Like with all software, I'm late on delivery with missing features. I had originally planned for 5 days (last Monday through Friday), but it's now 1:45 on Saturday.

This is the program I've been working on for the past week, which I call "hatsubai" (meaning "on sale" in Japanese) for lack of anything more creative. Sometime late last week, I was surprised to find out that there were quite a few new releases in September that I wasn't aware of including Hanaukyo Maid Tai #10, Mahoraba #7, Fruits Basket #15, Ichigo 100% #12, and so on. I've been so engrossed in my reading that I haven't been keeping up with the list of upcoming titles. I don't think it's a serious problem as I'd much rather reading manga (and watching anime) rather than just spending all my time just talking about it and not actually enjoying the art. It's still nice to keep up with titles. What I needed was something that will scan through all releases for series I'm interested in and authors I enjoy reading, hence this program.

Hatsubai does a very simple job: it parses a long list of manga/anime/anime music/novel releases and shows me anything that matches the title or author that I specify. It also allows for some simple bookkeeping as to what I've pre-ordered, what I've purchased, and what I'm going to purchase. It can also filter out on the different types of media.

The database is pretty big and contains almost 45,000 products, ~27,000 manga titles, ~6600 anime DVDs, ~3600 anime/game CDs, and a few thousand novels and CD singles. The is downloadable as a comma separated file from Mangaoh and they track titles all the way to the beginning of 2001 to current/next month.

According to the program right now, there are 12 "must have" books for me for my next order. I didn't even know half of these were released until I ran it through the program.

If you click the image below, there's a little demo of the program. At the very least, watch the splash screen. That caused me quite a headache, but served as a good learning experience in programming in Cocoa.

The only missing feature now that I had planned is the automatic download of the product list from Mangaoh. Right now, I have to manually save the file, but eventually, the program will be smart enough to do that. It's amazing what laziness can make people do. :)

Manga reading will continue tomorrow, after a long, long slumber.

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