September

Work continues on Front-end Overhaul + LHTranslation support is finally here

Front-end Overhaul

As mentioned in the previous update - I've started working on a big upgrade for the front-end, which I've wanted to do for a long while now. I've pretty much got the main work done in September, so I am mostly left with testing and fixing up any loose ends. As a recap, this improvement will theoretically bring these improvements:

The size of the app will be up to 41% lighter (meaning faster page loads)
Initial render would be up to 55% faster (meaning faster page loads once again)
View updates when using Kenmei will be up to 133% faster
And finally memory usage will be up to 54% less.

Some Premium members already report that being the case:

As part of this work, I am also finally able to upgrade some of the visual elements, getting Kenmei to having 100% custom made UI. First of all, there are new 'notification' elements, that you see when you update your last read, edit an entry and so on:

Select menus are also all-new (even though the design is very similar), which are a lot more stable now - you can select items using arrow keys, close using Esc and it's fully optimised for screen-readers and more.

The most visually striking one is the tag selector - as it's completely custom, I've adjusted the design to match the rest of the app, as can be seen here:

And more importantly, long term, it'll let me add some very exciting new features, which I'll be working on for the rest of this year. Here are some sneak-peaks, can you guess what these are?

There have been some minor changes, that I wanted to mention (source related updates are usually shared on Discord, so do join if you are interested).

This month I've finally added LHTranslation integration, which has been requested for a long time. It's one of the most popular isekai scanlator groups, so do check them out!

Apart from the new source, there are some changes and improvements to the existing sources.

First of all, those of you tracking Flame Scans, might have been getting unread indicator show up daily for some series, even if you were up to date. Due to Flame Scans rotating URLs twice a day, Kenmei would think a new chapter has been released, when it wasn't really the case. After some tinkering, I managed to find a workaround that fixed this issue, so your unread statuses should work better now.

Another fix I've done was regarding MangaDex releases. I am now ignoring all external chapters from MangaDex - the likes of MangaPlus, BiliBili and others. Those chapters would redirect you from MangaDex to their respective sites, which I know many of you have been annoyed with. And I agree → Kenmei strictly tracks releases from the site you pick, so such redirects will always be ignored going forward (and have been already on some other sites). I will eventually add support for those sites and you will be able to directly track releases from there. But if a particular source redirects to another place to read, that goes against Kenmei philosophy, so those will always be ignored.

As mentioned last month, my main focus was going to be Chapters v2, followed by Front-end Overhaul. The plan slightly changed - I got stuck into working on the overhaul instead of chapters, as the progress has been very good. I plan to wrap it up in the first half of October and then get back to Chapter v2 for the rest of the month.