I had no idea people were reading comics online! I knew Marvel had their eComic thing going on for the last year or so, but didn’t think anyone was using it. Or cared.
Who knew that there was another alternative, that’s existed for who knows how long, the CBZ and the CBR.
Essentially they’re zip and rar files with a different extension, that comic reader apps know how to unpack.
I got turned onto this scene at 360|Flex San Jose, and found an app for the mac called, Jomic. It’s not an easy experience but certainly interesting to read comics on my laptop on long flights.
So my point (other than wanting an excuse to post my Domo Halloween pic) was to say I heard about a really kick ass Android R&D project we’re working on here. With today’s Tmobile announcement, Android is officially leaving the vaporware space and hitting the mainstream.
Android has (or might have, or will have) some cool potential, and we’re making sure we’ve got that knowledge when the train leaves the station. We set up an R&D project, and the team on it, decided to create an android comic reader. It takes the comic archive files from an SD card (An emulated one at the moment) unpacks and handles all the images. Totally a proof of concept, and purely research, but how cool!
It allows navigation by touch screen, and nav buttons, so that no matter what kind of android phone it is, you can navigate it.
I asked josh, one of the developers working on this project, what his thoughts on Android were,
“Android dev for me so far has been a breath of fresh air after doing as3 for so long. I’ve missed java. The xml based layout is nice and has obvious similarities with mxml, but has a long ways to go until it
catches up with the quality and power of that present in flex.
However, the android team has done a lot to even improve that aspect during the beta. I have also come to appreciate that Android is basically a mini version of linux, so that also makes a lot of the aspects of how the phone will operate fairly intuitive.”
I asked what the hardest part of developing this app has been so far, 
“The hardest part so far with our application has been the relatively
small heap size restriction (16MB). One high res image alone can
easily bring our app crashing up against that limit. But it’s still
manageable for the most part, and we’re figuring out ways in which we
can optimize our data caching to work around that restriction.”
Gizmodo has a video demo of the G1, which looks like it’s running some things that aren’t currently in the SDK. Wonder if there will be ‘flavors’ of Android that are carrier specific?
The G1 becomes available October 22nd. The video shows some pretty compelling features, it’ll be interesting to see how Android changes/improves the iPhone market, assming Apple pays attention.
*Watchmen is a trademark of DC Comics
Wanna work on cool and compelling Android apps? iPhone apps? Let us know
I’ve been a Kindle owner since the K2 came out, and I paid almost $400 for it. I dropped it one morning and busted the screen, and bought a K3 for 1/3 the price of my K2, and I love it. It’s light, easy to use and great at the one thing it does, display words on a readable screen. Continue reading 
