What’s new in v0.7.0
Check out the brand new Adaptive Viewer that delivers an optimal reading experience for every type of comics.
Click here to get the latest beta.
Building a better Viewer
You’re probably wondering why we wanted to redesign the Viewer. Although the old design was good enough at delivering comics to our readers, we realized that there were several limitations with the way it treated different types of comics.
As you know, comics come with multiple shapes and sizes, such as Japanese manga, Korean webtoons, and western comics. The old Viewer was not able to cater to all these comics formats. For instance, with webtoons, the Viewer could not display continuous scrolling strips properly, and it unintentionally allowed readers to read the strips page by page.
We saw a lot of room for improvement, and the best way to go about it was to rebuild it from scratch. The result is a brand new Viewer that is truly immersive, intuitive, and respectful to the content.
Introducing the next-gen Adaptive Viewer
For this update, we focused on building a smart and powerful Viewer that delivers an optimal experience for every type of comics and caters to all of your reading preferences.
First and foremost, all interface elements have been redesigned to give the Viewer a fresh new look. Right after you open a title, you’re greeted with a new onboarding view that shows you the recommended reading direction of that title.
Secondly, the default reading mode is now set to vertical, since this is the most used option among our readers as well as the natural gesture on mobile devices. But note that you can always switch back to the horizontal mode via the Viewer settings.
The new Viewer is also redesigned to display double-page spreads in a more intuitive way. This page format is often the spotlight of a chapter, where vivid and detailed visuals are drawn across two pages. Now, in vertical reading mode, simply swipe up and down and the app will automatically pan around the double page for you.
With the Smart Magnify feature, the Viewer can detect a page’s redundant borders and automatically zoom in to maximize the reading area. This helps to make text and content more readable while maintaining the overall image quality.
In the new toolbar, we added a page slider so that you can easily navigate inside a chapter. From here, you can also jump to a different chapter using the chapter list.
All other Viewer settings are now located in the More view. We realized that in the old Viewer, there were options like reading a webtoon page-by-page or reading a Japanese manga left-to-right that may lead to undesirable reading experiences. Therefore, the settings are now simplified in order to give you easier and more practical customization options.
Also in More, you can directly interact with the current title and add it to your Library lists without having to go back to its Info page. The actions available are:
- Subscribe/Unsubscribe to the title
- Add/Remove the title from Read Later list
- Add/Remove the title from Liked/Disliked lists
And more to come
The redesign with a completely new code base enables us to work on even more features for the Viewer. With the help of AI technology, we plan to introduce other smart features like auto-scrolling and smart zoom in the future.
If you have any questions or feedback about this update, feel free to share them with us. Once again, thank you for being on this journey with us.
To learn more about the Adaptive Viewer, please visit our Help Center.
To learn more about the beta and how to get it, please visit our beta website.
