IManga Library

Entertainment comes in an abundance of forms, ranging from jokes, songs, clips, games, videos and books. These can also depend on culture and a highly-popular type is Manga, which are merely comic books created in Japan, but with a personal look and feel about them. With the Internet enhancing file download, various websites can be accessed so you can read favorite Manga comics, or even download them with applications like IManga Library.

First of all, you need to make sure your computer is equipped with Java Runtime Environment for proper functionality, since it's built on this platform. This has a few advantages, such as the fact that the applications is portable, and since Java is platform independent, there's a high chance it can run on multiple platforms.

The main window is pretty compact you'll probably be confused at first because of the extreme simplicity. Fitted with one entry in the toolbar, a “Back” button and an almost empty list of sources to download Manga from, but not hinted in any way, it's pretty difficult to figure out what to do.

You can take your time and add trusted sources, or explore Manga Eden, which is implemented by default. An impressive number of titles can be found and there's a search field to make identification a bit easier.

Sadly, navigation is based on a series of steps and this is where the “Back” button comes in handy. The selected title is displayed with its corresponding cover page, as well as a short description if available. All series and episodes can be picked from a list, with the possibility to choose multiple entries for download.

Another aspect that drives you crazy is managing downloaded items. There's no option to pick a destination folder, which is created in the deployment folder of the application. You need to use the toolbar menu entry to access downloaded content, but these are enlisted in the same window. This dependency of one window has a negative impact on flexibility.

There's also an implemented viewer, stripped of any other options and buttons other than navigation tools. You'll have to use them whether you like it or not, because hotkey support is not implemented, not even for arrow keys. Needless to say that you can't set slides to automatically change at a given time.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that IManga Library is not the best application you can use to download and read Manga comics, not even being ready to replace methods you commonly use, such as a web browser. Sure, it's lightweight and pretty simple, but it takes too much time to get familiar with it for the amount and diversity of features it has to offer.