Accessing MCP from your iPod (Comic Book Forums)

This is the single most useful utility ever written in the entire history of humankind. Thank you, whicken!

-RwP42

Thanks to RwP for some spanking good feature requests, I've got a new version which works even better.

Seriously, if you have an iPod, this is unbelievably useful. Check it out. (Is there a better place to post this than the "General Questions" forum, where it might get missed?)

Wendell

It's just generating text files, so if your Samsung can view text files, that would work. But you wouldn't get some of the extra niceties of the menus or links between piles, you could just take the earlier version with the compressed output and store it as a single file on your player.

I'm going to check if it works on my Samsung and get back to you.

[quote:33a62e78b9="joshschr"]
Where do the program and my tab delimited file need to live?
Do I need to have my iPod synced when I run the program?
Where does the output file go when I run the program?
Do I use the program to name the output file?
[/quote:33a62e78b9]

The easiest way to run it is to make a new directory, let's call it c:\mcp. Copy the Jar file and your export file there. In the command prompt, make that the current directory like this:

cd c:\mcp

Then, you would run

java -cp Comicutil.jar Comicutil -bypile -ipod=notes pile_export.txt

This will create a folder called "notes" in the current directory. (So the path will be "c:\mcp\notes". You can copy all the files in this folder to the Notes directory on your iPod, and then they will be visible. In this case, your iPod does not need to be connected when you run Comicutil.

You can also put the files whereever you want if you use full paths. Here's an example of that:

java -cp c:\thejarfilepath\Comicutil.jar Comicutil -bypile -ipod=f:\ipod_folder\notes c:\downloads\pile_export.txt

Two other most likely options are are interested in currently:

-bypublisher sorts by publisher instead of by pile
-years adds year information to the series (it's hidden by default, just volume info appears so more fits on screen)

Using the original example, sorting by publisher and showing years would look like this:

java -cp Comicutil.jar Comicutil -years -bypublisher -ipod=notes pile_export.txt

In my case, I use -expand -nohide... Also, you can run multiple views, and store them all on your iPod by creating a folder structure there. But those are advanced options - once you get the basics working, I can show how those work if you are interested.

This code was all written on my MacBook Pro - with the release of OS X, lots of engineers are moving in that direction, although with the Unix prompt.

Awesome, glad you got it working. I'll be adding some more features over the weekend probably, including an "all comics" view, divided out alphabetically.

If you have feature requests, let me know - no guarantees, but if they are easy or useful, there's a reasonable chance I'll squeeze them in.

You mean when, of course.

I'll probably work on it tonight. I'm also hoping to get my scanner working, so I can start doing covers.

That's an awesome idea. I'll have to see if the ipod supports images.

Also, I might need some support/permission from Doughboy for the images.

I'd also like to know how many issues in a series, to make the -holes reports more useful!

I've got rwp's FR implemented, just one more issue to resolve and I'll make another "release".

I've fixed the 4k limit, so you get multiple pages as necessary - this only happens if you have around 600 issues in a single pile, but no worries, because it's working now. Also, I added RwP's "All Comics", sorted out alphabetically, feature (and I used that report in the comic store today checking whether I had a certain TPB or not, so it's already come in useful).

Well, I understand you want to protect the MCP assets. From my point of view, the easiest interface to build mashups on (like the iPod reports), would be something like this:

- Add a column to the export lists, "Image". The value of this would be the database index for the image (or a unique key that can be used like that)

- Add a REST style HTTP method to retrieve the images. Something like

http://www.mycomicpile.com/api/1.0/image?id=1234

If you want to lock things down a bit more, maybe you could do a simple login auth, so users can only access images which they have either uploaded, or have active in one of their piles.

I think the iPod reports would be more useful if they could do the exports programatically, again with some kind of auth. I haven't checked how hard that would be to spoof, but I only want to write "MCP Friendly" tools, so I wouldn't do that unless you were ok with it.

The initial entry is a bit of work, but after that it is just maintenance. The usefulness of having 'future' issues also in my iPod is beyond words -- esp. when it is combined with the complete catalog of my collection. Awesome stuff.

-RwP