[openbeos] Re: Showimage
- From: "Andrew Bachmann" <shatty@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2003 06:44:25 -0800 PST
"Joachim Seemer" <j.seemer@xxxxxx> wrote:
> Generally I agree to beware of feature creep. The suggested slicing
> ability would fall into this category IMO. OTOH, we have to consider
> the purpose of the app. And I have to say that I think R5's ShowImage
> didn't take that into account either.
>
> It isn't just for displaying one image file. That works just as well
> with Net+ (plus you get animated GIFs and a history there). R5's
> feature was to cut areas out of an image to save it in any format.
> Useful, but not the end of things.
Wow I'm gonna freak. Actually, ShowImage IS just for displaying one
image file. Suggesting that one use Net+, an html viewer, and an
application over 10x as large as ShowImage, is unbelivable. Cutting
areas out of image is IMHO a demonstration of drag and drop
capability, and certainly not ShowImage's purpose.
> IMHO ShowView should accomodate the end-users needs to view his image
> collection. This includes navigating easily through folders with
> images, zooming (much nicer with bilinear filtering) and rotating
> portrait/landscape. Inverting and flipping comes in handy with wrongly
> scanned negatives etc. Cutting to an interesting area is useful, even
> more so if drag&drop directly into e.g. BeMail would work... :)
Suddenly perhaps people understand why I get concerned about this?
You're missing a recursive decent in the current version, as at least one
more "feature" that should be there. And why stop at bilinear filtering?
We could even have a whole plugin architecture right? And maybe a
tools palette, right? Next thing you know, it's photoshop!
> ShowImage provides these essential features. Additional features should
> IMO work behind the users back, i.e. no more options and menu items if
> possible. For example, saving the orientation in an attribute, more
> sophisticated navigating, read-ahead etc.
Somehow I got along just fine with my old ShowImage that didn't have all
of these "essential features". It did it's purpose very well: Showing Images.
> For me as end-user the new ShowImage already proves to be more useful
> that R5's version. In fact, I use OBOS' ShowImageX instead of my former
> viewer ImagePro that I've paid for!
That's just fine, Gobe's picture editor is more useful than R5's ShowImage.
These things have different purposes. We all need to keep in mind that
Be didn't make these apps small just because they didn't have time to work
on them. In fact, they probably had this same internal struggle about
where to draw the line.
An important thing to remember is that the built-in software is not meant
to pre-empty third party developers. Rather, it is to encourage and enable
third party developers. Note: this is quite the opposite of microsoft
strategy... which would be a good thing, I think. :-)
Andrew
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