Komos review

My family has a subscription to the L.A. Times, but what’s the first thing I read when I get my hands on that folded packet of important local and global news? The funny pages. What can I say, I like to have my shot of happy before burying myself in the overwhelmingly depressing happenings of the real world. Unfortunately, you’re limited by the selection of your newspaper–you really can’t catch ’em all.

That’s why you need Frozen Frame Media’s Komos app (and an internet connection with which to use it)! With 162 daily comics and 62 editorial comics featured, there’s a lot more than what you’d get subscribing to one (or even five) newspapers. The dailies and the editorials are on separate screens; just tap the switch button on the top right to change views. Dailies are listed by alphabetical order, while editorials are listed by the artist’s first name. When you tap on a name, you are automatically taken to the latest strip, but the best part of this app lies within the Date button on the bottom left.

Tapping on it will allow you to access the comic strips prior to the latest, so if you miss a week, you’re fully covered. Of course, some comics go back further than others, so don’t go skipping out for an entire decade and come back expecting to see them all laid out for you. When viewing strips, you can switch between landscape and portrait views, and manipulate them as you would a regular photo on an iPhone: double tap to zoom, pinch-zoom, and swipe to scroll. You can also save, copy, or email any of the strips.

Komos is extremely minimalist in design, so there’s no way you can get confused navigating it. It is clean, focused on getting you what you want to see, and the controls are intuitive. I like the selection, but there are a few titles missing that I feel are glaring omissions…perhaps there were copyright issues, or something along those lines. I’d also love to see a Favoriting feature added, so I won’t have to scroll past titles I don’t read or dislike just to get at the ones I do. I feel kind of horrible for further contributing to the decline of newsprint, but you can’t argue the ease and efficiency of having over 200+ comic strips at your fingertips for a LOT less than a newspaper subscription. And I won’t miss the ink stains on my fingers.

Here is a video demo of the Komos app on the iPhone

AppSafari Rating: 4/5

AppSafari review of Komos was written by Julie Guan on July 27th, 2010 and categorized under App Store, Art, Fun, News, Reading. Page viewed 6822 times, 2 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.