Development Diary #12: Features Restored, UI Polish, and Under-the-Hood Improvements! (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

It’s time for a new weekly digest, and I’ve got a massive set of updates for you today. This past week has been all about refining the core experience, squashing annoying bugs, and finally restoring some key features.

Here is everything new in the latest alpha build:

🛠️ Core Features & Improvements

Database Management Restored: Database cleanup and backup tools are fully operational once again. With this update, all Patreon-exclusive extra features are officially back online and fully functional! Thanks for your patience while we got these fine-tuned.

Persistent Queue Customization (Patron Exclusive): You now have granular control over how and when your download queue saves. Head into the settings menu to enable or disable queue persistence on restart. You can also customize the save frequency! For instance, setting it to auto-save on every change so your progress is fully protected against unexpected crashes or sudden shutdowns.

Auto-Shutdown Toggle: Added a quick-action button to the bottom toolbar that enables automatic application closure once your entire download queue finishes processing. Perfect for those of you who leave JAM running overnight, on a secondary machine, or running on a server machine!

🎨 Interface & Quality-of-Life Fixes

Settings GUI Redesign: I redesigned the Settings window layout to fix rendering and layout bugs that were occurring specifically when using the Nimbus look-and-feel theme. Everything should now be visible.

General Stability: Packed in a handful of under-the-hood fixes and performance tweaks across the core application to keep things running smooth.

💡 Development Insights: Page Download Parallelization

I spent a considerable amount of time testing parallelized page downloads to see if we could squeeze out extra speed. However, real-world testing quickly proved it was a double-edged sword with very little upside:

It frequently triggered aggressive anti-bot protections across most source sites.

The network overhead caused download stalls, freezes, and overall slowdowns—ironically making the total download process of a single chapter slower than fetching pages sequentially.

It added unnecessary complexity to PDF and EPUB generation engines.

As a result, I’ve officially shelved this approach.

🔌 Plugin Ecosystem Updates

I’ve pushed out maintenance updates for a long list of plugins. While too many were touched to list every single one, fixes and improvements have been deployed for key sources including Comix, Kagane, Tappytoon, Mangaplaza, Mangago, and others. I’ve also expanded our site support lineup with the addition of Reimanga!

❤️ A Huge Thank You to Our Supporters

As always, none of this constant development, troubleshooting, and feature-building would be possible without your incredible support. Every single pledge directly powers the time and effort that goes into keeping JAM fast, updated, and feature-rich. You are truly the backbone of this project, and I couldn't be more grateful to have such an amazing community behind it.

Give the new build a spin and let me know how it performs for you in the comments here or on Github!