Updated J-Novel Club app coming soon!
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"J-Novel Club will also have an app coming soon featuring a night mode, sepia mode, search bar in the series list, ebooks listing and a ‘much improved’ menu navigation. The functionality will also be tweaked with background pagination, resume function fixed, local progress support, improved image loading, and Italics/bold/center all parse and are paginatable. More features are in the works including offline reading, download premium epub direct to device, and reading list."
Source: https://animeuknews.net/2018/07/j-novel-club-anime-expo-2018-announcements/
I had a quick search of the forum and couldn't see a reference to this announcement.
I'm really looking forward to this!
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@shiny I mentioned this in my AX livestream summary post. Haven't listed any specifics, though, because those are pretty much just bug fixes and popular requests that were already said to be in the works. Anyhow, I'm pretty sure it's more accurate to call it updated rather than new.
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Sounds like solid update to me, I've only just recently gotten into the whole ebook thing, directly because of JNC.. and trying to find programs/apps an whatnot was a headache.. While I've got a system o sorts up an go'n now, it's bit basic lol, an I'd found it a bit odd that couldn't read titles which I'd bought from JNC on their own app which lets us subbed-members read the pre-pubs through.
At very least being able to download a copy right to my phone will save one step of my convoluted process i've got currently.
~Isto -
@istolla said in New J-Novel Club app coming soon!:
I'd found it a bit odd that couldn't read titles which I'd bought from JNC on their own app which lets us subbed-members read the pre-pubs through.
That could be explained by looking at options for .epub readers:
- They exist, meaning JNC can just tell everyone to use them instead of implementing stuff in their app
- Most, if not all of them has several issues so you can tell it's pretty damn hard to make a solid reader, and even more time consuming if you target multiple platforms
So while that's something you may see as a part of the perfect JNC app image, that's certainly not something that's gonna happen in near future. Lots of other features would have higher priority (the current version doesn't have proper resuming and it takes about 1 minute to load very big parts, imagine reading full e-books with that).
That said, the feature that would actually be relatively simple to implement in an app (but maybe somewhat more complicated on the server) is allowing e-book owners to read prepubs regardless of expiration and membership (and maybe throw in the illustrations as well). Kind of how wakanim lets you stream (lower-quality, subscription based) web streams if you bought their (higher-quality, pay-per-episode) DLs.
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@_08 said in New J-Novel Club app coming soon!:
@shiny I mentioned this in my AX livestream summary post. Haven't listed any specifics, though, because those are pretty much just bug fixes and popular requests that were already said to be in the works. Anyhow, I'm pretty sure it's more accurate to call it updated rather than new.
Thanks for your summary post. I've now changed the title of the thread to say updated app rather than new app.
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@_08 It was listed as one of the coming soon features (not in this update) as well as offline reading. I don’t know how to embed photos but I checked the photo I took to verify and it’s there.
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I once asked on CuriousCat if Sam could add the ability to zoom in on illustrations in the prepubs in the app. I hope that’ll be a thing in the update.
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@the-green-death said in Updated J-Novel Club app coming soon!:
@_08 It was listed as one of the coming soon features
They listed downloading (not reading) premium books. Which is a feature that both my and @Jaquobus's app is likely to have sooner than official one.
I don’t know how to embed photos
Upload to imgur or a similar service and insert with  syntax.
@legitpancake said in Updated J-Novel Club app coming soon!:
I once asked on CuriousCat if Sam could add the ability to zoom in on illustrations in the prepubs in the app. I hope that’ll be a thing in the update.
Really doubt it's gonna have much other than announced stuff.
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@_08 I don’t understand why someone would want to download the books if they couldn’t read them. Can you explain the difference? (Not being belligerent I just don’t understand - an unfortunately frequent situation in my old brain)
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If it's easier to download through the app than the website, then folks who have a third party reader wouldn't care about reading epubs in the app.
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@the-green-death Opening the JNC app, quickly finding the volume in the library, clicking the download button in the app and opening it in the third party reader instead opening the browser of going to website, maybe logging in, going to account page, going to library (which may not be too nice to navigate), finding the volume there, clicking the download button and finally opening it in the third party reader. Former will be much less painful unless you really mess it up.
And unless you have super-fast network there might be difference from that as well because in the app you need like one request to get a list of owned volumes and then one more to download. Via website you'd need like ten requests to various servers plus a dozen more slow requests if things aren't cached. -
Ah, that makes sense. Thank you!
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The app was covered at AX around 22:15-24:45 at https://www.periscope.tv/jnovelclub/1jMJgEWmPEqKL
Slide 1:
- New App Version!
Slide 2:
- New Features! Night mode, sepia mode, search bar in series list, ebooks listing, much improved menu.
- Improved Functionality! Just in time background pagination, Resume function fixed, supports local progress. Italics/bold/center all parse ans are paginatable. Improved image loading.
- Coming Soon: Offline reading, download premium epub direct to device. Reading list,
Statements (paraphrase):
- It is not on the App Store yet, but will be out there fairly soon.
- Redesigned menu completely.
- No more 10-15 second delay when you start reading as it will paginate later pages in the background.
- Improved image loading which should fix things on large Samsung devices.
- Trying to put as many features in the app to make it a nice place to read the latest parts.
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I'm excited the image bug with my crappy Samsung tablet is fixed!
~ flarecde
Reality is nothing; Perception is everything. -
@flarecde You and me both
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@eternal-wanderer I hope so anyway! I think I've determined the source of the issue (hardware acceleration attempts to stretch it using OpenGL bitmap textures but your devices memory is too small for the resolution it tries. Changing the resize method to software before rendering should fix it.
