[Windows, Linux, Mac, Android] Zenbooru - Browse every image board in one place

Hi guys, I've been working on a *booru app for PC for a few months and I've just recently ported it to Android too. I'm looking for any feedback anyone cares to give about it.

Zenbooru (全ボール) is an app for image boards (a.k.a. image booru) that searches all your favourite image boards at once and displays the results back as a single stream, merging duplicate images or videos and their tags together.

Compatible with many popular (booru-style) image boards.
Supports viewing images (png, jpeg, gif, bmp, webp, svg) and videos (webm, mp4).
Downloads and shows formatted translation notes over content.
A slick and unobtrusive UI that scales from phone screens all the way up to UHD (a.k.a. 4k) monitors.
Only needs a site's address to be added, Zenbooru will figure out the rest on it's own.
Converts animated gifs into videos (via gyfcat) before downloading for smoother playback and smaller file sizes.
No advertisements or analytics and open source so anyone can check what's in it.
Supports rendering pixel art with crisp edges and unblurred from scaling.

You can find links to download, screenshots and more at it's website http://zenbooru.org

How does it handle (translation) notes?

NNescio said:

How does it handle (translation) notes?

It doesn't currently, nor comments or other data that needs to be fetched per image, but this is something I plan to implement.

Edit: As of the latest update (v0.4.5), Zenbooru now supports showing translation notes with formatting over images. You can also see them in the side bar without formatting and toggle showing of notes individually or altogether.

I don't see a lot of people using it in the future on the Android since it's going to be a paid app. Also, can you make it so it doesn't require Google Chrome on the PC?

tapnek said:

I don't see a lot of people using it in the future on the Android since it's going to be a paid app.

I appreciate a price tag will be a barrier to some people, but producing an android app and getting it on google play takes time and money that I otherwise wouldn't have wanted to spend without that incentive. I considered other options like adverts and paid features, but decided I was most comfortable with just making the full release paid. The source code will always remain free and open source so if others want to compile it and host apks for free I'm fine with that. I'm open to any suggestions people have on what they think might be better business models though.

tapnek said:

can you make it so it doesn't require Google Chrome on the PC?

It might be possible to remove the Chrome dependency for Windows 8+, but older versions of Windows, Linux and OSX will still require it as they have no other suitable browser preinstalled.

What's the issue with installing google chrome? If you're worried about privacy, Chromium (http://chromium.woolyss.com/download/) is the open source base for Chrome and doesn't contain the silent tracking stuff.

The problem isn't with Google Chrome, it's having to rely on a third party browser to do most of that stuff when you can just build only some of the required features into the program itself.

As for the Android thing, what will the full release include that packages complied from the source code won't have?

tapnek said:

you can just build only some of the required features into the program itself.

I can't — Zenbooru is written in HTML and JS — I would have to include some kind of web browser and the smallest one suitable would be nw.js (http://nwjs.io/) which weighs in at about 70MB per platform. To support all three major PC OSs as Zenbooru does now I'd need to include each version together which would be 210MB. That's a 178,117% increase in file size over Zenbooru's current 117.9KB which seems like a waste when most people will probably already have a suitable web browser installed already. Personally I think it's amazing you can have a non-trivial application that works across multiple OSs and is under a MB in size.

A better question would have been, why write it in HTML and JS. The main reason is it's what I'm most familiar with, but it also means that over 90% of the code base works everywhere and the remaining 10% is just "bootstrapping" code to start it.

tapnek said:

As for the Android thing, what will the full release include that packages complied from the source code won't have?

Convenience and support, feature wise they will be identical.