OOTS/Erf viewer

[tKircher]

I'd had a thread about this before, but i seem to have misplaced it.

Anyway, I got tired of waiting on the slow webserver when browsing through the archives of OOTS and Erf. After all, it's tough to get involved in a plotline when you spend 50% of your time staring at a blank screen, waiting for the buttons to pop up.

So to reduce the amount of time i spent downloading all the site materials, i created this little program to download just the comics, and store them locally.


http://tinyurl.com/ootsview
(it's a 22kb .jar file)


Originally it only worked for OOTS, but there was an almost unanimus request for it to support Erfworld as well, so here's the 'latest greatest' for fans of Erf and OOTS.

It's pretty simple to use, simply choose your comic from the dropdown box, hit Grab, and browse at will as it stores the comics. I've found it's handy to keep it on a USB flash drive, so you can keep the comics with you to other computers without needing to waste their hard drive space, or bandwidth.

The 639 comics of OOTS take up 100mb of disk space, and Erf takes up 30mb of space. So you won't be breaking the bank on hard drive space.

Legality was brought up last time; so let me take the opportunity to say that this is completely free and legal, it doesn't do anything your browser doesn't do. It also saves quite a bit of bandwidth on both ends of the transfer, so it's not like you'll be wasting anyone's time by using it.
Allow me to reiterate: nobody gains or loses money if you use this program.

It has some known graphical bugs on OSX (I don't have a test machine for that), but it should FUNCTION correctly on all Java systems. Someone said it worked on Ubuntu, and i know it works on all Windows, but cross-platforming is an imprecise art.


Criticism welcome. I like to think it's perfect, but please be cruel about any flaws you find.

[[TS] Shadow]

Seeing as it's clear that this is legal now, I'll be happy to use it. However, will we have to use the "grab" button every time a new comic is released if we want to read it offline?


EDIT: This thing works really well. If I could make a suggestion, is there anyway to jump from story arc to story arc? If I want to read War and XPs, it's a little annoying to have to remember where it starts.

[Mando Knight]

I'd had a thread about this before, but i seem to have misplaced it.

Tip: When you want to keep track of a thread, subscribe to it. That way, you can easily access them from your User CP. I do so for all of my homebrew and game threads.

[xyzzy]

While as far as I can tell this is legal, there's one enormous flaw with it that's the main reason webcomic artists are opposed to these: they make no money from them.

The Giant has stated that merchandise (books, t-shirts, and the board game) are his main source of income, and the ads for these products at the bottom of every comic and the shop button on the side of the page are the biggest way readers can be introduced to these things.

He might be okay with this; again, I don't know everything about legality issues involved, and it's possible he's peachy keen with this tool being used, though I strongly suspect otherwise for this reason.

[WarriorTribble]

I always figured the biggest way to introduce people to OotS merchandise was the "Shop" link directly below the forum link.

[tom712]

Thanks for the program tKircher.
I used to save every comic to my harddrive for faster access to older comics. And now this thing is really useful :-)

EDIT: Strange, now when I looked at the ErfWorld part it seems to me that those pictures have lesser quality than those on the web.
The pictures I downloaded are different from pictures your program grabed.

See the difference:

http://tom712.web.klfree.net/klfree/diff.png

[Ancalagon]

Add a button to the program that opens the shop in your browser and all issues are completely gone - since that is the only thing the website does to create "cash". There's the comic and there's the button to the shop...

[Roland St. Jude]

I'd had a thread about this before, but i seem to have misplaced it....

Sheriff of Moddingham: Actually, it was moved to the mod forum pending review of its legality and desireability. Please don't restart it.

I appreciate that you're trying to help and this does seem ingenious