The Zuda Contracts.

McDuffies · Post by **McDuffies** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 11:36 am

So, anyone handed a proposal yet?

Bustertheclown · Post by **Bustertheclown** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 11:46 am

The site is still not submission-ready.

McDuffies · Post by **McDuffies** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 6:40 pm

So... anyone writing a proposal?

Linkara · Post by **Linkara** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 7:34 pm

Johndar and I are working on one.

Bustertheclown · Post by **Bustertheclown** » Sun Oct 07, 2007 1:05 am

mcDuffies wrote:So... anyone writing a proposal?

Five, actually.

Bustertheclown · Post by **Bustertheclown** » Thu Oct 25, 2007 10:30 pm

For those who may be interested, Zuda has announced its live date.

McDuffies · Post by **McDuffies** » Fri Oct 26, 2007 3:28 pm

It's not a big trick, predicting when you're going live, but try and predict when you're gonna die, that's something.

Cope · Post by **Cope** » Thu Nov 01, 2007 10:50 am

AGUAGH! They're using Flash to display their comics. I was afraid of that.

Bustertheclown · Post by **Bustertheclown** » Thu Nov 01, 2007 4:21 pm

Yeah, don't know how to feel about that, myself. I like that you can zoom in, though.

McDuffies · Post by **McDuffies** » Fri Nov 02, 2007 11:41 am

Cope wrote:AGUAGH! They're using Flash to display their comics. I was afraid of that.

Yeah I was afraid that they'd be too flashy.

Cope · Post by **Cope** » Fri Nov 02, 2007 4:43 pm

and the moral of this story is that mcDuffies shouldn't flash people.

McDuffies · Post by **McDuffies** » Fri Nov 02, 2007 4:50 pm

So I'll have to flash people in order to act according to moral?

Cope · Post by **Cope** » Fri Nov 02, 2007 4:56 pm

Yes.

I mean, WAIT! No! NO. NOoooooooooo.

Guardsman · Post by **Guardsman** » Fri Nov 02, 2007 5:42 pm

So wait, whats the problem with flash? Its a great application for web comics in my opinion. It gives you the ability to structure your comic in a single page, without a lot of html surfing.

In counter argument, the Zuda flash viewer is highly complicated, flashy indeed. Personally I would tone it down, but then again they got some flash guy to do all the work, so why not complicated?

In the end its cool, but I'm kind of annoyed because I am working on a flash viewer for my comic. I intended to use it to keep the chapters of my manga in one single page. Because my comic is black and white, and the interface is simple, the flash acutely comes out to be only about double the size of a standard jpeg page of Hegemonia.

I only have a proto type together at the moment, but you guys can check it out. http://guardsmankr.deviantart.com/art/P ... c-68580328

Bustertheclown · Post by **Bustertheclown** » Fri Nov 02, 2007 6:04 pm

Why would it annoy you? Because they got to it first, or something? If that's the case, I wouldn't worry. I don't think anyone's gonna accuse you of stealing the idea from Zuda. They're not the first on the scene with a flash viewer.

Cope · Post by **Cope** » Fri Nov 02, 2007 6:51 pm

Guardsman wrote:So wait, whats the problem with flash?

My biggest beef is the load time. I mean, my 512 kilobit connection (not amazingly fast by today's standards, but not unreasonably slow, either) takes twenty-plus seconds just to load the player. I don't wanna have to waste my bandwidth on that.

CodeGuy · Post by **CodeGuy** » Fri Nov 02, 2007 9:37 pm

Flash also means readers can't bookmark a page. If someone reads 40 pages and then leaves, when they come back they'll have to press the "Next Comic" button 40 times. And the problem gets worse if you have one of those comics that's around for years and has hundreds of pages.

Komiyan · Post by **Komiyan** » Fri Nov 02, 2007 9:46 pm

When I've read flash-based comics before, my main annoyance was if I clicked off the page by accident, when I hit back I'd be right on the home page again and I'd have to flick through to find where I was. That's wretched, and enough to make you not want to bother.

Also what if I want to link a particular page to someone?

Guardsman · Post by **Guardsman** » Fri Nov 02, 2007 10:33 pm

The Zuda loader takes a while because they put a lot of extras in the flash viewer. Also you are loading at least 8 pages which are most likely, at the high quality that they display at, around two megabytes.

Personally I don't believe its wasting all that much bandwidth. The images are compacted into the flash it self, a single flash can contain an entire comics worth of pages. It dose not seem to me that it would waste too much more bandwidth than a standard html page.

Flash also means readers can't bookmark a page. If someone reads 40 pages and then leaves, when they come back they'll have to press the "Next Comic" button 40 times. And the problem gets worse if you have one of those comics that's around for years and has hundreds of pages.

I checked out the Zuda flash loader, and it has a thumbnail select style. It also has a bunch of other features. I'm not sure if it has a bookmark function but I think some one could program in a linking and bookmarking system.

So yeah, personally I think flash viewers are just another step along the road. The internet used to be all text, then it had some graphics, now its going to have some animation. Then again, we all might be killed by the ape upriseing eg planet of the apes 3. Watch out!

I'm not really that annoyed with Zudas flash viewer. Personally I want to keep working on my own viewer and eventually see if I can get some people to adopt it.

McDuffies · Post by **McDuffies** » Sat Nov 03, 2007 3:59 am

Flash is a fancy tool to make a shortcut in making visually appealing sites without having to do any coding. The site you make, as others mentioned, loads slow, renders standard browser functions (back, bookmark, save) useless and is usually very flashy and counter-intuitive because when you make a tool that requires little knowlegde to use, well, they'll just make a mess, a mess that looks cool at first look.
Anyways Flash is old news. It was considered latest thing in web-design somewhere around 2000 and back then people thought that it's push standards such as Javascript out of the market. Now it's 2007 and I don't see that happening, quite the contrary, flash isn't very compatible with web technologies that are expanding these days such as xml and web 2.0. It's an animation tool more than anything else nowadays.
So it kind of surprising that these folks would go for Flash now. Well, actually, it's not surprising, not at all.

bustertheclown wrote:Why would it annoy you? Because they got to it first, or something?

He kind of said very clearly that he didn't like their implementation of it because it's too complicated and show-off-y.

Comic Genesis Forums

The Zuda Contracts.

Loading, loading, loa...OH HURRY UP.

Re: Loading, loading, loa...OH HURRY UP.

Flash as a rat with a gold tooth, mate.

DO NOT WANT

I'm hoping this will be a flash in the pan.

Re: I'm hoping this will be a flash in the pan.