Panels - Comic Reader

Pinch-and-drag to navigate comic pages has been the bane of mobile reading for a long time. In fact, I remember when it was big news that The Bone series had been reformatted to panel by panel format and released as an iPhone app. Panel View accomplished the same thing algorithmically—and it works. Tap to move from one panel to the next, and fit the whole screen with that panel. It’s not the same as reading on an iPad or other large format, but it’s worth the trade off compared to all the options I was aware of previously. Besides this, Panels is beautifully designed and (most importantly) actively developed. It’s not perfect yet (notably, it could do a better job of matching metadata and automatically sorting comics into groups), but it’s on the way.

There are a number of apps for comic book collectors to organize and read in. Nothing comes remotely close to panels, whose developers always respond to user questions and implement user suggestion quickly if the idea has obvious merit. They have a forum site set up just for communicating with users. The app itself is stellar. There are no folder icons because the devs understand how important cover art is when you’re trying to find something. Instead you create stacks of cross-referencable comics which look like a stack seen from above. Everything stays where you drag it if you don’t want auto alphabetization - so you can separate artists from writers, or new stuff from the permanent part of your collection, or what have you. i could go on and on as to what make this app the clear winner in its field. My collection is vast (over 500gb) and the app scrolls smooth as glass. I’ve been able to organize that much content sensibly and quickly. They’ve provided tools to help people on phone screens read panel by panel instead of page by page. With the last update it can even read to you. Excellent elegant software.

It’s a very useful and minimalist app but this comes with its limitations. For example, I have not found a way rename or delete a collection once it’s been created. I cannot create sub folders to sort comics this leaves me with like 100 collections when they could be just 10. I can’t rename comics. The title of a comic isn’t shown in the icon/cover view. Needs to be a back or home button instead of always clicking a collection header and scrolling through my long list of collections. Really could be better. Edit: Thank you for the reply. I did not realize that was how to delete collection I kept on holding and going through settings. Wish you the best

I would like to say that this is the best looking comic book reader on the iPhone hands down. Everything about it is beautiful. The navigation is extremely well done, and it doesn’t add a bunch of stuff that gets in the way of reading. After two days of usage I bought the ad-free version because I loved it so much. If I had one criticism of the app it would be that I would also like to have double tap to zoom option either in the settings that you can turn on or, just on by default. Other than that, this app is perfect for my needs.

The UI will often not zoom correctly. And if you zoom out too much or tap on the screen the menu shows up and it’s really annoying, breaks the flow when really into reading. Simple fix: make it so that the menu only comes up if you swipe up or down on the screen when you are zoomed out to show the full page. An app called iComix does that and it’s much more enjoyable to use. I only used this app because the iComix app icon is ugly af. One great feature it has over iComix, however, is the progress bar. Really helps you realize if you should put down the phone because you still have another 150 pages to go.