Chad Carpenter’s Tundra is now available on the iTunes App Store as a iPhone/iPod Touch app. They have released two versions – a free app with 25 comics in it and a $.99 app with 100 of his comic.
Over the last couple of months, I’ve downloaded a few comic apps to see how each developer/creator approached taking comics to a very small screen. By far, the comics that make the best leap to the 320×480 iPhone screen are single (vertical) comic panels such as The Argyle Sweater. Multi-panel comics such as uClick’s Bone was an interesting implementation as not all of its panels were vertical, but for the most part, they were cropped to keep the story-line flowing.
Tundra, being a one panel horizontal comic, has none of the advantages of the single vertical panel, nor small panels like Bone or multi-panel comic strip. The developers of the Tundra app solved this by presenting the comic in landscape mode, but still it doesn’t quite line up. To fit the full comic on the screen, it shows the full panel slightly more than half of the screen which works with my 20/20 eyesight, but I can imagine it would be very small for people with less abilities. The app doesn’t allow for pinching or spreading to enlarge the comic to a more readable size.
What the developers did well is allow for flicking through the comics with the ease you’d expect in an iPhone app. Since Tundra’s gags are so simple, one could flick through the entire app in a short amount of time. You can also enter in which number you want to jump through to skip directly to a favorite.
Disclosure: I am a participant in Septembers Self-syndication Seminar set up by Tundra marketing guy Bill Kellogg and Chad.
We have had several comments about the text being too small, and therefore difficult for some folks to read on some of the comic strips. Because of this, will be enlarging the text on those strips and adding the ‘pinching & spreading’ feature to these two apps, as well as any future apps.
I would appreciate any other “constructive criticism” too. We are new to the whole iPhone thing but we want to make these as good and user friendly as possible.
I really enjoy your strip, a type of humor you don’t see too much. Can you set this up so it can be viewed on the Android system Thanks so much!!!