Interest in Community Fork - Live Here

[nickv2002]

Though @arauchfuss built a great tool it seems like they're not around here much to run things. (No judgment, just observation.) There are several bugs and PRs, including important Catalina fixes, outstanding that should be merged going forward.

@arauchfuss if you do get this message please weigh in: can you appoint some other people to help manage the project here? Otherwise, is anyone in the community interested in creating a fork we can work together on?

My experience in Mac coding is limited but I can volunteer a bit of time to organize and evangelize if other people would be on board for such an endeavor.

Thanks All.
-Nick

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Update (Feb 2020):

Mac App store version is up here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/simple-comic/id1497435571

Please provide any feedback in @MaddTheSane's fork here. Thanks all!

[MaddTheSane]

I have my own fork, with some work done by @J-rg.

[nickv2002]

Thanks @MaddTheSane - that could be a good start.

In case I wasn't clear I was thinking about making a new (GitHub powered) landing page where non technical users could download a signed binary that would run without warnings on Catalina. I also want to get all the contributors here pointed in that direction so we can address the most relevant bugs and feature requests.

Maybe we could also get it in to the Mac App store, though I'm of two minds about that.

Anyone else interested in moving forward on something like this?

[erutan]

I could help with a landing page, but nothing too much more technical than that.

I sent an e-mail to arauchfuss from the dancing tortoise site with a link to this issue - his twitter has been dead for years but hopefully that account forwards somewhere active.

update: email address dead according to google postmaster bot. No public social presence updates since ~2014.

[runrunrirun]

The project needs a live fork, Rauchfuss is long gone and nobody else can accept PRs.

@MaddTheSane I tried to build your fork, the webp project must have some additional dependencies, build failed on trying to find decode.h in CGImage_WebP.m.

[MaddTheSane]

Did you try initializing the submodules recursively?
The WebP framework submodule has a submodule of libwebp.
You might have to do this:

git submodule init --recursive
git submodule update --recursive

[Spazholio]

Since the contact email on the dancingtortoise.com site doesn't work anymore, has anyone tried the email that's in the "Donate" link? It's arauchfuss@gmail.com. Might be a way to get his/her attention in order to get some movement going on the app again by way of either handing over the project, or at least giving some people here the ability to accept PRs?

[nickv2002]

I sent an email to arauchfuss@gmail.com :

We've been discussing the future of your great Simple Comic app on this GitHub thread.
#126
If you have time over the next week to drop by and give your quick thoughts that would be really appreciated.

If we don't hear back over the next few days we can move forward with a community fork.

[nickv2002]

No word from @arauchfuss after over 2 weeks so I think we can take matters into our own hands.

I can volunteer to organize, do technical writing, and (optionally) put a build up on the Mac App Store. (I have an active personal subscription for an iOS project.) I also have a VPS host on Linode if needed. I'm more of a server-side engineer so I don't have much expertise or time to do coding in Xcode however.

@MaddTheSane - since you're here and seem to be actively tinkering with the source code, do you have any interest in making your version the new official fork? (Unless someone else wants to volunteer?)

Everyone else, if you'd like to help out, please volunteer here with any skills/resources/time you can contribute.

Thanks!

[manuelgrabowski]

I'd happily help with translating the app/website/store description etc. to German, also beta testing of course.

[waha]

I can offer help with testing/bug reporting at least, used to beta test for Rauchfuss back in the day.

[nickv2002]

Thanks @manuelgrabowski & @waha - we can definitely use your help going forward.
What do you think of making your branch the official fork @MaddTheSane ?

[MaddTheSane]

Sure.

[nickv2002]

Great!
@MaddTheSane can you add me as a collaborator to your fork?
I can write up some more descriptions there and try to add some more notes etc in a PR as well as create some issues for TODOs.

[MaddTheSane]

Invite sent

[alibolcakan]

Thanks for picking this up @nickv2002 and @MaddTheSane, could you update the releases page when you get a chance?

[nickv2002]

Thanks to @MaddTheSane we've got an initial notarized version of of the app (which makes it easier and safer to run on Catalina). The new version can be downloaded here.
(It's notarized with my developer certs, but still has the previous bundle identifier, version, etc.)

Please kick the tires a bit and make sure it works for any tricky files etc. Some things that are still potentially buggy (so please try them out):

1. QuickLook previews (possibly delete/zip-up old versions of the app so you just have the new version to test)
2. Comics sometimes open to a very small initial window, known problem

If people are generally happy with this build I'll work on submitting to the Mac App Store. If there are any issues, and as we move forward, please join us over on MaddTheSane's fork. Thanks!

[blmatthews]

I played with it a bit on Mojave and it seems fine, even opened some cbrs the old version didn't. Other than the small window problem, I didn't see any issues (not that I did exhaustive testing or anything.)

[blmatthews]

I also tried QuickLook, and for the few files I tried, it worked fine (still on Mojave).

[nickv2002]

Mac App store version is up here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/simple-comic/id1497435571

Please provide any feedback in @MaddTheSane's fork here. Thanks all!