Multiplex - a comic strip about life at the movies
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Posts Tagged ‘Multiplex for iPhone and iPod touch’

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Multiplex is now in Comic Chameleon!

Monday, June 30th, 2014

chameleon

So… big news today: you can now read Multiplex in the super popular Comic Chameleon webcomic reader for iOS. If you already use the app, check it out! If you don’t, well, you probably don’t care, because with just about every single great webcomic in existence included in their app, how could you possibly need another reason to check it out? Girls with Slingshots, Dumbing of Age, Questionable Content, HijiNKS ENSUE, Wasted Talent and many, many more are all right there at your fingertips. (Even Oglaf, for you perverts with dirty dirty fingertips!)

What does this mean for Multiplex for iPhone and iPod touch? Nothing. Jelly and I hope to add some new features to it soon (likely after iOS 8 is released). I enjoy Comic Chameleon, and I use it to read loads of my favorite webcomics, myself. But it’s not an either/or thing. There are several differences between the two apps:

Comic Chameleon has a cool panel viewing mode that makes reading really nice on smaller screens and loads of other great webcomics right in the same app. But — the Multiplex app is ad-free, has the Notes from the Manager posts, Related Strips, and the Cast pages. (There’s no way to include them. in Comic Chameleon.)

Also, only Book Seven (strips #771 and forward) are available in Comic Chameleon right now, but if people seem to like reading it in their app, I’ll find time to put more of the strips into their system. Marking all the panels up for their panel viewing mode gets time consuming when you have hundreds of comics in your archive.

Frankly, my hope for including Multiplex in Comic Chameleon is that new readers will discover the strip through their app and continue to read the comic whichever way they like most: in Comic Chameleon, on the website, in the Multiplex app… I don’t really care how people read Multiplex so long as they enjoy it. (And if I get any significant amount of ad revenue from Comic Chameleon, sweet!)

For Android users, this doesn’t change anything — for now. Sorry. Comic Chameleon has plans for an Android version in the works, but nothing firm yet.

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Multiplex for iPhone and iPod touch 2.1 is rolling out to the App Store!

Sunday, May 18th, 2014

iOS Simulator Screen shot May 13, 2014, 10.48.17 AMMultiplex for iPhone and iPod touch has a slightly overdue refresh: Version 2.1 is in the App Store — well, some places. It may take a bit to get to you, but it is coming!

As users of the app know, it has been a little dodgy lately. What’s happening is, some strip images are being loaded and the app doesn’t recognize that it has finished downloading. It’s a really weird bug, because it only started happening recently, and it only affects certain strips—but if the current strip in the strip view is affected, the app will not load.

Version 2.1 includes a completely rebuilt-for-iOS 7 strip view that fixes the issue. It also sports a UI refresh for iOS 7 (just in time for iOS 8!) and fixes a couple of other minor bugs, like one that would cause the Notes from the Manager to fail to load occasionally.

The bad news is that the app will only support iOS 7 now. Jelly (the developer) and I don’t have the resources to spend more time tracking down what’s actually causing the problem—we’ve tried and failed; it’s a free app; and Jelly is donating his time to make it exist in the first place. So, I’m sorry, iOS 6 users. You will need to upgrade to iOS 7 to use with app with any confidence. You can delete and reinstall the app and it should start working again, but as I said, some strip images may cause it to break again, and we have not been able to figure out why. Literally nothing changed in the code or in the way that I’ve prepared the images.

Hopefully more features will come soon!

If you use the app, please review it! And if you find any bugs, please let us know! We can’t fix it unless we know about it!

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Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (to the Multiplex website)

Saturday, March 22nd, 2014

Those of you playing along at home will know that thanks to the Patreon backers passing the $600/month Milestone Goal, I’m redesigning the website to remove all third-party ads entirely and to accommodate larger strip images.

There is good news and bad news about that, though. First, the vegetables: The complete site redesign is going to be a little delayed. It’s a bit more work than I have time for, because of grad school, unfortunately. But I will get to it as soon as possible.

BUT… the good news is that as a temporary measure, I’ve removed the third-party ads from the comics pages (including the homepage), although they remain on other pages of the site because removing them would break the site layout. They’ll disappear in due time, though. This temporary redesign was the simplest solution, and it removes the ads from the vast majority of the website.

I’ve also increased the size of the current — and future — strips to 900px. That’s 25% bigger! I’ll be updating the older strip images, too, as time permits. This benefits ALL Multiplex readers, whether they read on the website, the RSS feed, or the Multiplex iOS app. The Milestone Goal was announced for 900px images, but I’ve settled on 960px wide for the new site. 900px is just the largest I can make them with the current site design. Other features of the new website include a responsive layout (to play better with mobile devices) and retina display detection (to provide even larger images to displays capable of showing them).

Thank you VERY much to all of the patrons at Patreon for helping make this happen, thank you to my programmer Daniel Farrelly for devoting so much of his time and work to Multiplex, and thank you for reading!

UPDATE: I’ve updated all of Chapter 34 to the 900px size now.

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A few Multiplex iPhone app tips and tricks

Tuesday, July 9th, 2013

Multiplex app iconAs I announced last Friday, Multiplex for iPhone and iPod touch is now available in the iOS App Store! Version 2.0 has been completely rebuilt with a great new interface, so for the 10% of Multiplex readers who visit the site on iOS devices, I highly encourage you to try out the app. I use it on my iPad mini, and while there is a laundry list of features we need to add to the app (including, obviously, an iPad-specific interface), I’m really proud of what we’ve built so far.

Version 2.0 is such a big upgrade over the previous version that I wanted to get it into your hands with relatively few new features beyond the interface. There are many more features to come — but I honestly think it’s already the best webcomic reader app I’ve seen. This totally custom experience is the reason I wanted to build an app just for Multiplex rather than see it shoehorned into some one-size-fits-none interface with a dozen other comics.

iPhone app jump menuWe’ve tried to make the app as intuitive as possible, as touch-based interfaces should be, but there are a few subtle features you may not know about. None of these are essential, of course, but

• Want to jump around the app a little more quickly? Long press (tap and hold) the Info button at the bottom left of the strip view to pull up an action sheet taking you to the strip’s current chapter or book page — or to the Home screen.

• Want to view all your bookmarks a little more quickly? Sure, you can get to the Bookmarks menu from the Home screen, but you can also directly from the strip view by long pressing (tapping and holding) on the bookmark icon in the title bar.

• Going on an archive dive? Hide the interface while reading strips by simply tapping on the image.

• Lastly, I wanted to acknowledge that there is one known issue with the new app so far. On very rare occasions, the Notes from the Manager for a strip may not load. We’re trying to get to the bottom of this, but when this happens, you can tap on the view three times to force it to reload the contents and that always fixes it.

Enjoy! And please remember to rate or review the app if you like it. (And if there’s anything you don’t love about it, please send us feedback!) Helping get it in on as many devices as possible justifies our continued development of the app.

 

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