v0.4.9 - Spillover + Webtoon Reader Polish
Published on November 27, 2021 by Joseph Milazzo
It's been 1 year since I started on this idea of building an alternative reader to Ubooquity with the goal of being the Plex of the reading world. I wouldn't be able to believe the amount of progress that I would make nor the direction shift which would happen thanks to my vocal and understanding community. Kavita has definitely come along ways and has a long ways to go. I have many ideas still to implement and look forward to growing it with your help.
This is the last release before the initial metadata support release. As mentioned last release, this is a split of the defects and changes to polish Kavita since the next release will take quite some time to implement. By total accident, this release has a huge focus on the readers adding new functionalities like fitting covers to device, a new bookmark effect, and of course, a complete rework for the webtoon reader making it a solid reading experience.
In addition, we had a few changes. We've added an indicator to the top right of the nav bar to show you when Kavita is performing tasks like scanning the system, refreshing cover images, running backups, etc. This will expand in functionality over time, but it should give you a good insight into what's happening with the system.
We've changed what we collect from you if you opt into Stat collection. We now only collect your anonymous install id, OS, kavita version, .NET version, if you're running docker, and the number or cores you have. All data previously collected that does not fall into this set of points has been deleted with this release.
Lastly In Progress section is now called On Deck. This behaves very similar, however when a series gets a new chapter/volume added to it and you have reading progress, it will jump to the beginning. This should help you quickly see when something new comes out on series you might have fully read.
Also, if you haven't seen, we have a new feature request site up. So if you've been wanting to request something, take a browse there and request or upvote others.
Lastly, I want to thank Palace-Designs Inc, whom has offered up hosting for our VMs for free, which helps us reduce costs. Thank you for all the resources and help in getting us migrated over.
You can find the release here.
Added
- Added 'Date Added' to volume/chapter card detail modals to help users understand when new chapters are added after something has been fully read.
- When bookmarking a page in the manga reader, show a fade effect to help user understand which page was bookmarked (#667)
- Added a check during library scan to check if the drives are accessible and if any in the library root aren't, the scan will be aborted. (#713)
- In progress and Recently Added will now remove a card if the series is deleted during a scan
- Series detail page will now send user to dashboard if a series is deleted during a scan
- InstallId is now persisted to the database. InstallId is a anonymous key that is generated at startup and is used to track unique installs if you enable stat collection
- Added a select all/deselect all checkbox on Library Access for users that have a lot of libraries (#751)
- Added a widget to the nav bar which shows when the backend is processing events and tasks. Progress can be seen through this when active. (#755)
- Added progress events for Backing up Database, Cleaning Cache/Temp, Metadata Refresh for a library
- New Splitting option for cover images: FitSplit. This new method will scale the image to the display on cover images so you can see the whole image on load rather than splitting it (lessening the effect) or showing original with scrolling. This is now the default option for new readers. (#759)
Changed
- Webtoon reader will now use fit to width instead of original to prevent overflow for high res images (#667)
- Page prefetching and current page tracking is now separated and a page is not counted as current page without the top edge hitting top 25% of the screen. This results in much more reliable tracking on webtoon reader. (#667)
- Moved format for card details to the highest level since all chapters and files have the same format for a series and added date added to each file/chapter to help users understand when chapters are added to the volume.
- Don't show toasts on new series added when a user is reading
- Book reader now scopes css to a class that has less potential for style creep
- Some books have margins set that conflict with Kavita's reader. Added a style to avoid this case (black bars on side of book reader) (#728)
- In Progress is now called On Deck. When a series with existing progress is updated with a new chapter, it will be pushed to the front of the list. (#742)
- Update checks will now occur randomly between noon and 6pm daily.
- Changed some log statements to better indicate when a series is not added due to a constraint issue
- Implemented some performance enhancements to avoid extra array generation during library scan.
- Improved the logging in scan loop for when duplicates or series can cause issues with adding. New messaging is now on the wiki to help user understand.
- Allow the user to make more than 1 backup per day by including timestamp into the filename.
- Removed most of the information gathering from the installs. Only InstallId, Number of Cores, Kavita Version, Dotnet Version, OS, and IsDocker is now tracked for all users. (#628)
- Refactored how css variables were access through components, resulting in smaller css bundles
- Updated readme with new host information and urls
- Updated system tab with new urls and replaced .NET Version with InstallD, which is a unique identifier for an install.
- Updated the default reading preferences for new users to give a better reading experience.
- Tweaked the styling on the Changelog and added publish date as well.
- Removed no-connection page redirects when an API fails in backend.
- Updated the bookmark effect to have a much nicer effect rather than adjusting opacity
Fixed
- Fixed an issue where dragging the slider on manga reader wouldn't show tool tip dynamically. This does not work for webtoon reader. (463)
- Fixed a missed case where partial volume support got missed on the epub parser. Now your books with Volume 1 and Volume 1.5 won't group. (#727 )
- Fixed a spec issue with entries that contain no items. We send 'Nothing here', but I forgot to send an Id for that feed.
- Fixed a missing migration for backup directory to the new config directory. Docker users will now have backups in config, all other users would have to manually move them over.
- Fixed an issue with Panels OPDS integration due to a malformed OPDS feed from our end.
- Last page on webtoon reader now properly counts.
- Fixed an issue where scrollToPage (from progress slider or go to page) would not work if the page was somehow slightly visible.
- Fixed an issue where register new user inputs were not styled correctly.
- Fixed an error being thrown when trying to rename a series to the same name as another series in the library but with a different format. (#741)
- Fixed backups not pointing to the correct directory (config) from previous release. Backups now contain the correct files. (#749)
- Fixed a bug where backup wasn't working correctly for docker users.
- Fixed a bug in cover image selection under a unique situation (#756)
- Fixed some comic parsing bugs based on user report (#758)
- Fixed a bug where check for update was scheduled twice with different ids.
- Fixed a duplicate render on automatic scaling due to emitting a value change with automatic scaling changing fit option.
- Fixed an issue where next/prev chapter loaders would execute when they shouldn't in webtoon reader
- Fixed a bug in webtoon reader where next chapter spacer when clicked would load previous chapter
- Ensure specials don't show their extension in reading lists (#766)
- Fixed a rendering issue on the book reader with long absolute positioned images causing a 2 tone background color in dark book reader