Introducing... FuwanViewer!

[Kreweta]

Alrighty! I am gonna spend some evening hours working on that. Give me a week or two before you start working on next version. If I encounter any problems or will have some ideas, I shall let you know by then.

[Kreweta]

Hello there again,

 

So I did this thing called "feel the love and write some code"  and here are my thoughts about API so far:

 

1. First, I have rather simple question. What are these fields for: images>featured, site_flags>active, site_flags>featured, tl_flags>donations. I didn't really get their meaning...

 

2. Another minor thing ... I noticed some sort of inconsistency with few fields. Both items: egs and vntls contain an link item, while there is another item later named links. Imho, it would be more consistent to move links to links item and leave the other childs (score, votes, etc.) in coresponding egs and vntls. I mean, they still make sense and so on, but it might get tricky later if there would be more links later.

 

3. I also noticed redundancy, in dates item. Right now we're sending dates together with time, but time as I've seen is always 00:00:00. Its only few bytes in every time, but why not use date type instead (ISO8601: YYYY-MM-DD)?

 

4. In torrent field, there is a size item. And it really suprised me that it is not an int, but string, and that I will have to do conversion later to enable sorting ). If it wouldn't be much of a problem, I'd prefer if API would return size in some units, e.g. KBs.

 

5. And at last, the thing that has been bugging me most. The field texts>team, in all honesty,  in current form doesn't come quite useful. It's form is not specified and it is, just as it says, "text" with just anything there... team members, group name, requests for more members... I do realize it is quite a bit of work, but I believe it would be worth it as well, to create a more approperiate struct for it.

 

I guess, people after reading some VN would be interested in other projects of same group or translator. Also, by having more approperiate format, we could put emphasis (perhaps by adding some extra formatting) onto the projects that are currently looking for people )

 

As far as I've thought about it, the struct would look moreless like this:

team
{
   name,
   programmer,
   editor,
   translator,
   missing_members,
   message
}

where name is the team name, programmer, editor, translator are arrays with names of group members, missing_members is array with missing members by role (like missing_members []{"programmer", "translator"}) and message is any message from team, e.g. how to contact or homepage link.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thats about all I have to say. Everything else is cool and I really like the way FuwanViewer looks with all the data in it. However, I also noticed a problem while debugging and I am not sure whats causing it. I am not too good in all these protocols and stuff, but from time to time when I try to retrieve a WebResponse I get a WebException saying that I can't connect to the remote server and yet when I try again in 1 min, it works just fine. Do you perhaps have some idea, what could possibly be the reason?

 

Cheers, Kreweta

[Nayleen]

I need to leave for a bit, but I'll reply properly later, a quick comment on the Team entity: I had something along those lines planned, but didn't get around to it yet.

[Nayleen]

I'll quote your bullet points one by one instead of doing a wall of text to answer yours (no offense, I appreciate the questions/feedback ).

 

1. First, I have rather simple question. What are these fields for: images>featured, site_flags>active, site_flags>featured, tl_flags>donations. I didn't really get their meaning...

• images[featured]: if not null, and site_flags[featured] is true, the image can be displayed in this section (4 at random per refresh):

• site_flags[active]: If false, a TL project is considered stalled/dropped.
• site_flags[featured]: see above
• tl_flags[donation]: Whether the TL team accepts donations, I could possibly deprecate this as it has never been used, not even on the old site.

2. Another minor thing ... I noticed some sort of inconsistency with few fields. Both items: egs and vntls contain an link item, while there is another item later named links. Imho, it would be more consistent to move links to links item and leave the other childs (score, votes, etc.) in coresponding egs and vntls. I mean, they still make sense and so on, but it might get tricky later if there would be more links later.

That makes sense, I'll change that after replying.

 

3. I also noticed redundancy, in dates item. Right now we're sending dates together with time, but time as I've seen is always 00:00:00. Its only few bytes in every time, but why not use date type instead (ISO8601: YYYY-MM-DD)?

Debatable, I'd want to properly document (as in, have an online documentation for the API) that we're sane enough to store our dates/datetimes in UTC. Until then this makes perfectly clear it's UTC.

 

4. In torrent field, there is a size item. And it really suprised me that it is not an int, but string, and that I will have to do conversion later to enable sorting  ). If it wouldn't be much of a problem, I'd prefer if API would return size in some units, e.g. KBs.

I agree actually, I didn't have the foresight to implement this right from the get-go though. Will make the change after replying. kB does indeed seem like the sensible choice.

 

5. And at last, the thing that has been bugging me most. The field texts>team, in all honesty,  in current form doesn't come quite useful. It's form is not specified and it is, just as it says, "text" with just anything there... team members, group name, requests for more members... I do realize it is quite a bit of work, but I believe it would be worth it as well, to create a more approperiate struct for it.

I wanted to make this happen together with the project management features (where it would make sense to have the possibility to assign VNs to teams instead of the other way around), but I really need to talk with Tay about prioritizing projects for main page development before I could even start, there's just too much on the back burner right now.

 

Thats about all I have to say. Everything else is cool and I really like the way FuwanViewer looks with all the data in it. However, I also noticed a problem while debugging and I am not sure whats causing it. I am not too good in all these protocols and stuff, but from time to time when I try to retrieve a WebResponse I get a WebException saying that I can't connect to the remote server and yet when I try again in 1 min, it works just fine. Do you perhaps have some idea, what could possibly be the reason?

I'll try to have a look at it by running ab to see if we get random error responses.

[Nayleen]

Filesize for torrents changed to int (in kb), EGS and VNTLS links moved to links array, tl_flags[donations] removed.

[Kreweta]

Cheers. I appriciate that my feedback is taken into account.

[Nayleen]

It's not much since I was either held up with RL or some other personal issues and I wanted to take things a little slower anyway, but I've added meaningful Last-Modified headers to all API routes.

[Kreweta]

Yup. Thats just what I needed. Thank you for that. I actually noticed it didn't work and wanted to let you know after I finish coding this part, but it's even better that I didn't have to )

[molitar]

So have we got any kind of update or any idea of an ETA for this program?  This made it so easy to see when a new release was out and to come grab it and read about it but without it I am too busy to check daily.. I see all sorts of new releases since being here last.  I really miss this application

[Kreweta]

Alright, no biggie.

 

I bet in a week or two weeks tops, we shall post some fully functional version. There are still features we want to add, but we can do it later in form of an update.

[Kreweta]

Okay, the time has finally come. Me, Ilegend and Kuky_nekoi are happy to announce the:

 

FuwanViewer 2.0 - beta release

(To run, just download .zip file, extract is somewhere and run .exe file in it)

(In case you get an error, make sure you have .NET Framework 4.5 installed, here is download link)

 

FuwanViewer still serves it's main purpose - i.e. give you a better overview and smooth up browsing Fuwanovel.org collection. In the current state, we haven't added any outstanding functionality, but in the current state you can:

• browse all novels, in a handy DataGrid with some basic information and preview,
• inspect a visual novel in detail, i.e. get simlar view as on fuwanovel website,
• filter results by company name, tags and some other conditions.

Here are some screenshoots:

 

 

As for requirements:

• windows vista/7/8
• .NET Framework 4.5
• probably around 128MB RAM to run smoothly

Yup, no windows XP. That's because Windows XP can't run .NET Framework 4.5 (at least from what I know). However, if some of you guys really want it on XP, we might do the migration to .NET 4.0 later.

 

Known issues:

We're aware that it's not everything works as it should. Here are some issues we're aware of and will be fixed in next bigger release:

• Your password is not safe, it's really easy to find since we didn't do any encrypting and such. So umm... if you have some viruses, beware
• Featured novels misses scroll bar, oh well...
• images are popping up in some annoying fashion,(it's not an issue, we just wanted to annoy you),
• Application size is stupid big, that's due to some development pieces (such as design time support) being compiled and never really used in the app itself. Sorry, bad design by me there.

 

Planned features:

Some of the features that we want in final version are:

• storing user related informations (read/finished/ignored novels),
• extending VisualNovel data with information from vndb.org,
• theming/skinning feature, so that you may alter the app view in some minor ways.

 

About feedback:

If you guys manage to find some action that crushes the app and is not stated in known issues, feel free to respond in this topic. Also, if you happen to have some nice idea for another feature that we could implement, let us know and we'll certainly consider it.

 

=========================================================

We're all hoping that you guys will find this application useful and with it's aid you'll find some perfect novels for yourselves and avoid the creepy ones.

[JeMhUnTeR]

Can't login.

[molitar]

Excellent thanks for the release.  Now features I really want to see is listed below.

 

1. Sort by translation release date (can easily see new releases)

2. Pictures viewing.. make the top picture like a next type slide show so can easily view all images

3. Double clicking have it open to the tab

[Nosebleed]

This is awesome guys!

Do you mind if i make a blog post about it and link to all the stuff here?

[Kreweta]

Thank you

 

It'd be much appriciated if you blog about it, the more users the better. 

[Nosebleed]

I'm working on it now. Just to make sure are only you 3 the staff that participated in this 2nd release? I'd like to name all the staff included in this if possible.

[Kreweta]

Yeah, just us 3.

[Nosebleed]

Sorry I fell asleep last night.  Published it now

You can read it here

[justanix]

I cant log in using this acc

[Kreweta]

If you can't log in despite putting in the right username/password then problem lies somewhere in Fuwanovel API... Can't really solve this issue, we'd have to contact administrator and have him help us find out the problem. We'll certainly try to solve this before next release, but for now, can't do anything.

[Guest]

It's working for me.

That will be a really useful tool once it's finished.

I'm really impressed by what you 3 have done so far.

 

It's working fine for me. And I'm on Win 8.1

 

I just found about this thread and what a pleasant surprise it was.

[justanix]

If you can't log in despite putting in the right username/password then problem lies somewhere in Fuwanovel API... Can't really solve this issue, we'd have to contact administrator and have him help us find out the problem. We'll certainly try to solve this before next release, but for now, can't do anything.

Well this forum has something with newcomers, the validation link in my email was messed up

[sanahtlig]

Sounds like interesting functionality.  I don't understand the need for a separate app to do this when VNDB-esque features could simply be integrated into the main site.

[Kreweta]

Well yeah. Certainly our app would be rendered useless if only the website provided such browsing utilities. But because this is not the case and we're not responsible for the website, we've decided to create our own app

[molitar]

Any updates and a roadmap of what you plan to add to this app?