[openbeos] Re: ShowImage "Mirror" Operations

  • From: Waldemar Kornewald <wkornew@xxxxxxx>
  • To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2006 13:16:55 +0200

Stephan Assmus wrote:

I consider most of the requests of things to add to showimage to only be applicable to photos, and therefore a standalone app for simple photo manipulation would be good. I'm also thinking ahead a bit to RAW support and the other things that make photos unique - the ability to losslessly alter white balance and things. I quite like the idea behind Apple's Aperture (never used it, just seen the screenshots) - an app expressly designed for photo manipulation recognising the source as a photo rather than just a grid of pixels.

The problem is when you run your slide show in ShowImage and then unexpectedly come across a photo that you need to correct in some way. Then you need to launch that other app and that's what is going to be annoying. I vote for making ShowImage handle photos, for the simple reason that most people are going to use it that way. What kind of images are you going to look at with ShowImage that are not photos?! I don't want to give ShowImage a more sophisticated GUI than it already has. I would even remove stuff from it. I would only change a feature that it already has to be more useful!

Exactly. Most often you don't know in advance if an image must be edited, so you double-click it and see "oh, red eyes!" and the next thing is that you interrupt your workflow and switch to Tracker, use the context menu to "Open with...->MonsterGIMP". Then, you see a load of buttons, menus, and mini-windows in front of you, but all you want to do is remove red eyes...
Also, seen from another point of view: if you had ShowImage and ShowImage++ on your computer and the latter one only adds a simple "Tools" menu (nothing more!) which app would you use the most? I'd bet that 99% of all users will of course use ShowImage++ because it performs exactly as well when showing images, but does not interrupt your work flow.
I support removing unneeded features from ShowImage (esp.: dragging within the image), but I also think that a few basic functions should be added because there is no point in having a mini-viewer, a mini-editor, and a monster-editor.


Bye,
Waldemar

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