Tangible Digital Comics
Pulp is a comic book reader for android. It can read CBZ and CBR comic files. I created Pulp because I wanted reading digital comic books to feel the same way as reading real ones. I definately learned a lot about dealing with compressed archives and bitmaps in this project.
To create the feeling
of handleing a real comic
I decided to make the cover
of the comics a swipable
object. To achieve this
I used Swipe-Deck
Swiping the Comic left goes
to the next one in the stack
but swiping right opens the comic
up so you can read it.
The user can make there own
lists of comics. this prevents
the user from having to swipe
through a large list of comics
just to find the one they want
to read. I use firebase to store
these lists for each user. That way
if the user switches devices they
can still access there collections.
I added the ability to turn pages using an app on an android wear watch.
The hardest part of this project was dealing with RAR archives. When it comes to Java the only thing out there is junrar. Junrar has no documentation so I had to read through the source to piece together how to use it. But once I got it working it did the job.