Comique Dev Diary 28/3
Lately Comique’s blog has been mostly posts about new comic releases (which is how it should be, imo). But I don’t want you to think I’m not working on new projects for Comique — in fact, it’s all I’m working on right now! But it’ll be a while before these efforts see the light of day, so I’d like to start sharing my progress — my unfinished, ugly, malleable progress — with you on this blog.
I’d like anyone who’s interested to be able to enjoy and understand these posts, so I’ve tried to write this in a way that requires as little knowledge about programming as possible (though there might be little nerdy notes here and there for those who are interested). Let me know how I fare.
Going beyond iOS
It’s clear Comique needs to expand beyond iOS if it’s to be a truly useful app for comic makers and readers. So what to do? Start working on the Android version, right?
… right?
When I started working on Comique a year ago, there was just the iOS app (written in Objective C, a language used exclusively for Apple’s platforms). But there also has to be a way to get comics on there, so I made a web app for comic makers too (written in Ruby, a popular language for web development). Finally there had to be a website for potential readers to browse the catalog (also written in Ruby), and for various reasons, that’s another website.
That’s already three different codebases, sharing very little code with each other. And keeping each codebase healthy and productive requires maintenance and care — otherwise it starts to become difficult to work with, like an unruly garden.
There’s just one person working on Comique (hello!), and I want using Comique apps to feel excellent. But I’m not sure I could do that if I added a fourth garden to take care of in the form of an Android app. Three feels like too much already, and I’m not able to hire any helping hands.
But if Comique is gonna be for realsies, as they say, it’s got to be everywhere.
Comique everywhere, but also in as few places as possible.
My plan is to work towards just having two codebases:
The native iOS app
A fully featured web app where:
Comic makers can make their comics, like on artists.comique.co
Comic readers using any device can browse, buy and read those comics.
That’s a lot of responsibility for an app. Tomorrow I’m going to post about how I’ve started building it, and what kind of progress I’ve made in the last few weeks. I’ll do my best to keep it interesting and get some videos of super ugly, in-progress features!
