What's the best Webcomic Reader for iPhone?

September 10, 2009 7:48 PM

What's the best way to read webcomics on my iPhone?

I just Googled around for 10 minutes or so and the best I could come up with was an app called Kapow, which was underwhelming at best.

Features I'd like to see:
- Smart fetching of popular comics, probably using some kind of scraping presets for each comic.
- List of favorites with other comics pushed to the bottom.
- Pre-fetching the next strip so that I don't have to wait for it to load.
- Even better, offline reading.
- Decent resizing/navigation interface.
- Remembers the last strip I read for each comic.

No problem with paying.

posted by Nameless to computers & internet (2 comments total)

Safari. InstaPaper might be ok but I haven't tried it.

There might be an app for that but if there isn't there's a lot of good reasons.

A developer taking this on facing several daunting challenges: it needs to be better than Safari in some way or there's no point. It has to do screen scraping which will be unique and constantly changing for every comic. Storing (prefetching) may run into copyright issues. Scraping the comic also will remove the ads and make the comic owners hate you.

It would also be substantially easier to do this as a web app designed for the iPhone. You'd lose offline reading but most iPhone users wouldn't care.
posted by chairface at 10:55 PM on September 10

Thanks for your response, chairface. All of these things make sense, and I've considered them. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something easy and obvious.

I think that even offline reading could be implemented in a web app, since iPhone Safari now supports offline storage. You can fit a lot of comics into 5MB.

Moral issues aside, I think that screen scraping could be accomplished with a list of rules that are periodically downloaded from a server. This would allow the developer to avoid having to store copies of the comics.
posted by Nameless at 2:08 PM on September 11