggle between the most recently selected zoom mode and the default view. Lastly, there's a currently nonfunctional Audio button. There's a long history of comics and music crossing over, and the CEO of LongBox, Rantz Hoseley, won an Eisner Award for editing an anthology, "Comic Book Tattoo," a collection of comics inspired by Tori Amos' songs. If the button allowed publishers to associate recommended playlists with their comics, this could be a really cool feature, but there's no word as of yet as to what it can do. The navigation controls at the bottom look smart but need tweaking still. There are controls to move forward or backward by a single page, or flip to the beginning or end of the comic. When you mouse over the controls, a pop-up bar appears previewing the pages of the comic that looks and feels like mini and elongated version of iTunes' Cover View mode. However, the previews are all blank unless you've already viewed a page. This could be a clever way to avoid spoiling the whole story, or another bug. It's a lttle bit hard to tell at the moment. This "gray market" CBR-formatted comic book was put together from online previews published by DC Comics. LongBox supports the format, albeit with no metadata. The Reader mode is absolutely the guts of the scheduled program, and a comic read on a 19-inch monitor with occasional juicing from the zoom mode was enjoyable. Nobody really cares about the news features or even the store if you can't read the comic, and on that end LongBox succeeds. However, it's likely that users with drastically smaller or older screens will find it unbearable. Hoseley has stated that the beta will proceed in three stages. The current public beta, version 0.5.2, is practically identical to the private beta that I started testing toward the final end of 2009. The next stage shall introduce redemption codes for nonwatermarked comics. The final stage shall introduce full e-commerce functionality to the LongBox store, and add about 100 comics to the store. Besides the types mentioned above, there are a lot of known bugs in LongBox. Font utilization needs to be standardized, the Comic Book Resources feed requires tweaking, the default window doesn't pull titles from LongBox site correctly, and metadata editing needs work. The LongBox public beta showcases a massive amount of potential, but unlike the latest Web browser beta from whichever browser publisher is your favorite, this is a rough work and is still very much in progress definitely. It faces massive challenges beyond getting the software to work correctly. Unlike music and MP3s, there's currently no single approved file format for comics. CBRs and CBZ are little more than image archive containers. There's also the issue of adoption. Except for the rise of graphic novels, comics have been dependent on the direct market niche comic book stores. Will readers flock to digital versions of them? And will those readers jump from stores to digital, or will LongBox bring in new readership? Overall, though, LongBox represents a good-faith effort to shove the medium out of its print-based nest. Best Windows software for a hard-hit economy. It's just too soon to tell whether it can fly.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |