Thursday 13 September 2012

Problem (and Solution) with Mangaupdates

Hi, this is your programmer :)

Today I want to share my experience on fixing a bug on MangaUpdates. First I have to explain the bug.

We use various site to empower All Manga Mobile. We scrap manga sources from MangaReader, MangaFox, etc to manga and images. And we go to MangaUpdates for manga information. Why do we use MangaUpdates? Because it has the most reliable manga rating and status (Ongoing, Discontinued, Hiatus or Completed) in the internet. I visit MangaUpdates at least once a day!

We use Jsoup for scraping the site. Jsoup is very handy and easy to use. I've been using it for years (just 2 years actually). I will not discuss how I use Jsoup here since it will take a lot of time and page :(

The problem is: we Jsoup accept very specific charset. We can use "UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1", and "LATIN-1" as input  charset . But it will fail for something trivial like "LATIN1" or "LATIN 1." And what's worse, recent MangaUpdates, which usually give correct charset name, decide to give us "LATIN" as its charset name. In turn our server broke for days and I figured it out a bit too late. I made a hack so we won't accept any URL from MangaUpdates for a while until I had the time to fix it.

And the time came just now. What I did is basically getting the byte of the Jsoup response and parse it manually by assuming its charset is "LATIN-1" or "ISO-8859-1" instead of "LATIN." Here's some snippets

My code used to look like this:

Document mangaUpdatesDoc = Jsoup.connect(url).get();

Now it looks like this:

Connection con = Jsoup.connect(url);
Response resp = con.execute();
String html = new String(resp.bodyAsBytes(), "ISO-8859-1");
Document mangaUpdatesDoc = Jsoup.parse(html);

A bit long and inefficient. But at least it works!

Hope it helps!

Saturday 28 July 2012

All Manga Mobile v.0.2.0

After weeks of development, we officially release All Manga Mobile v.0.2.0. This is a huge update (which is the reason it took so long for release).

Here's full changelogs:

  1. Added manga source on Advanced Search. Selecting specific manga sources might reduce your network workload significantly!
  2. Added more manga source. French, German, Indonesian, Italian and Spanish manga are now available!
  3. Changed reader significantly! This will result in very fast reading experience. This reader is in very beta phase. Please let us know if there's anything wrong.
  4. Beta offline reader. This will let you view images on one folder as manga with its navigation and things. And because it's still in beta phase, please let us know if there's anything wrong.
  5. Progress bar on reader.
  6. Pretty and more informative notification.
  7. Achievement has more info now.
  8. Faster read list loading (will be very slow first time but will be blazing fast later on).
  9. Added new scale mode.
  10. Search result fix for Android 4.0 above so the results can be sorted by name and rating.
  11. Fix more bugs.

New manga source selector. And new manga sources, too!

Beta offline reader. Open your images as manga from your favorite file browser.
And I (All Manga Mobile's programmer) learned a lot from this updates. I'll write some technical post about this later.

More features is coming up! Stay tuned!


Give us a drop at Facebook and let us know what do you think about this new version!.
Get it on Google Play

Saturday 30 June 2012

All Manga Mobile v.0.1.4.1 released for more bug fixes

We know we're making so much update lately but we hope you are not bothered by it. All Manga Mobile v.0.1.4.1 contains more bug fixes, some performance improvement and more! Here's a complete changelog

  1. Fix some force close bug while reading manga and going to next chapter.
  2. Fix some search bug where search doesn't work when you try to exclude only one genre.
  3. Slight performance improvement.
  4. Decrease file size (All Manga Mobile is less than 1 megabytes now!)
  5. Reading on "Fit to height" mode now more fuller and better than before!
  6. Remember some annoying bug when the page just went blank without reason? You can fix that by selecting "Refresh" on reading option! (we are working on automatic fix).
Notice the new "Refresh" option 
Right now we're working on improving server performance and adding manga source for Spanish, French, Indonesian, Malay and Italian language. Be sure to keep updated on All Manga Mobile!


Give us a drop at Facebook and let us know what do you think about this new version!.
Get it on Google Play

Wednesday 27 June 2012

All Manga Mobile v.0.1.4 released!


New version of All Manga Mobile (v0.1.4) is on market now! It includes bug fixes, slight performance improvement, new reading UI interface and new manga source: MangaHere.
You can edit your settings straight from reading mode!

Give us a drop at Facebook and let us know what do you think about this new version!.
Get it on Google Play

Sunday 17 June 2012

Regarding Connection Error

Hi,

We want to officially apologize for the inconvenience in All Manga Mobile regarding Connection Error message. This is basically caused by our cloud service is in sudden maintenance. The length of the maintenance is still unknown. We are trying our best to serve All Manga Mobile online again as soon as possible.

We're very sorry for the trouble and thanks for your attention.

Saturday 16 June 2012

All Manga Mobile v.0.1.0 released!

Yes! After weeks of development, finally All Manga Mobile is released for Android!
We are scheduling a time for iOS release but it might not come out real soon after all. Sorry guys :(
It was really fun thinking how users will use this feature. What if there's something here, something there and we have yet to handle it. But we figured out that releasing it to market maybe our best bet to actually improve All Manga Mobile.
Handling different screen resolutions was no easy task. We had to test in on different phones and made different assets for each screen. But it is worth the efforts!
Actually some of the features came up from our early users. Like recommendations and reading navigation bar. We wonder whether we can actually make All Manga Mobile be the best manga reader when there're more input to consider.
Even the woody UI is feedback from one of our friend!
And yeah Nisekoi are programmer's favorite manga now. He just love Kirisaki so much!
Give us a drop at Facebook and let us know what do you think about All Manga Mobile.
Get it on Google Play

Tuesday 13 March 2012

Spoiler: All Manga Mobile

I'm about to introduce my new project: All Manga Mobile. This project continues the development of Manga Mobile to the next level. Inspired by All Manga Reader, All Manga Mobile will improve manga reading experience to the next level.

First and foremost, the most important thing of All Manga Mobile: Manga Mobile Service. Manga Mobile Service is a server hosted with cloud computing power to serve the request of Manga Mobile user. This way Manga Mobile user will only have to download required files for his phone to read manga, thus improve overall performance of Manga Mobile.

Next is All Manga Mobile Client. The client will be developed in Android, reusing most code in Manga Mobile but with huge improvement. The feature of the old Manga Mobile will be revamped to suit what All Manga Reader provides. There will be huge UI improvement! And another cool thing is: this application will be available for iPhone, too!

Right now the development of Manga Mobile Service is done and so far the performance boost is as good as expected. Let's see if I can finish the Android one as fast.

Monday 12 March 2012

Expanding The Market

Today I saw the statistic of Sound Scheduler was not going that great. It was so poor compared to Manga Mobile. So I did some drastic movement. I expand my market!

Now Manga Mobile and Sound Scheduler are currently being reviewed by Amazon AppStore and Motorola Store. I hope this will result in more constructive review from users and I can make these 2 apps for the better.

Greetings from Hallucinogen

Hi this is Hallucinogen Developer Blog sole programmer of Hallucinogen products. This is a separate blog from my private blog which mostly written in Indonesian. I'll post announcement about my products here.

Right now I'm interested in Android development though in time I'll make application for iOS, too. Currently, I'm working on 3 Android projects to be submitted on market. Two of them already on Android market, they are Manga Mobile and Sound Scheduler.