Hi all,

I've just completed a port of cbrPager to the Maemo platform.

cbrPager is a lightweight comic book reader written in plain C. It has been modified specifically for the tablet so that it provides a pleasant reading experience. Well, at least, it's pleasant to my wife, who was kind enough to be my beta tester.

If you are using Comix but find its startup takes way too much time/eats too much disk space, consider using cbrPager. It takes an alternate approach: rather than unpacking the whole archive at once, it unpacks only the current page. I initially thought it would be way slower when paging, but I find it's roughly as fast as Comix flipping pages (or at least, I can't really see a difference). However, it opens a file much, much faster than Comix does.

Rest assured that it's a pretty stable application at this point. I've read about 10 different manga series on it so far :-)

Usage

Hardkeys are mapped properly. Zoom in/out, fullscreen and the menu key work as expected. Tap and hold for a navigation-related context menu.

Escape toggles between portrait (rotated clockwise) and landscape.

Down pages forward (in portrait and landscape mode), Up pages backwards.

Right sets "fit to screen".

Left sets "fit to width".

To set auto-rotate, use the preferences dialog. Note that the key re-assignments may not be possible for all keys; for instance, it doesn't look like you can rebind the d-pad at this time, but the rest should be OK.

Screenshots

Everyone likes screenshots :-)

The following screenshot shows the Hildonized menu:


The following shows the navigation arrows, just like the PDF reader minus transparency :-)


For the Maemo port, I've added auto-rotation and a fullscreen mode, activated by the fullscreen key of course :-)


Cool! Where do I get it?

If you wish to try it out now, download it at this URL:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/4599/cbrpager_0.9.20-1_armel.deb


There are no dependencies outside plain Diablo (it probably works in Chinook, actually, but I haven't tried). If you want to read .cbr files, you'll need to install unrar. For cbz files, though, support is built-in. Also note that you need some space on the /media/mmc2, because that's where I put temporary files for now. The space you need is equal to the size of the biggest picture in your archive file; with JPEGs, this is rarely more than a couple hundred KBs.

You can also get the source here if you're interested: https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/4598/cbrpager_0.9.20-1.tar.gz


Final thoughts

If everybody likes it and no bugs are found, I'll try to get it in maemo-extras. Please let me know about any issues you find, except this one: the paging arrows don't always appear properly when toggling full-screen on. This is a known bug and I'll try to fix it soon.

A big thanks to John Coppens (http://jcoppens.com) for writing this program in the first place and putting up with me.

I hope you will enjoy this program!

-- BGE