Been talking to someone from work quite extensive about Linux, Mono and C# these last 4 days. So much in fact that I looked back at my old pet project, Comic Buddy#. This had been a VB6 application I had written several years ago to allow me to browse all/any Calvin and Hobbes or Garfield comic strip that were (back then) freely available online. These comics, together with many others are still housed and fiercely maintained by a group (the company name and web site url left out on purpose) that has recently changed their policies concerning the viewing of said strips.

To make a long story short, the application built a dynamic string pointing directly to the comic’s url and displayed it onto a web browser control embedded in the application. The program itself was freely distributed at several locations, including downloads.com, and reached 25,000 downloads at one time. Feeling that a lot of people could take advantage of this program, I then naively contacted said group and offered to give them the rights to distribute it on their web site, free of charge. I did receive a reply stating they were very interested and had a few suggestions for possible enhancements, to which I agreed. However, shortly after that email, I received another one where they politely refused my offer and told me they had decided to develop something similar in-house. I didn’t think much of it afterward until I received a legal “cease and desist” email from the group’s lawyers. I promptly contacted them and tried to defend me from the accusations that I was distributing copyrighted material. I tried in vain to explain to the guy on the phone that the application worked as a web browser and nothing was being distributed… That very same day Comic Buddy was removed and never seen again (those there are some places out there in the wild www where you can still manage to get a broken copy of the installer).

Talking to this person from work made me go back to sourceforge.net and download the source code for my failed attempt at porting Comic Buddy to C# (and Linux). Here’s a screenshot of Comic Buddy# at a very rudimentary stage. Maybe this is the inspiration to go back to coding that I needed?