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Proprietary Library Manager, No Thanks

A topic by Ionwerks created Aug 23, 2020 Views: 467 Replies: 6
Viewing posts 1 to 5

I think it must be 2 decades since I had to use a special utility to load MP3s on my phone. Even my Kobo reader will just work with any old EPUB I copy onto it. By all means generate metadata to improve the experience but let it sit alongside, preferably in *my* carefully named directories rather than buried in arbitrarily numbered folders. Not that I could get a connection to the companion more than once (and even then it wouldn't download any images).

It's a shame because the viewer itself is excellent, though to my mind the controls are inverted - maybe it's a gaming thing but I kept expecting the stick to move the viewer rather than the subject.

Developer (1 edit)

Thanks! We can later have a setting for inverted controls. Sorry for the companion connection not working, still working on the stability.

The companion respects and depends on your folder structure such that the same folders appear in the app. The biggest hard reason for a separate application is that the Quest could not handle unzipping big files, we’d have to wait minutes and then it’d often run out of memory. The companion unzips in seconds and serves to the comic reader one image at a time so the Quest doesn’t choke.

Then we plan to support more file types like books and PDFs and images and audio.

Sorry again the companion didn’t work, I’ll work hard to make sure it’s more seamless and hopefully you can give us another look in the future.

(+1)

I just installed the demo and I enjoy the functionality of the app, but agree that the file manager approach is a bad idea, at least as it is currently implemented.

For starters, when I fired up the Windows desktop app for the first time it scanned the complete contents of "My Documents", finding not just my .cbz and .cbr files, but also apparently every .pdf file I have! This is a terrible way to start off with a new user ... the scan took about half an hour, and found a total of 8044 documents, the majority of which are random .pdf files. Do I want to view my old scanned tax returns in a comic viewer? NO! Plus, I don't feel at all comfortable with your making everything in My Documents available, including sensitive pdf files. This is a security nightmare.

Suggestion: You have an "Add Folders to Scan" button. Why not just let me use it? I know where my comics files are; I really don't want to wait for half an hour while you scan through all my files.

As I mentioned in another post, I also chose 3 comics to be downloaded via USB, but that didn't work at all.

Another problem is that I have my comics separated into a handful of folders, but you don't respect that ... they are all dumped into a flat list, making it difficult to find what I want to read, either in the Quest 2 or in the desktop app.

Above, you say "the Quest could not handle unzipping big files, we’d have to wait minutes and then it’d often run out of memory. " This is not true at all, at least not on the Quest 2. How do I know this? Because I used Sidequest to load the Perfect Viewer apk (Perfect Viewer is an Android comic reader), and then used Sidequest to copy over some .cbr and .cbz files.

On my Quest 2 I opened Perfect Viewer, pointed it to the Comics directory where I'd copied the files, and the comics loaded instantly. Each file was approximately 25MB. In fact, even though it was designed for Android phones and tablets, it works pretty well on the Quest 2, although the controls are a bit out of whack, and I don't know if it's possible to adjust the size of the screen that the Quest 2 uses to display Android apps (I want it bigger!). But it does support folders so it's easy to keep things organized.

On the plus side, I love the way Supermedium displays the comics for reading! I will probably go ahead and buy it because despite the overly complicated hassle of loading the comics, the reading experience is great, and  plus I'd like to support you.

So my final advice would be: rethink the whole file library idea ... if an Android app that isn't even designed for VR (Perfect Viewer) can allow you to read local files, files from Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc., and display them in folders in a really nice virtual bookshelf - and all without a separate library manager - I really don't think there's a need for you to put resources into reinventing the wheel here ... 

And think of how many people are turned off once they see you also need to install a separate Windows app!

Anyway, thanks for the app ... and will be looking forward to improvements!

Developer

We are still waiting on our code signing certificate from ssl.com as well that Windows requires to trust our app, else antivirus and firewalls get in the way, so sometimes we need to allow an exception for Supermedium in the antivirus and firewalls.

ssl.com should not let you wait. Why does ssl.com take so much time? Do they let you know why they need weeks?

Developer

I can’t get a customer service response from ssl.com. It is supposed to take a few business days to verify our company and then they give us the certificate. Maybe they are backlogged.

Any news/updates about ssl.com?