[openbeos] Re: ShowImage "Mirror" Operations

As Ryan said, ShowImage is now a bit of a misnomer. If anyone wants to search 
the archive, I started (IIRC) a thread a couple of years ago about ShowImage 
losing focus from it's original intention. I remember having a bit of a moan 
about how impossible it was to remove functionality from open source software 
after it is committed (or that may have been about Tracker's context menu, I'm 
completely with you on that Jonas). If we don't get on top of that, Haiku will 
gradually tend towards linux, where every feature anyone has ever liked on any 
OS will be implemented and there will be no real core design philosophy. OSS is 
even worse than design by committee at times - it can turn into "design by lots 
of seperate individuals". This is only going to get worse as Haiku attracts 
people who have never heard of BeOS and have their own ideas about how things 
should work.

There is definately a case for having a simple image editor, capable of 
correcting photos (sharpness, brightness, contrast, lossless rotation, red eye 
reduction), but without painting tools. ShowImage is not that app though IMHO.

If Be hadn't thought it would look cool in demos to be able to drag transparent 
parts of images around, ShowImage wouldn't even be able to save. In my opinion, 
it would be better for it. Saving a clipping by dragging a part of the image to 
Tracker is brilliant, but I question how useful it is to be able to drag part 
of the image to another place in the same image. Definately a job for an 
editting app if you want that sort of thing.

I appreciate all the work that went into extending ShowImage - some of the new 
features (sizing images to fit, slideshow, applying rotations after loading 
based on attribute) really are very welcome. 

Lossless JPEG rotation is tricky - it requires knowledge of the JPEG format and 
rotating the image in it's compressed format rather than uncompressing, 
rotating, and recompressing. As ShowImage uses the translation kit, it only 
really has access to the image in it's uncompressed form. JPEG rotation could 
be added as a "special case", but that doesn't really fit ShowImage's 
"universal image viewer" approach. As Jonas mentioned, also you get the UI 
problem of the difference between rotating after loading due to the attribute, 
or rotating the actual data (which might not even be possible losslessly for 
all image formats).

For a practical solution for current BeOS - wouldn't ZooKeeper let you bing 
rotate clockwise/counter clockwise commands as tracker addons (if you know the 
jpgtrans command line), so you could just selct some files and hit a keyboard 
shortcut? I've never used it myself, but it looks groovy.

Simon

> 
> From: "Ryan Leavengood" <leavengood@xxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 2006/04/19 Wed PM 11:50:36 GMT
> To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [openbeos] Re: ShowImage "Mirror" Operations
> 
> On 4/19/06, Jonas Sundström <jonas@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > But.. in general, I don't believe in design by committee/community.
> > There has to be a vision. Some kind of idea. Giving people
> > what they need (=what they want?), yes, but pleasing everyone
> > end up a hodge-podge.
> 
> I agree with a lot of the sentiment in your email here, and I REALLY
> AGREE with the above. Design by committee has always been a disaster
> in my opinion, because you just can't please everyone all the time.
> 
> > I wonder if the simplicity of ShowImage can be retained,
> > if you add the concept of physical data rotation in addition
> > to persistent fake rotation. How do you present that to the user?
> 
> It would be very confusing to have both. IMHO we should keep things
> how they are and the physical data rotation could be left to a tracker
> add-on or another application.
> 
> > I absolutely see the value in red eye reduction, resizing,
> > cropping, rotating and all that. These are things I need
> > myself. I'm basically not sure -how- I want them.
> 
> Well after reading your email I was contemplating on just the name of
> the app in question: ShowImage. Of course we inherited the name from
> BeOS, but don't you think we might be getting a little too far from
> the CORE purpose of this application the more we add image editing?
> I'm not sure what the solution is either, but let's be wary of feature
> creep in the beautiful simplicity that is part of why we all love
> BeOS.
> 
> Ryan


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