Setup MangaUpdater
This page will only inform you of the functionality of this application. Code will not be discussed on this page. The application will need to be run as admin and .NET Framework 4.0 has to be installed or the application will crash horribly, since I am a very lazy developer. Use this application at your own risk.
A few months ago I started to really like reading manga. I bookmarked every manga I liked and I also bookmarked every new chapter, so I knew where I left off. One month later I had so many bookmarks that I couldn't keep track of them. I also wanted to learn how to use LINQ, so I thought it would be a nice idea to develop an application that could keep track of the manga I followed.
On a lot of websites it is possible to keep track of updates by reading their RSS feed. Explained simply: The RSS feed is a file accessible through a URL, for example: http://mangafox.me/rss/bleach.xml. Mangafox uses XML as data representation. It's also possible to use JSON (and many more), but XML is most common. RSS feeds are usually used for showing updates that have been made on the website. For example if you host a website that shows news, then you could update the RSS feed with every added news. The RSS feed would then contain the title of the news and the link to the webpage of the news.
I figured it would be a good idea to revolve the application around RSS since Mangafox uses RSS and a lot of other manga hosts use RSS as well. When you add an RSS URL (1), it loads the XML and reads the data it needs. For now I only use the title and the chapters of the manga.
When a manga is added, it is shown in a list (2). Every manga is sorted in alphabetical order. If the current chapter of the manga is not the last chapter, then it is colored red and put at the top of the list, else it is colored green and put at the bottom of the list. The selected manga gets a light blue background color and the current chapter is shown.
I also added a feature that makes a screenshot of the current chapter's webpage (3). This is very useful for people that have an awful memory, like me. All those Japanese names don't help with that fact either.
The application looks for updates for each manga in their RSS feed every 15 minutes or when you press the refresh button. A balloon with the manga titles of the manga that have new chapters will appear near your system tray. The application will also look for updates when it has been minimized to the system tray.
Setup MangaUpdater
Source Code MangaUpdater Project
Wow shit dude you're alive! I was under the impression this blog had died for good! Will you be updating again, or is this just some fancy page to give us false hope with?
ReplyDeleteI will be updating again. All of a sudden a lot of people followed this blog. I was of course really happy that people did. Then at a certain moment I started to Google this blogspot, so I could see how popular it is. Then I saw that someone has been illegally advertising this blog. The illegal advertising might have been good will from someone, but it could have ended in me being banned. Then I got demotivated that people followed the blog because of illegal advertising and not because my tutorials were popular.
ReplyDeleteWriting an advanced tutorial at the moment. I'm glad that you left a comment.
The fact that they decided to click the link in the advertisement (or something similar) means they were interested in your blog, so there was no reason to be disappointed. I hope you won't make the same mistake again. Well-written tutorials have great potential!
DeleteI still haven't done an awful lot in C# since I've mostly been building complex website systems lately, so the advanced tutorial may be a little high-level for me right now, but it's good to see you're back on track.