August

Official Extension, bulk chapter update & more

Welcome to the regular monthly update, everyone. It's been a good month overall, with a lot of new improvements on the verge of release. This was mostly made possible due to me taking a week off, getting me 10 days of uninterrupted coding on Kenmei. This helped make some considerable progress on the extension, as it turned out to be a more challenging task than I thought.

🧩 Official Extension

The biggest focus of this month ended up being the official extension, for both Chrome and Firefox users. As the latest poll showed, ability to auto-update chapters as you read and being able to manually mark chapters as read - were 2 most requested features. This extension solves both of these problems (I still plan to add manual chapter updating on Kenmei itself, but the extension should make it a lot easier meanwhile).

Now, I have really tried to finish the extension this week, but in the end, it felt like it wasn't quite ready. As Shigeru Miyamoto once said: A rushed game software is forever bad. The extension is around 90% finished, so I hope to have it shipped in a week or two max. Meanwhile, here are GIFs to showcase how it'll work:

As you can see, you will be able to quickly add or remove series from one of your lists:

Extension: Series view

If you are tracking the series, you will see your last read chapter as well as what chapter you are currently on. And of course, you have auto-update switch, that will update the last chapter read, as soon as the page loads (of course, if it's after the one you read previously):

Chapter tracking with auto-update

✨ Other Updates

I didn't get to work on many other features, but I did add a few that were requested:

Ability to mark the last chapter as read for multiple entries at the same time

Bulk chapter update

Tag filtering will let you quickly find tags if you have a lot of them. This works both in filtering and when adding tags to entries.

Tag filtering

These are the most notable additions, but you can see the full breakdown in the Changelog:

📋Changelog

📈 Progress Overview

With extension taking up most of the month, I didn't get to spend as much time on other features, as I would have liked. But extension solving 2 most requested features, I felt like it was the right thing to focus on. Here is the updated list:

1. Official Kenmei Extension → 90% Complete

2. Ability to choose title type globally (English or Romaji) → 50% Complete

3. Dark theme → 10% Complete

4. Cover grid mode → 30% Complete

5. Revamped manga list UI → 70% Complete

6. Improving mobile experience → 50% Complete

After I finish the extension, I will be going back to finishing that revamped manga list UI with the improved mobile experience. Followed by the rest of the list, unless something more urgent comes up.

Look forward to sharing progress next month!