Shutting down

I regret to inform you that I am shutting down KiwiComics. The reason should come as no surprise by this time.

With nearly 40.000 downloads it has been a quite pleasant experience. I will not tell you that I don’t have time, because that would be a lie. I just prioritize differently at this stage in my life. I’ve started to live life more fully now (party!), and I am almost done with my master thesis, and I haven’t have the urge to read manga in a long, long time. It’s funny how creating a manga reader has had that effect.

If I’m to enjoy the last of my college experience, then the time to do so is now.

You may have noted that there are currently some issues with updates of manga. I believe that OneManga has made changes to  their web pages which breaks KiwiComics. This will probably not be fixed. Time to search for another manga reader! Post your alternatives in the comment section below!

Some of you have been emailing me, asking for an iPad version, but that will not happen. The thing is that the KiwiComics is somewhere in the moral grey-zone in my country (it could be argued that it simply is a web browser for OneManga), which is one of the reasons that I never asked for any money for the app or added it to appstore.

I hope some of you have enjoyed KiwiComics (and according to your ratings, which is above 4 of 5, and comments on ModMyRepo you really have!). I would also like to thank you people that visited this blog. It’s one thing to rate an app, but another one completely to take time of your busy schedule and write feedback on this blog!

As a last note: the license for the source code for this application has been changed to “Do whatever you like with it, without restrictions of any kind”.

Style.it

Style.it author Judith Jaquet mentions KiwiComics in one of their articles called Manga mania. It is unfortunately only for the italian readers.

KiwiComics helper program

Rynus_Rein has kindly enough created a program to add series and chapters to KiwiComics.

Rein explains:

Actually, I wrote a little .NET application (should also work using Mono) which allows you to add series/chapters/pages to the sqlite database which is used by KiwiComics.
Basically you download the .sqlite file from your iPhone using SSH, add new chapters/pages and upload it again.
The application is not very user-friendly since I’m the only one using it, but would anyone be interested in this too (then I would polish it and upload it somewhere)?

Write your thoughts and/or support in the comments.  You can find his homepage here.

New release

Version 1.2.1 has been released. It fixes some small bugs only. The database has not been changed but I would still advise you to uninstall your old version of KiwiComics and then install the new version this is because your database may have been corrupted.

So to summarize: upgrade only if you have no stability problems otherwise uninstall and then install the new version.

Try this version if you had problems with KiwiComics not starting up.

Why you should contribute

It’s a fun experience and the perfect choice for learning objective-c and the iPhone API.
It’s semi-famous with over 10.000 downloads a month .
You have total control as the license gives you permission to fork your own code if you are not happy with my decisions.