It has been a little less than 1.5 months since the Webcomix beta was announced, and I think the project has finally matured to the point where it need no longer be considered a beta. During this time the number of supported comics was more than doubled, the comic-selection UI has been completely reworked, features that weren’t working quite right at the start of the beta have been fixed, and a number of new features have been added, such as live thumbnails, Facebook integration, and more.
Most importantly, the original architecture and caching hierarchy have been validated as capable of efficiently managing requests for a large number of comics pulled from several distinct data-sources, and the API verified as sufficient for creating complex comic-centric applications. Overall I am fairly pleased with the current state of the project, and thus I give you:
Anyways, if you missed it before then I invite you to take a look at Webcomix. All you have to do is sit back, read some comics, and enjoy.
This is an interesting project. A bit of feedback: I think it would be better if the comment were arranged in a simple vertical layout. The draggable boxes are kind of neat from an engineering standpoint, but I don’t think they add much to the user experience. Also, I think at least a few comics should be selected by default, in order to make a better first impression.
Anyway, cool site!
er… “if the comment were arranged”… “comment” should be “comics”
Thanks for the feedback, I like the idea of showing some random comics by default, that’ll go on my to-do list. With respect to the vertical layout though, how do you envision it working, particularly given that some comics are very, very tall (see the most recent 8-bit Theater comic for a particularly horrendous example)?
The idea behind the draggable layout was to let people create something akin to their very own Sunday-paper comics section (not that anyone reads newspapers anymore). It’s not quite there yet (fancy UI’s have never been my forte), but I’d welcome any suggestions that would help move it in that direction. Originally I actually wanted the page to be scrollable both horizontally and vertically, but the horizontal scrollbar kept screwing up the footer UI and was just kind of clunky regardless, so I think some better paradigm is called for, but I’m not sure just what that would be.
Yeah, big vertical comics could be problematic, but I think the tradeoff would be worth it. If I have selected a comic, then presumably I want to read it, and that means I’m probably going to end up scrolling through it anyway. You could also put a little collapse button at the top of each comic to reduce it to a title bar or some such. I just really don’t like the idea of having to manually arrange everything. I’m running a tiny netbook with a track-pad, so my user experience may be quite a bit different from yours. In particular, dragging images long distances is a pretty big pain in the ass.
Without getting into crazy bin-packing algorithms, I think just listing images or divs one after another and letting the browser handle the layout produces reasonable results. It scales well regardless of monitor size. Check out this demo for example: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/135901/random_images.html