02-22-2005, 04:00 PM
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Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 15,171
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ComicEdge: Comic Reader For Pocket PCs
"You'll always be entertained with dozens of the most popular comics available at your fingertips. Webcomics, syndicated comics, and editorial comics are all there. You can view the last 2-4 weeks of comic strips and keep track of which ones are read and which ones are new."
I've got a ton of webcomics I read every day (15? More? I've lost count) and a tool like this sounds like the ideal way of keeping track of them. Best of all, it's free during the current beta period. I'll have to download it and check it out. 
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02-22-2005, 04:21 PM
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Mystic
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 1,725
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Nice. The two comics I read are available with it.
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02-22-2005, 04:40 PM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Jul 2006
Posts: 56
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Looks cool, but I can do this already with any RSS reader.
Well....I use to be able to anyway, it appears the Tapestry website that normally hosts the RSS feeds for the comics has gone bye-bye. It is my guess that ComicEdge also uses Tapestry since I could not get a list of comics when it starts up. That is to bad for ComicEdge, just goes to show, relying on others peoples data or web sties could be a bad thing.
I found a new site http://www.comicalert.com it is a free site, but you have to setup a username an password. Then you subscribe to whatever comics you want and pint to a rss feed. There are hundreds of different web comics out there and comic alert looks like it have links to all of them.
EDIT: Hmmm...just setup comic alert and unfortunately, they don't send the comic strip in the news item, they just link back to the website that has the comic strip. So, not a good alternative, hopefully the Tapestry site will go back up sometime soon, otherwise I will have to create a way to grab the strips myself.
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02-22-2005, 04:52 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 148
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What ComicEdge does is legal, but I don't believe it is ethical. Essentially, what it does is take the content from web sites, most of which are advertising supported, and present it to you without the advertising.
Just something to think about before you sign up for this service.
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02-22-2005, 05:23 PM
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Sage
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 797
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Ed@Brighthand
What ComicEdge does is legal, but I don't believe it is ethical. Essentially, what it does is take the content from web sites, most of which are advertising supported, and present it to you without the advertising.
Just something to think about before you sign up for this service.
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You mean like the thousands upon thousands of people reading sites with RSS readers?
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02-22-2005, 05:25 PM
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Mystic
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 1,734
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Quote:
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ComicEdge pushs the latest comic URLs to your phone so they you directly read your favorite comics. It does not store any comics on its servers or on the phone so it does not violate any copyrights or trademarks. All it does is lets you directly access the latest strips from your favorite comics. It would be the same as if you opened up PocketIE and started typing in the image URLs of comics available online. ComicEdge just gets you that information fast and effectively.
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Can I agree with Ed. If they are planning on charging for this product, and making money this way, they are being terribly unethical. They are costing bandwidth but stripping away any source of revenue for the website and comic producer. This kind of thing kills the digital commons.
On the other hand I would not really be prepared to pay much for the service. Maybe $10 per year, which I assume is much more than they can expect to earn from ad impressions from me (as I nearly never click on advertising links) Unfortuanately I expect Dilbert et al would rather charge me $30 for only their collection of comics.
I would not use this service, but I hope this prompts the comic syndication people to start a service of their own, at a price but stripped of ads. Of course more likely they will fight against the service and even remove their comics form the web. Only time will tell I guess...
Surur
PS: A simple way to fight this would be to use tables to break the comic into small uneven bits. That would prevent one url from representing the whole picture, and would only display properly in the right container enviroment.
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02-22-2005, 05:27 PM
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Sage
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 797
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They're only providing a vehicle for downloading the comics and keeping up to date, they're not really selling the content. No worse than an RSS reader or other News Aggregator. Most of them charge also... (Feed Demon comes to mind)
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02-22-2005, 05:39 PM
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Mystic
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 1,734
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by vincenzosi
They're only providing a vehicle for downloading the comics and keeping up to date, they're not really selling the content. No worse than an RSS reader or other News Aggregator. Most of them charge also... (Feed Demon comes to mind)
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Dont most of them redirect you to the full story or web page when you click on the link,which allows the site to earn money from advertising, versus only displaying the content from the page without any opportunity for ads at all?
Surur
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02-22-2005, 05:51 PM
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Sage
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 797
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Surur
Quote:
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Originally Posted by vincenzosi
They're only providing a vehicle for downloading the comics and keeping up to date, they're not really selling the content. No worse than an RSS reader or other News Aggregator. Most of them charge also... (Feed Demon comes to mind)
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Dont most of them redirect you to the full story or web page when you click on the link,which allows the site to earn money from advertising, versus only displaying the content from the page without any opportunity for ads at all?
Surur |
There is no "most" with RSS. They display the feed depending on the configuration of the site. There are tons of sites that are ad-supported that place their full article content in their RSS feed, completely alleviating the need for visiting the site altogether.
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02-22-2005, 06:02 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 241
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To lean back into the topic for a bit . . .
I installed this program, and it seems nice at first, but there are two kind of major (in my book) flaws I have identified.
In the 'feed' selection screen, you have to click on each item and choose subscribe for each. so with a list of a hundred or two, that means 200 taps if you want them all. select all, or some type of multiple selection process would be nice here.
The other flaw, even majorer ( :roll: ) is that this is not an aggregator. This does not compare to RSS at all. All this does, is give you links, and when you select one, it goes to the website (i am assuming it goes to comic edge website) to get the comic currently selected. It does not store this on the ppc, and if you are offline you can not use this program.
My that surely will be useful for me on the train, i can select hundreds of comics that i cant read because i dont have them.
If im at the office, i will use the desktop computer to read. I guess this would be fine for internet enabled devices, but I was really hoping this would be a comic aggregator. That would be the answer to my dreams. honest 
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