Panels - Comic Reader

I love Panels on my iPad, so I was ecstatic when I saw it had finally come to Mac. While the interface is great, and it has dark mode unlike Simple Comic or YAC, I’ve run into some issues. First, it crashes. I’ve had the app freeze and crash on me while adjusting settings at least 3 times in the past 2 days. Finally, my biggest gripe: reversing reading order is finicky. I read almost exclusively manga, so it’s important that I’m able to read right to left. For some reason, the buttons you click to go backward and forwards do not reverse when reversing reading order, although your arrow keys do. I’ve also run into issues with the scroll wheel. It may just be my mouse, but scrolling a single page requires at least two full spins of the scroll wheel which is not easy to do. Being able to adjust scroll sensitivity would help this. It would also be nice to be able to use the vertical scroll wheel on your mouse to scroll your comic horizontally if you choose. Please fix reverse reading order and the scroll wheel sensitivity and this could be 5 stars!

I was trying to self host my own manga server using Jellyfin and once I got it working, I noticed that manga wouldn’t load to my phone using my reverse proxy. After many hours of troubleshooting, I downloaded Panels after reviewing some Reddit threads and figured it was worth a shot. I was a previous user of Chunky (another manga app that has been deleted I believe) and loved the OneDrive connection capability. I couldn’t find an app I liked since Chunky. Panels has easily taken that spot. I look forward to getting my Jellyfin server running and working properly but I think I’ll try the SMB connection first on Panel. If you are curious and want to try it out for a month, I’d say it’s worth the $2. At the moment, I’d probably pay the one time cost for a total unlock of the app just because of the convenience alone.

I’ve been using panels for going on 2 years now. In the beginning, it was really cool to be able to read my manga and comics on my iPad because I switched from physical books to digital thanks to the pandemic. Panels was really nice in the beginning albeit a bit lackluster feature wise. Over the course of my use, it’s been improving each update, adding all sorts of wonderful features and just making it a better experience. By far my favorite feature to day is them adding custom SMB server support. I have it connected to my home server where all my e-books are stored and now it’s just like my Plex server. Panels is definitely my go to app for all things comic related. You honesty can’t beat it in my opinion. I don’t even make reviews for apps but Panels is definitely one that deserves the praise. I put all my friends on to it and they love it just as much as I do. Please keep up the good work Panels time, y’all are truly making something special here for us comic lovers .