Best free Comic/Manag reader for iPad

For the best comic/manga reading experience, ComicZeal still pars none as the best application on iPad.  But if you want to go for cheap, there are several options, and after trying them all, I found that there's no real winner.

I first tried Bookman Lite, which was fine expect that the zoom feature is kind of messed up.  It sometimes jump all the way to the lower corner, and even got into some strange blank space.  Over all, though, it still provides the best user experience.  

Then I tried ComicFlow.  At first I like it a lot, found it does exactly what I expected.  Then I realized that there's NO WAY to manage the comics.  There's no folder, no move, and it doesn't even have a way to delete a comics.  Time to delete the app.

CloudReaders is kind of like a in between situation.  It does most of the stuff I want, it has some organize feature, but the navigation kind of annoys, and the worst part is that there's no way to modify the navigation.

So at the end I am still using Bookman Lite.  In fact for 1.99, I may just get Bookman.

Experience of installing iOS 5 beta 3

iOS 5 beta 3 installation on my iPad 2 is such an odd experience.  To seamless there's a very specific sequence that I need to follow, and obviously I didn't aware of the sequence and thus the experience was less than perfect.

So here's the proper sequence to perform to upgrade:

• Make sure your iTune (on Mac) is in version 10.5 beta 2 (not beta 1 and SPECIFICALLY NOT Beta 3, but 10.5 beta 2)
• Transfer all your apps from your iPad 2 to iTune.  That way you don't have to manually reinstall all your apps one by one.
• Backup your iPad 2.  Otherwise you will have to reconfigure all your application.  That will suck.
• Now with your iPad 2 connected to your Mac, hold ALT/Option button and click [Restore] button on iTune.  It will then kick off the regular restore process (like selecting the ipsw file of the iOS 5 beta 3)
• At the end of the process, proceed to restore your iPad 2 using the backup you did a while ago.
• Now here's the funny part: iTune 10.5 beta 2 will REFUSE to sync with your now iOS 5.0 beta 3 device because iOS 5 beta 3 does NOT work with iTune 10.5 beta 2.  So now you have to first upgrade your itune 10.5 beta 2 to beta 3.  And then you should be able to proceed to sync all your apps from iTune back to your iPad.
• Finally you should have a working iPad 2 with all the app working just like it used to be.

My biggest problem is that I upgrade the iTune 10.5 beta 2 to beta 3 TOO SOON.  And for whatever super stupid reason, 10.5 beta 3 CANNOT work with iOS 10.5 beta 2.  This definitely is ultra stupid.  The result is that now I have all my apps scattering on my system, and I have to spend time to organize them all over again.  Definitely not cool.

OSX Lion and Pain

Finally I got OSX Lion Gold Seed installed on my machine.  But then I found that the "save problem" still exist.  Basically, saving ANYTHING on the Lion will fail, and I have to reboot the OS in order to have a working environment again.

And then I found that iOS5 has quite some change to a point that the old iPhone and iPad app I wrote NO LONGER WORKING.  I spent a bit time to twist but finally decided to switch back to Snow Leopard.  Still running XCode 4, but at least this time it's working.  Of course I also have to revote the certificate form my developer account, but at least Organize automatically set everything up for me.  However, make sure that you also remove the old certification from Keychain, or otherwise you will get some odd error.

So until that stupid save error got resolved, I think I better go back to Snow Leopard.