[Significant Improvement] Pandora Image Viewer (PIV)


_wb_

Microbe
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As a last minute submission, I'll release an update to PIV. I'll leave it up to you whether it is going to be a significant improvement or just a minor improvement, but it will at least be some improvement.

The nature of coding competitions like this is such that it gives an advantage to secret development, and a disadvantage to early and frequent releases. If I would have kept NubNub and PIV secret pet projects until after the compo announcement, they would have made pretty nice entries in the "new game" and "new application" categories. Not that I regret having released them earlier, but perhaps it is something to take into account.

Anyway, one extra feature that was often requested for PIV was thumbnail navigation. I have been coding a bit the last few days, and thumbnails will be there the next version (to be released just before the compo deadline). When you zoom out from a fully zoomed out image, it will show 2x2 pictures. Zoom out further to get 4x4, 8x8 or 16x16 pictures (or something in between like 5x5 using the zoom fine-tuning buttons , and .). In the thumbnail mode, the current image is highlighted and you can navigate with the dpad or touch. You can select, delete, and rotate images from thumbnail mode (for cropping and detailed info you still need to zoom in to one image). Since you can fit up to 256 thumbnails on the screen at the same time (at that size they are tiny of course, at most 50x30 pixels), thumbnail mode is very suitable to get an overview and to quickly see which pictures you want to delete, which you want to keep, and which you want to select for e.g. a web gallery.
 
Here's a screenshot of what it looks like with 4x4 thumbnails and some images selected and marked for removal:

piv_thumbs.png


Currently the loading of thumbnails is still a bit slow, so I'll try to optimize that a bit where possible.
 
Version 0.5 is on the repo!

Thumbnail loading is relatively fast now. I'm using the embedded 160x120 thumbnails that can be found in most big images. For larger "thumbnails", and for images without embedded previews, I just scale down further than what I would otherwise do to get near 800x480.

Zooming out from a fit-to-screen image, you get a 2x1 "grid" of "thumbnails" -- this may be useful if the images represent pages of a portrait book. Zooming out once more gives a 3x2 grid, then a 5x4 grid (this fits 20 standard 160x120 thumbnails perfectly), then a 10x8 grid, and finally a 20x16 grid of 320 tiny thumbs (40x30 px). Intermediate grid sizes like 4x3 and 6x5 can be reached using the fine zoom buttons (, and .).

I also changed the downscaling: to go from 2Wx2H to WxH it used to just discard 3 out of 4 pixels. This is very fast, but it introduces some aliasing that can be avoided by doing smooth scaling (taking the average of 4 pixels). It is slightly slower now, but the difference is not as big as I feared. For JPEG files there is barely any difference at all, since the downscaling for JPEGs is done in a smarter way anyway for 1/2, 1/4 and 1/8 scale.
 
Can I associate image filetypes with this? So I can open images in this by default when doubleclicking on one?

EDIT: Nevermind, I figured it out.
 
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