Peruse 1.2 "The Winter Wonderland Release"

My sister, with a cup of gløgg and some
æbleskiver, reading Wasteland Mutants in Peruse.

Today marks a very interesting day: Near enough to six months after its initial release, this will be the final release (minus any potential minor revision work) of the 1.x series of the comic book reader Peruse.

Why is it the final release, you say? Well, easy - there will be a 2.x series, which will be based upon Kirigami 2, and further have a bunch of new features and behavioural changes which all together makes it sensible to make a big version number change. So, no, this is not the final release of Peruse itself, only the 1.x series - rest assured that there is a very bright future indeed for your favourite comic book reader built by and powered by the KDE community!

Where can I get it?!

Don't want to wait? Well, certainly, don't let me stop you! Hop right over to the Peruse website and grab yourself a copy of whichever version best matches your needs.

What's in this?

While you wait for your download, let's have a look at what you can find in this shiny, new version of Peruse. The same features you found in 1.1 are still there, of course: CBZ, PDF and ePub support, alongside a few other less common ones. A handy continue-where-you-left-off feature with support for multiple books. A collection system with filtering options based on author, title, folder structure and so on. Full screen mode, with both touch and keyboard controls. All that stuff you already know.

As for new things, however, we have done some major overhauling of the PDF and ePub support, which is now considerably more solid, with less glitchy rendering and a more usable view. Still based on Okular, but using a more Peruse-like navigation system, which makes the whole thing feel more at home.

A whole bunch of little annoyances have been ironed out as well, and using Peruse is now more pleasant as a result. Things like using a more natural title for title-less comic book archives, and supporting basic ACBF information will come in handy when browsing your collection, and when reading.

What about shinies?

This version is not all just cleaning and polishing, you also have a preview of things to come: There is now a (very basic) shop, which you can find in the sidebar with the title "Get Hot New Books", which is by no means the final name, and is more alluding to the name of the technology underneath. Clicking on this entry will let you download and read comics from the share.krita.org comic section, which is currently quite low on content - something which the second thing being previewed in this version might help with.

Peruse Creator is a partner application to Peruse Reader, designed to allow the many creative people out there to easily produce comic book archives, for use not only with Peruse, but with any other comic book readers out there. The version shipped with this release is an initial, basic version, a sort of proof of concept. Even then, it already has support for creating comic book archives with ACBF information embedded, including not only titles and other basic information like that, but also genres and the like. Important to note is that comic book archives made using Peruse Creator will, even though they have ACBF information embedded, work just fine with applications which do not support this: They will simply not have the information available, and really just work like any other cbz file you might come across.

What's next?

Bear with me as I go slightly fluffy for a moment: The next step for Peruse is to close the cycle between creation and consumption. We want to make it as easy for the readers and the makers to achieve their goals, which here is, of course, to let the readers read the things the makers make. This is not simply a case of creating a store that people can put things on and get things from, it is about creating the tools which allow the readers to read the content they want to read, in the most comfortable manner possible, and for the makers to make the content they want to make, in the most comfortable manner possible. That all sounds nice and logical, right? But, what, more precisely, does it mean?

For the readers, it means creating a place where they can get that content, the store which is previewed in this version. The version in Peruse now is extremely simple, and really, it would be great to hear what you all want out of it. We have ideas of our own, like showing you what's next in a series where you have downloaded and completed reading a book, and there are more books available on the store. And to show various categories and the like in the store, to let you find things you want to read. Most of all, though, we want to hear what you want to be able to do.

For the makers, it means letting you create comics not only comfortably, but efficiently as well. The creation tool is currently simplistic, but we want to support all the features that ACBF allows for, to allow our makers to make comics which can do things they could not do on paper alone, such as frame based navigation instead of simply page-by-page navigation. Again, we want to hear from you what you want to be able to do.

We in this case are myself and the KDE Visual Design Group, and we would absolutely welcome input from everybody out there, because you are the people we want to be able to make happy. So please, get in touch and we will greatly enjoy listening to your amazing ideas, so we can create the best Peruse possible.

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The word of the day is: Boiler. Because we are having a new one installed right now. Have been without heating for over a week now, so getting that sorted is nice ;)