A new *unofficial* reader application for j-novel.club (**now also for Android**)

Jaquobus

Oh well, with all the new novels out there to read, I thought I might as well release a new version of the app, too. It mostly fixes two stupid things:

It doesn't re-render the whole part when changing a page, but only the pages which will be displayed
Put the HTTP cache in the cache directory on Android

chocolatkey

@Jaquobus Being a big Qt fan that never had the time to get into QML/Quick, I finally had time to play around with your code. The renderer is somewhat buggy, but nothing that couldn't be improved with some work. Was playing around with themes, icons etc. and also added a blur effect when the reader is busy repaginating.
0_1544311883381_ce835bd5-a802-4783-9f56-17268465aaba-image.png
0_1544312352694_0fb0ee2c-efb7-458d-8100-0fc1f8a88f83-image.png

Going to try and add vertical mode in

Jaquobus

@chocolatkey Have fun. I currently lack the time to develop features myself, but I can still answer questions, or merge features. The icons do look nice.

zchronos

After a while using this app, my opinion:

This unofficial app is better than the official....

Thanks you very much!.

Jaquobus

I'm happy to announce a new release: Version 0.4.0 for Android is out! It requires Android 5.1 or later.

User visible changes

On smartphones, volumes and parts aren't crammed into the same view anymore. Instead, you'll select the volume first, and a list of parts will be displayed.
The filter bar is hidden by default; if you want to filter series/volumes, you'll have to click on the magnifying class icon first
Thank to contribution from Ricky there is now a Black theme. Furthermore, when using the Dark or Black theme, not only the rendered pages but the whole application will use a dark theme. Furthermore, the reader ships with the Literata font, and uses it by default on fresh installations.
There is now pull-to-refresh support (though that one doesn't work that great yet in all honesty)
Parts in the latest releases' list now display the date when they were added

Changes under the hood

There is now support for ArmV8. This increases the APK size, but should give better performance on most newer devices.
When the application is suspended, it releases some resources. That makes it less likely to be killed by the Android scheduler.
Ported the core viewer component from QQuickPaintedItem to the scene graph; this should lower resource usage, and allows to make scrolling smoother in upcoming releases.

As quite a few things have changed, I expect that bugs and regressions slipped through. You can report issues in the bugtracker, or directly here in this thread. Also if you have any feature requests, make sure to tell me about them too.
Lastly, in case someone wants a release for Windows: That's not really an issue, but unless someone requests it I won't do one.

Serah

Seeing something like this makes you wonder why JNC does not put the app as open source and offer you a freelancer job instead of having an official one which does not work so well and an unofficial one which does do a better job.

BartzBB

@jaquobus
I tried installing it but I received an error: "Parse error, There was a problem parsing the package."

Jaquobus

@bartzbb That error can have multiple causes:

You have app installation from unknown sources disabled; you'd need to at least temporarily allow it
Your Android version is < 5.1; that's unfortunately unsupported.
You have an Android device running on a x86 processor. Tell me if that's the case, then I'll upload a version for x86.
Your download was for some reason incomplete/corrupted. Maybe try downloading it again, if none of the above applies to you.

_08

@jaquobus said in A new *unofficial* reader application for j-novel.club (**now also for Android**):

Thank to contribution from Ricky there is now a Black theme. Furthermore, when using the Dark or Black theme, not only the rendered pages but the whole application will use a dark theme. Furthermore, the reader ships with the Literata font, and uses it by default on fresh installations.

I couldn't change font size until I cleared app's data.

There is now pull-to-refresh support (though that one doesn't work that great yet in all honesty)

Refreshing volume list always causes vector's out of range exception.

As quite a few things have changed, I expect that bugs and regressions slipped through.

Probably an old bug: going to the last page in reader's portrait mode and switching to landscape causes the app to stuck.

jnovelclubconnector.cpp:
// extract all image URLs (the HTML should be simple enough in this case to make the RegEx approach feasible
static QRegularExpression re(QStringLiteral(R"|(<img\s*src="([^"]*)"\s*(/?)>)|"));

I also used to think that but then Underdog's first image was like <img class="center" src="..."> edit: tearmoon's V1P14 doesn't even have quotation marks in src="..."

Disclaimer: I'm not actually using this app.

BartzBB

@jaquobus
The device that I used is using KitKat OS. Just a suggestion it would probably better if you indicated the supported OS in your post.

seltzermx

Trying the app out. Liking how well it flows. 2 questions:

how do you make don't bigger? Seems small and can't figure how to resize.
what is the library function in the your account section? Can I add series to keep track of there? If so, how do I do this?

Thanks!

Serah

@seltzermx said in A new *unofficial* reader application for j-novel.club (**now also for Android**):

Trying the app out. Liking how well it flows. 2 questions:

how do you make don't bigger? Seems small and can't figure how to resize.

what is the library function in the your account section? Can I add series to keep track of there? If so, how do I do this?

Thanks!

Surprising how a fellow fan expects so much from another fan's work, instead of asking the official JNC app's developer. Makes you wonder how much people would donate for a really good unofficial app.

_08

@seltzermx said in A new *unofficial* reader application for j-novel.club (**now also for Android**):

how do you make don't bigger? Seems small and can't figure how to resize.

You need to type it in the "Current font size" field in "your account" tab. Not the best UI here.

what is the library function in the your account section? Can I add series to keep track of there? If so, how do I do this?

It's supposed to be similar to website's library but it doesn't work (yet).

seltzermx

@serah said in A new *unofficial* reader application for j-novel.club (**now also for Android**):

@seltzermx said in A new *unofficial* reader application for j-novel.club (**now also for Android**):

Trying the app out. Liking how well it flows. 2 questions:

how do you make don't bigger? Seems small and can't figure how to resize.

what is the library function in the your account section? Can I add series to keep track of there? If so, how do I do this?

Thanks!

Surprising how a fellow fan expects so much from another fan's work, instead of asking the official JNC app's developer. Makes you wonder how much people would donate for a really good unofficial app.

I'm not "expecting" anything out of it. I'm asking if there's someway to do what I asked. I would be willing to donate to a good app for sure.

And I have made comments on the usability of the official app. Not much more I can do about that.

smashman42

I've stuck with the other unofficial app since forever, how do they compare?

Just curious as I note the creator of the other one is active in this thread too.

Jaquobus

@smashman42 @_08's app currently has more features (horizontal scrolling mode, manga support, etc.); and at least until I do the next release fewer bugs. I'd say has a more "androidy" look and feel, mostly due to differences in the used framework.

I guess they both were born out of dissatisfaction of their respective authors with the official app, and gain features when someone requests an addition, or whenever the author feels bored ¯\(ツ)/¯.