Mr.Gonzo
*implode*
aha . Yes for sure.
It was just a mock up.
A nice zoomed out/thumbnail menu would be cool too
It was just a mock up.
A nice zoomed out/thumbnail menu would be cool too
Image Viewing On The Pandora
- Thread starter CandidStan
- Start date
I personally use a zune 3" 240×320 all the time to view comics and have put silly amounts of time formatting my images, pdf books, and comics to try and find the best way to make them easily readable (an up hill battle). Any way I personally find that changing the orientation of picture every few images to be annoying even on the much more handy zune device. I know it sounds like a good idea but I spent hours cropping images rotated one way or another to try to get the important parts of all the pictures clear and in the picture. The wast would be sooo much more if you actually wrote a program before checking out how much you like it.
For just the occasional page in a comic it might not be that bad...
Any way I also tried cropping the images in an automated batch fashion focusing on the top right, top left, bottom right, and bottom left; All with a 10% overlap on the horizontal axis and a greater over lap vertically. By doing this you just click a button and the next part of the page is there. No fiddling with zoom or image navigation controls. The 10% overlap I found out the hard way was necessary because with it any image bubble is going to be on one side or the other (between the 2 images). With out the overlap you end up flipping between pages to read one one part of a sentence. The 10% seemed to work out well as a compromise between making the images to as big a zoom as possible and easily reading along. It works fairly well but you still end up wanting to have a full image and scroll around on it normally, but if you had software that was just skipping around to different predictable points of the same comic book page then that would not be a problem. Needless to say you would need a western and eastern (right to left VS. left to right) modes.
I also tried slicing and image horizontally into 3 sections with a heavy vertical over lap and pasting them side by side so that you only need to scroll across in one direction and you see different versions of the same page progressively further down the page. I thought this was a novel idea and it does work but it is not the best. You could have a mode that zooms in and scrolls from the top of the page to the bottom and then goes back to the top of the page but on the other side before going onto the next page upon scrolling to the bottom of the page.
But as to having comics essentially remain portrait pictures (in reference to Pandora's 800x LCD) or be turned side ways to line up more with the dimensions of the screen, I do have a view. You would not think it but comics really are more vertical. That is to say if you are going to view a limited portion of a page at a time it is more important to have a larger portion of the image be vertical rather than horizontal. It does not make to much sense when I try to rationalize it but one does tend to read down the page, and many elements tend to be vertical rectangles; a head with bubbles above it, people standing, a bubble stacked on top of another bubble. There may or may not be a line at the top of a page that goes all the way across but after that often your eyes are drawn downwards to the bottom of the page before you are drawn back up to the top of the page to view the other half of the panels. It's just one of those things.
Because of this vertical tendency of comics if the top of the comic page did correspond to the top of Pandora's LCD you would be forever scrolling to the bottom of a page and then scrolling back to the top. I DO however think that is the best solution, just because I 'think' that you would see enough of the vertical portion of a page at a time for it not to be a problem and the greater standard zoom on the comic would be nice. If it was aligned the other way then I think that it could not full screen default to a resolution that would be entirely satisfactory and most readers would end up zooming in and scrolling around the picture from there, and this would end up being more of a hassle.
This is just how I see things now. It will be much clearer to all of us what would be handy when we have an actual Pandora in our hands. I would just request that a mouse click or a touch screen drag could move the image. I guess that would come along with controls onscreen to zoom in/out, but you would want them not visible when not in use.
For just the occasional page in a comic it might not be that bad...
Any way I also tried cropping the images in an automated batch fashion focusing on the top right, top left, bottom right, and bottom left; All with a 10% overlap on the horizontal axis and a greater over lap vertically. By doing this you just click a button and the next part of the page is there. No fiddling with zoom or image navigation controls. The 10% overlap I found out the hard way was necessary because with it any image bubble is going to be on one side or the other (between the 2 images). With out the overlap you end up flipping between pages to read one one part of a sentence. The 10% seemed to work out well as a compromise between making the images to as big a zoom as possible and easily reading along. It works fairly well but you still end up wanting to have a full image and scroll around on it normally, but if you had software that was just skipping around to different predictable points of the same comic book page then that would not be a problem. Needless to say you would need a western and eastern (right to left VS. left to right) modes.
I also tried slicing and image horizontally into 3 sections with a heavy vertical over lap and pasting them side by side so that you only need to scroll across in one direction and you see different versions of the same page progressively further down the page. I thought this was a novel idea and it does work but it is not the best. You could have a mode that zooms in and scrolls from the top of the page to the bottom and then goes back to the top of the page but on the other side before going onto the next page upon scrolling to the bottom of the page.
But as to having comics essentially remain portrait pictures (in reference to Pandora's 800x LCD) or be turned side ways to line up more with the dimensions of the screen, I do have a view. You would not think it but comics really are more vertical. That is to say if you are going to view a limited portion of a page at a time it is more important to have a larger portion of the image be vertical rather than horizontal. It does not make to much sense when I try to rationalize it but one does tend to read down the page, and many elements tend to be vertical rectangles; a head with bubbles above it, people standing, a bubble stacked on top of another bubble. There may or may not be a line at the top of a page that goes all the way across but after that often your eyes are drawn downwards to the bottom of the page before you are drawn back up to the top of the page to view the other half of the panels. It's just one of those things.
Because of this vertical tendency of comics if the top of the comic page did correspond to the top of Pandora's LCD you would be forever scrolling to the bottom of a page and then scrolling back to the top. I DO however think that is the best solution, just because I 'think' that you would see enough of the vertical portion of a page at a time for it not to be a problem and the greater standard zoom on the comic would be nice. If it was aligned the other way then I think that it could not full screen default to a resolution that would be entirely satisfactory and most readers would end up zooming in and scrolling around the picture from there, and this would end up being more of a hassle.
This is just how I see things now. It will be much clearer to all of us what would be handy when we have an actual Pandora in our hands. I would just request that a mouse click or a touch screen drag could move the image. I guess that would come along with controls onscreen to zoom in/out, but you would want them not visible when not in use.
krooked
Member
its funny this all has been brought up, this exact image viewing idea was going to be my first program i was going to design to learn the steps taken from code -> pandora use.
well i guess now ill have to just think of a better idea while i wait for my pandora.
well i guess now ill have to just think of a better idea while i wait for my pandora.
zaoin
Member
You can use comix(freeware) with a palm emulator.
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