Comic CMS
Comic CMS is a work-in-progress web app. I'm a fan of webcomics and would eventually like to make one myself. I personally feel that a lot of webcomic interfaces could be improved, especially on mobile devices. Comic CMS is an attempt at making a new interface for webcomics that feels more intuitive, fluid, and simple.
Initial design. Sample comics from Paranatural by Zach Morrison and Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson.
Past Prototypes
My first prototype was in Protopie and looked like the original concept above. Some unique features included smooth swiping and navigation, full width images on mobile, and the ability to search by text.
After getting some feedback from users, I redid the prototype as a web app with some minor improvements. Here's a video of the functionality:
Video of first prototype as a PWA
When moving this from Protopie to a web app, the main difficulty was adding the swipe animation/action in a web context. Not only do web interfaces not support something like that easily, but I'd like the page to change URL without re-rendering. This was done using vue-router and some interesting CSS and javascript.
Current Version
Since both initial prototypes were successes, I am working on building the final version based on the prototype. I want the app to have server-side rendering so that the app is usable without javascript (for users on older browsers, users with javascript disabled, web crawlers (such as AutoComic, and SEO in general.) I also am building the user interface for the back end (adding comics, not just viewing them).
For current progress, check out Comic-CMS on GitHub!