
Show HN: App and Comics on Nikola Tesla, Alan Turing, Ada Lovelace, Mary Anning - rlalwani
https://social.tinyview.com/cUefS58ej2
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rlalwani
Hi all,

We spent last one year to create an app, Tinyview Comics Reader, and a comic
series, IN SCIENCE WE TRUST, to tell stories of scientists like Nikola Tesla,
Alan Turing, Ada Lovelace and Mary Anning. Working with artists like Jack
Richardson whose illustrations have appeared in publications like the
Economist, and Andy Warner, the NY Times Best Selling author of Brief
Histories of Everyday Objects and This Land is My Land. He is a contributing
editor at The Nib and teaches cartooning at Stanford University.

These are our initial titles and we are learning a lot for future titles
(adding a healthy dose of humor). I hope you enjoy them. Alan Turing and Mary
Anning are FREE and first two chapters of Nikola Tesla are also FREE.

The app is easy to use and lets you read comics in vertically scrollable
manner. We want it to be a platform for other comics too - so there is more
content for users and more users and in-app purchase/subscription for content
creators.

Please share any feedback. Thank you!

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drivingmenuts
Why do you need an app to display an image? Your own website proves that a
browser is all that’s necessary to display images in a vertical scroll.

You want to sell subscriptions? That tech already exists as well and can be
platform-independent.

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rlalwani
Being able to monetize for quality content is one of the main purposes of this
experiment. For our content as well as other people's content in future. I
don't understand why content creators have to give away the content for free
and "beg" for donations on Patreon. We will allow them to combine the two.
There in-app purchases help quite a bit even though we end up losing 10-25% to
the app stores.

There are some other reasons related to user experience. We can do a bit more
in an app than what we can do in a browser e.g. push notifications for new
titles and more control over UI. Also, I feel people like apps because people
like to put things in "buckets" mentally.

But you are right - if/when we get some traction, we will provide a full-
fledged platform on the Web also. People can choose where they want to read.
Thanks for your thoughts.

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drivingmenuts
Why would you need Patreon? You an just as easily sell subs to a website. Push
notifications can be handled from server side and UI control is a matter of
some careful CSS and JS.

Matter of fact, you can build a responsive site that looks and feels like an
app on mobile and behaves like a site on desktop with one codebase.

I’m not against apps, per se, but I do think they are totally unnecessary when
duplicating behavior that is just as easily achieved in a browser. Plus, the
browser means you can push updates once and everyone gets them, as opposed to
an app where it’s piecemeal.

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rlalwani
I hear you. I am not a big fan of apps either - web is based on open standards
and decentralized. But micropayments are a problem on the web. In-app
purchases do work. Push notifications do matter. If you are right about the
web, how do you explain the rise of apps? Gmail, Facebook, Instagram could
easily be web-based but their app versions are far more popular. I think you
raise a good point though. I am afraid I don't have all the answers but I do
see some reasons as I mentioned earlier.

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saadalem
It's really good work !

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rlalwani
Thank you. We got some feedback from readers (make them funny) which we are
incorporating. We are working on 6 new titles starting with Archimedes.

