Uclick
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GoComics brings the funny pages to your iPhone
Universal Uclick is the company that holds the licenses for most of the comics in your daily newspaper -- the company was formed when the Universal Press Syndicate joined up with the Uclick media group. They've run a web archive of the company's comics for quite a while now, and today that content has arrived on the App Store in the form of the free GoComics app. Just like the website, the app offers up daily archives of many, many different comics from the funny pages, and while you can sign in to an account and even sign up for a "GoComics Pro" membership (which kills the advertising and gives you some extras like an email digest), just browsing through the drawings is completely free. The app is quick and smooth, and because Universal's reach goes so far, there's never any shortage of new comics to read. The one issue I have with the app is strictly mechanical -- when browsing through the comics on portrait mode, the UI will slide into the background as you're reading. On a timer, that seems to be exactly when I finish reading whatever strip is visible at that time. This would simply be an annoyance, except that when the UI does slide away, the ad in the app just happens to slide itself right into the spot where I normally would press to see the next comic. That may all sound complicated, but the end result is that the UI feels clunky, and it's extraordinarily easy to "accidentally" click an ad when I don't mean to. The same issue doesn't pop up in landscape mode, however, so I presume Uclick isn't just trying to sneakily sell more ads. At any rate, that's a small concern with an otherwise excellent little app. If you like reading the comics, but don't always have access to a newspaper, the GoComics app is a great way to browse through the cartoons. It's available for free right now.
View .cbr comics on your iPhone
Of course there's an app for this, but I'd never even considered it. While I do occasionally read .cbr (Comic Book Archive files) on my desktop, the iPhone didn't really occur to me as a portable comic book reading device. But sure enough, there are apps for that. iComic is probably the cheapest, but I hear it's a little tough to get set up. ComicZeal is extremely popular, and just a little bit cheaper from the somewhat similar myComics. Pull Lists uses a desktop client to sync up comics for you, which is a little more than I need, but it seems like some people like it. There are actually lots of choices, it turns out -- I would have thought that the iPhone's screen was pretty small for reading comic book pages, but I'll have to give those apps a try.Or, if you're too cheap to pay a buck or two for a full app, you can even do it yourself. .cbr files are really just .jpg archives, so as this tip from a while back on the iPhone Comic Book Reader says, you can actually extract out the jpegs, and then just sync them up to your iPhone via iPhoto if you want. Three dollars really isn't that much, and any of those apps listed above will give you a little more functionality (easy flipping between pages, bookmarking, and many other features per app), but if you really want to DIY, there you go.Now it would be nice to be able to officially buy .cbr archives over the web from some of the major companies -- the closest they've come that I know of is a subscription service, but of course you've got to use their own client for that (and there's no iPhone app that I can find, though Uclick has a few apps in there for certain books). As long as reading pirated .cbr files is outlawed, only outlaws will end up reading them.
