Development Diary #4: Library Mode, Kagane and Comix Plugins Fixes! (Patreon)

Dear Patrons,

Here I am again with exciting news to share regarding the latest optimizations for the alpha version of JAM. These updates, live today, are directly inspired by incredible feedback and tips from one of our subscribers 🙏

A Faster and Smarter Way to Download from Kagane!

As you should know, until today obtaining tokens and bypassing the Widevine DRM challenge required a manual page-scrolling method to download pages from Kagane website. While effective, it wasn’t the most seamless experience. Thanks to a brilliant alternative browser-based method to acquire only integrity token and Widevine DRM challenge keys, manual scrolling is now a thing of the past! 😃

By implementing this new approach, JAM can now utilize official Kagane API calls directly. This means two major upgrades for your workflow:

Significantly Faster Downloads: Bypassing the waits for image loadings and page scrolling of the old system allows for a much quicker downloading process.

Higher Reliability: Minimizing manual interaction greatly reduces the margin for any error, making the entire process incredibly stable.

Keeping the Classic Method as a Backup

While the new API-based method is superior for daily use, I always believe in redundancy. The original scrolling method is still completely functional and highly resilient. Should the platform update its site structure or encryption keys in the future, the old method will likely serve as an excellent fallback. Because of this, I am keeping both options available for you. I have added a new setting inside the Extras menu for Kagane, allowing you to seamlessly switch between the two procedures and choose what works best for you at any moment.

A Completely Rewritten Comix Plugin with Improved Resilience

As many of you have noticed, the site's API encryption has been changing constantly lately, making support extremely unstable and forcing me to release frequent hotfixes. I have decided to take a radical new approach: the new plugin no longer relies on the API. Instead, it interacts directly with the website itself, letting your web browser handle the heavy lifting of data decryption, just as a regular user would while browsing.

This method is much more robust. From now on, simply changing the API or its encryption method won't break the plugin; the site would need to undergo a structural update to its web interface to impact functionality. This should provide us with significantly more stability moving forward. The only trade-off concerns the chapter list. Since Comix only displays 20 chapters per page, the plugin now needs to dynamically load all pages of the list (whereas the API used to provide the full list at once). For manga with hundreds of chapters, you may notice a slightly longer waiting time in the chapter list window. Don't worry if the screen seems stuck! It is actually working in the background to fetch the entire list via JavaScript, just give it a moment to complete.

New Option: Dual Image Acquisition Modes

I have implemented two different modes for acquiring chapter images, accessible via an option in the Extras menu:

Local Storage: Uses data stored locally in the browser.

Dynamic Scrolling: Relies on standard scrolling and dynamic URL loading.

Honestly, there isn't much difference in speed between the two methods (the time taken is effectively the same), but I decided to leave both as options for you. This way, if one of the two methods breaks in the future, you can try the other to keep things running while you wait for an update from my side.

Library Mode Fixes, Database Enhancements & Auto-Cleanup

Thanks to another excellent bug report, I have also completely revamped how the database handles manga IDs by switching to an incremental schema.Previously, if you deleted a manga from your library, its ID became vacant. If a newly added manga claimed that vacant ID, a bug would cause leftover chapters from the old series to mistakenly populate inside the new manga’s chapter list. With the new incremental ID system, this issue is resolved forever. To complement this, I’ve introduced an automated cleanup feature for orphan ID. Also, whenever a manga is removed from your library, the program will now automatically delete its downloaded cover image. This ensures old covers will never accidentally attach themselves to new entries.

Seamless Auto-Upgrade: You won't need to lift a finger to enjoy these database improvements. Upon your first launch of this update, the program will automatically upgrade your existing database, applying all the necessary new triggers and parameters entirely in the background!

❤ Thank You for your Support

As always, a massive thank you to all of you for supporting this project. The money, feedback, bug reports, and insights you are providing during this alpha phase are absolutely invaluable. You are directly helping to shape JAM into a faster, more robust, and more refined application every single day, thank you very much!

Stay tuned for more updates, and happy testing!