September

Various under the hood improvements, in preparation for the new UI release

Welcome to the September update. I apologise for the late update, but I had a chance to get a whole first week of October off, so I thought I'd wait till today to release the update, as a week of coding does mean a lot of new things could be finished.

Unfortunately, in this case, it didn't quite pan out. All the features I've been working on, continue to have a slow progress due to the complexity, so none of it made the cut for this month release. Read on to find out more.

🧩 Official Extension

Unfortunately, the extension had been put mostly on-hold this month. As mentioned before, I had encountered some very big issues at the very end of the development, making me have to re-think most of the underlaying code (thankfully the design is final). As I continued to work on it, I started to get seriously burned out, so I decided to put it on hold and focus on other features.

I apologise for the continued delays with this, but I hope I could make big strides in October.

📱 Mobile and Desktop Overhaul

Most of the focus this month instead went into the new UI for desktop and mobile. Primary reason for the overhaul, has been making mobile experience top-class, instead of a wonky implementation we got now. As Kenmei got more popular, more and more mobile-only users has started to use Kenmei and many have complained about how hard it is to use on mobile.

Last 90 days device breakdown

Second reason is that current implementation, which is mostly off the shelf, makes it very hard to add more features and data to the table. Switching to a completely custom made UI, means that I can fine tune everything I need, leading to various features that were not possible before. Things like nicer animations, smart suggestions (e.g. show when another source has more recent chapters) and lots more.

As you'd expect, that also means it takes a lot more work to build something like that. I've been happy with the overall progress, but it's still not quite there and will take a couple more weekends to finish. I won't share the mobile UI just yet due to it being quite raw (although I might share it on our Discord later), here is the look at the desktop version, which is more solid and shouldn't see too many changes.

New Desktop UI (Work in Progress)

This also leads me to mention another big change that happened, which was necessary for the new UI as well as to address some issues for users with big lists. You might have noticed that loading happens after changing your filters and sorting now. That is due to it now being done on the server-side, which comes with various performance improvements, as can be seen from one of the user's comments

Punkdog has over 1000 manga entries being tracked

There is still quite a bit of work left, so this feature will continue taking the priority this month. I plan to also give early access to users on our Discord, that mostly use mobile, to test out the new UI. If you want to join them, make sure to join our Discord and let me know if you would like to participate.

🔎 Search series by title

Another much requested feature has been searching manga by title, instead of having to always find a link and then paste into Kenmei. This searches across Kenmei database, which is currently at 15758 titles and growing everyday.

As can be seen below, you will be able to search by both English and Romaji titles. As database improves, expect to be able to search by titles from other languages or alternative names.

Search by title (Work in Progress design)

I am putting final touches into this feature, so expect to see it ship sometime next week

✨ Other Updates

As usual, there has been many smaller, but still important updates done, as it's too taxing to be always working on big features. You can find all the updates in the changelog:

📋Changelog

The one I'd mention here is the new validation system. Similar to what I mentioned before, I wanted to finer control over the validation, meaning I had to switch to a custom-made solution. As a result, I can validate things like URLs, have validations depend on each other, have cleaner UI and much more.

I am very happy with how it turned out:

Add series validations

Import MDList validations

📈 Progress Overview

This list hasn't been very honest for the past two months, as I haven't been working on some items here. Hence it has been updated to reflect my main priorities again. After I finish with the new UI and Extension, I plan to finally add a new aggregator to Kenmei, so that people can track a lot more series.

1. Revamped manga list UI → 90% Complete

2. Improving mobile experience → 60% Complete

3. Official Kenmei Extension → ?% Complete

4. New aggregator support → 50% Complete

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

6. Dark theme → 10% Complete on hold

7. Cover grid mode → 30% Complete on hold

Again, I apologise for the lack of big updates that are noticeable, but I have continued to work hard every week and many of the changes go unnoticed, but are necessary building blocks for bigger and bolder feature releases!

Take care and see you next month!