Added 1 new A* page:Yay after a move from one apartment to the other and getting my studio all set back up and comfy, we're back to regular A* updates again, thank goodness! Hopefully I won't have to move again for at least another 15 years. :P This new place is actually a little swanky: most of its floor area is actually level, which is nice for loads of things, including setting up a drawing table. :) At this point I'm a little paranoid about my daily brush cleaning clogging up the nice bathroom drain with various waterproof inks--we're not supposed to use Draino here--but eh well I figure I'll just have to get adept at the ol' backing soda and vinegar and boiling water methods, because the ink must flow, that's for darn sure.
In addition to the apartment move I've been trying to move to a new phone, because a friend gave me their old smarty phone, and I've spent way too much time over the past few days trying to wrestle it into submission. In the course of that I of course checked out A* in the tiny mobile web browsers on the thing, and noticed that while the screen on this thing should be just about the perfect size for the A* site and comic when you hold it sideways, the browsers insist on having a HUGE address bar at the top of the screen that pushes everything down so much you can't read all the subtitles--and for some reason they don't have the bar disappear when not in use, so it's just there all the time, blocking 20% of the internet.
Fortunately, at least with the Firefox mobile browser, there is a solution, namely a browser extension called Auto Fullscreen, which does what the browsers should do in the first place, and hides the gigantic address bar so it isn't taking up all that screen space (it comes back when you scroll), and A*'s subtitles and all fit just nicely. Although the little text page navigation links on the A* site are a little hard to see, much less click, on a tiny handheld screen, you can just click the comic image to go to the next page, so! Now you've got all you need--well, a fast Wi-Fi connection or something is also handy--to read A* on a fancy phone.
And if you're going somewhere without a good connection, you can always go to the episodes & e-books page and get the pdf versions of the episodes to download and then read later. I was actually pleasantly surprised by how well the pdf reading experience went on the small screen of this Android thingy.
So yay! Maybe tomorrow my phone number will have finished porting over and I'll actually be able to use this phone for phone things. : P I'm still paranoid that my reception with this new provider is going to be awful, being on the ground floor of an old brick apartment building right next to another old brick apartment building as I am, but eh in theory I can always just switch my number back to the old phone/provider if necessary, right? Right? :o
EDIT: A well-equipped reader has informed me that the Safari browser on iPhones is smart enough hide the address bar by default when the device is held in landscape mode, so they work just dandy with A* right out of the box. Jeesh you'd at least have thought Androids would'a copied that. : p
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