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[anville]

For anyone that is interested, here is a new cross-platform metadata tagging tool for comic archives.

http://code.google.com/p/comictagger/

[Yoc]

Interesting but why aren't they pulling data from GCD instead of ComicsVine???
Insanity.

[narfstar]

It is the GCD's goal to be the most reliable source

[anville]

@Yoc, ComicVine provides a public REST API.  Near as I could tell, GCD doesn't yet.  Does it?

[Yoc]

not sure what that is A but they do have a raw data version which I believe could be used for such an app.

[anville]

Basically, Comic Vine has a service that makes it very easy to query their database through software.  It's not perfect, but it does work.  Without such a service, programs generally have to resort to "scrapers", which try to extract data from the web pages served up for the human eye.  It's possible to do this, but it's very prone to failure, as every time a design change occurs on the scraped website, it could break the scraper.

I has seen some mentions of GCD providing such a service in the future, but nothing concrete.

And, yes, GCD does provide their entire database for download, but this has its own issues with respect to programming complexity, difficulty for users, and timeliness of data.

That said, plans are for ComicTagger to support GCD in the future, but things are stil in beta state at the moment.  So, still insane?

[MarkWarner]

Yoc, In simple terms in your program (or web page) you make a call to where the data is eg: GCD with  a parameter(s) and it returns data that is structured so that you can easily read it in your program. Basically very similar to when you do a search on a website, but instead it is a computer doing it and getting back raw data rather than the pretty version you see.

A web service is well over due on GCD ... but it's interesting you can download the database I didn't realize this!

As an aside I notice "external tools needed for writing RAR" are you shelling out for this or are you saying that this is a manual operation? If only all the archives were .zip the world would be a whole lot simpler!

[anville]

@Mark, I agree with you sentiment about zips!

Regarding rar tools, here is the text from the ComicTagger wiki on the subject:

In order to read and write RAR and CBR archives, you will need to download tools from WinRAR.
You may need to specify the tool locations via the settings/preferences dialog.

ComicTagger uses the command-line tools "rar" and "unrar", which, despite the warnings of the WinRAR
GUI, don't seem to expire. So, no need to pay!

And the settings dialog from the Mac version:

(The windows version doesn't need unrar, as it ships with the UnRAR DLL.)

Once the user sets this up, the reads and writes to CBR/RAR files are the same as CBZ/ZIPs

[Drahken]

While I haven't used this tagging program, I can confirm about the commandline RAR tools. I installed them on my system many years ago to use via a couple programs (gonvisor and tugzip). They're free, never expire, and don't nag (at least not when called via other programs like this).