Who likes manga?

Feature/UI suggestion – netsurf-style split horiz scrollbar with page forwards/backwards icons, and maybe some sort of bookmark icon to quickly jump back to a previously marked page.

A scrollbar is not a gadget, it’s a part of a window – so isn’t a split scrollbar basically a window with another window that is only a scrollbar pasted on top?

Maybe an optional tool pane (Draw/OvationPro style) would be better – it could have some other icons on it as well.

Since it’s not a productivity app I‘d prefer an optional tool pane as Rick suggests. Otherwise it‘d be similar to having your TV‘s on screen menu on all the time while trying to watch GoT (or whatever). So personally not keen on adding visible icons, IMHO!
Can’t see the need for dedicated next/last page buttons either.

A scrollbar is not a gadget, it’s a part of a window – so isn’t a split scrollbar basically a window with another window that is only a scrollbar pasted on top?

No. It was once upon a time, but the Nested Wimp allows you to embed the small tool window into the main window’s scroll bar and push the bar out of the way. As far as the code behind the main window is concerned, it’s just a normal window with two scroll bars.

So personally not keen on adding visible icons, IMHO!

Ditto. I wanted to keep the interface minimal.

Can’t see the need for dedicated next/last page buttons either.

Yeah, that one confused me but I had to go clock back in (and do paid work) so didn’t have time to say anything earlier. Click Select (anywhere on the Manga) for next page, Adjust for previous page, hold Shift to skip 10 page. Why have buttons to duplicate that?

but the Nested Wimp allows you to embed the small tool window into the main window’s scroll bar and push the bar out of the way. As far as the code behind the main window is concerned, it’s just a normal window with two scroll bars.

Ooh, I didn’t know that. Can you point me at any simple code to demonstrate how that works? Can the pane go on either side?

A sort-of-related question. When calculating how to scale the images when scaling to fit, I work out the size of the screen, then subtract some (132 OS units) for the iconbar, then some more (currently guestimated at 72 OS units) to account for the title bar and the lower scroll bar. What’s left is how tall the JPEG can be to fit.
Is there an official way to read the Wimp’s metrics?
Is the iconbar always guaranteed to be a fixed size? It looks like the height (132 OS units) is derived from the “iconbar” window defined in Resources:$.Resources.Wimp.Templates, so I guess it could change?
Likewise, the furniture. I could probably prod around in the Wimp’s sprite pool to work out which sicon is being used (nosuffix/22/11), and which cicon, read their sizes, convert to OS units, then add them. But surely there’s a better way than rummaging around the Wimp’s tool sprites?!?

Is the iconbar always guaranteed to be a fixed size? It looks like the height (132 OS units) is derived from the “iconbar” window defined in Resources:$.Resources.Wimp.Templates, so I guess it could change?

I’ve used Wimp_GetWindowOutline with a window handle of -2 before when I’ve needed to know the height of the iconbar. Not sure if this is ‘proper’ though, probably not.

Can you point me at any simple code to demonstrate how that works? Can the pane go on either side?

I have some assembler code which puts a writable icon and 3 small icons at the left of the horizontal scrollbar. The trick was to get the nesting flags correct for that position, and with the correct size the scrollbar magically adjusts itself. The documentation seemed a little cryptic to me! The overlay would go at the right, with different flags. I could send you an extract of that code – it would not work asis, but would provide some clues. If this would help, give me some clues what address I should use.

If this would help, give me some clues what address I should use.

https://www.heyrick.co.uk/blog/index.php?diary=20171203

Top of the content, just under the green title bar.

While you’re there, enjoy the song. It’s amusing.

PM sent to Rick.

Thanks for that. Yahoo! dumped the message into Spam – but ever since Verizon took over the Purple Palace, that’s been pretty much the expected behaviour. I probably ought to give up and use GMail instead, only I don’t trust Google not to discontinue something important, like IMAP access… [GMail address is the same before-the-@ as the Yahoo! address, in case anybody cares]

Following the code wasn’t hard, armed with a copy of the Nested Wimp Spec from Vigay’s site. The hard part was picking apart how DeskLib actually creates a window, so I could dupe the function and push in some extra flags. Then drop to inline assembler to do the OpenWindow (so I could use R2-R4). I guess some day I’ll fudge together a few extra routines in DeskLib itself to make this easier. ;-)

The results? Not that bad, actually.

This is a mock-up. The icons don’t do anything… yet.

The first two icons are Previous/Next. Utterly pointless, IMHO, but we all know somebody’s gonna ask.
The two icons afterwards are potentially more interesting. The ‘c’ is for “Centre” and it will be an intelligent toggle. When clicked with Select, it will toggle on and off the behaviour of automatically centring the page when loading a new page (as it currently does). If centring is off and you Adjust-click, it’ll centre the current window on the screen. [for those who have not used Manga – the main viewer resizes as applicable for the image; and not all images are the same size, particularly covers and intro images that are in colour and span two pages, etc]
The ‘’ button will behave in a similar manner, only it will toggle scale-to-fit; and if I can pull out the image file loading to be separate from the image retrieval, then maybe it can have immediate effect and perhaps Adjust-click to temporarily perform a one-off of the opposite scaling method?
The ’b’ button is shaded, it’s for a future idea.

I wasn’t sure what I’d think of an inline toolbar, but now I have one I can see it is actually a lot smaller and tidier than the five off-the-side pane concepts I tried yesterday. As always, the design is intended to be minimalist, so it’s simple characters, not fancy blingy icons. I might tweak the text shading to be lighter (less visually offensive if the machine is using a heavy font like Homerton or Sassoon, or – god help you – the VDU text).
As expected, this will be an option you can turn on and off as you like. I seem to have accumulated a couple of those. I think maybe it’s about time to think about having a Settings window!

Comments?

Is the page displayed – a sprite – or are the words added after?

If the words are extra – what about adding sound – ie speak support?

It’s a raw JPEG – “scanlation”.

For those of you on the beta track, v0.11 is now available.

• Toolbar (if your Wimp is up to it)
• All messages are now held in a Messages file, donc il peut être traduit au fran¢aise (mais alors – pourquoi? les mangas sont toujours written in English!)
• Now supports interactive help
• Option to disable the auto-centering of the viewer window. It’s useful on smaller displays like my 1280×1024, but it might be a PITA if you have a huge display.

Please let me know how this behaves for you (specifically if you spot any incorrect or blank messages). If it’s good, I can push this to !Store as an update.

Just noticed from the server logs, somebody in Germany (Frohes neues Jahr!) downloading the latest version by guessing the URL. Got it in two tries, too. :-)

It’s here:

http://heyrick.ddns.net/manga/manga_0-11.zip (62.7KiB)

If everything looks good, I’ll push it to !Store soon.

For the most part it works fine for me. I think it’s mostly issues outside the program causing issues, like the occasional failed load. Worse are the partial page loads that stall forever. The only way to fix that is to kill Manga as there is no means to cancel a page load (that I know of).

Worse are the partial page loads that stall forever.

Strange. That’s supposed to time out. I’ll need to look at what’s going on there.

Thanks for the report.

Read the entirety of Summer Wars (!Manga link) without a problem.

Eventually I gave up and faked a transfer stall by unplugging the Vonets in the middle of a download. That had the desired effect, though it must surely be rare that the server gives up sending data but keeps the connection open…

…anyway, I’ve added a forced timeout that if no data is received in a five second period, Manga will give up and report a problem. Even on a slow link, something should arrive within the time period. Can you please try this and let me know if it resolves the problem, or if the timeout needs adjusting? Does anybody still use dialup? :-)

[ Auto-update (beta track) within the app, or http://heyrick.ddns.net/manga/manga_0-12.zip ]

Great work.
Works like a charm on my Pi3.
Thank you very much.

The updated version works well. Failed(?) loads are timing out after a while now. Been spending way too much time with it now reading “Black Jack”. Thanks again for what I consider to be a killer app!

For those who didn’t want to do the beta-track stuff, I’ve just pushed v0.12S to !Store.

[the ‘S’ suffix means Store, slight change to configuration (edited !Run file ☺) to not attempt to auto-check for updates by default; this’ll probably become the new default in a future release, as I don’t know how to check the version available from !Store and since it’s on !Store I don’t bother updating my website; it’s only the beta-track that this is useful for…]

Thanks Rick! Since I left my BBxM at home I‘ll probably install it on my Raspberry Pi model A. Unfortunately the screen on my Atrix Lapdock is a bit on the small side, much preferred using !Manga on 1920×1080!

Thanks again for what I consider to be a killer app!

I agree. I think it’s brilliant. It brings loads of new content to RISC OS.

Beta-Track: I’ve pushed out v0.14.

• Now uses multitasking Resolver DNS lookup.
  I found when I first used it the lookups were failing immediately the first time, then working, but this stopped happening about as quickly as it started, so I have an error prompt that will provide an error number. Please report that to me if you see it – it might have been something daft like the Livebox being “busy” so the DNS lookup failed?

• Fixed bug where scaling but not actually needing to scale would tell ChangeFSI to scale by a factor of zero. :-)

• Documentation and Messages tweaks and fixes.

Have fun!

But…

Please note for the future, a RealSoonNow™ version of Manga (quite possibly the next) will change the cache image filenames to have three digits for the chapter and page numbering. A one-time convertor will be supplied to map the old names to the new format. The same release will likely also include a cache expiry system to delete images over X days old (‘X’ will be defined in the !Run file).
This is being done because my cache contains 3,301 files (517MiB). It’s supposed to be a CACHE, not an eternal dustbin! :-)

Beta-Track: You can now upgrade to v0.15 if you wish.

This version introduces a big change to the way files are cached. Instead of being “J_” then the manga ID, then the chapter and page numbers… the manga ID is a directory name and the actual file is the chapter/page number held within.

Because:

• I had around 3,100 files in my cache. Kudos to RISC OS for not choking (remember when 77 files was yer lot?), but that was kind of ridiculous.

• The names would not have been unique to ten characters so would not have worked properly on RISC OS 3.×. Now it should work on such older machines, but note the 77 files/dir thing.

• And changed the chapter/page references to use three digits instead of two. It would have “overflowed” to three anyway, but that would be untidy in the directory listing, etc.

Manga will perform a one-time conversion of the files in your cache. Be patient while it does so.
[it did my lot (Pi2, Class 10 SD) in around two minutes]

You shouldn’t revert to an older version of Manga as it won’t understand the new cache method and will download everything afresh.
Running this version of Manga afterwards will fix up the stray cache files from an older version either by moving them or deleting duplicates. So don’t worry if you do wish to use an older version, v0.15 can cope!

Didn’t work on cache expiry today. It’s twenty to eleven and I’m hungry… :-)

would not have worked properly on RISC OS 3.×. Now it should work on such older machines…

Huh? I kinda assumed you’d need something like RISC OS 5 and a remotely modern machine to run Manga. What are the minimum specs? Guess I could try installing it on my A4000 for laughs.