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12/07/2003
|
New Features?
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|
New features were not really supposed to be put into 1.0b1, but I'm putting a few in
anyways. :) Earlier Henry Letteron asked if I could make the slideshow images transparent to
allow for differnt color backgrounds so I put that in. Then Jonathan Gay asked if I could
add a feature where photo descriptions are set to their filename. I've opted to allow a uer
to choose to do this (off by default) when adding photos. The path and extension are
stripped off and _'s are converted to spaces. I'm also working on a "check for updates"
feature. I'm not sure how I'll have this hooked in. Right now the about box checks what the
latest version number is. I'd like to have it display all changes since the version on your
machine, thus letting you decide if you actually want to update. In the future I'd like to
put getting and installing themes/translations directly into the program so you don't have
to download, unzip, and install yourself, but such a feature most definately will come AFTER
1.0. In case your curious why updates have been a bit slow recently, it's the end of the
semester, I'm rushing to try to get a paper ready for possible publication, and I've been
building myself a bed.
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11/30/2003
|
Mucho Progress
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|
Being home for Thanksgiving and away from my thesis project resulted in mucho progress on
album shaper. I've made a number of improvements to the Slick theme, fixed two major bugs in
Album Shaper (hang on save, wrong subalbum thumbnail image displayed), and added album/subalbum
rep image unsetting. I've also changed slideshow images to be transparent png's. This allows
theme developers to use background colors other than white, as was already requested. Right
now this means loading older albums is a bit sluggish since the png's are not found, but
I'll put a fix in for this so the entire switch should be transparent.
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11/23/2003
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Theme Work
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|
I spent a good portion of the day working on the Slick theme. I fixed a
bug that comes up when the first phoot in a subalbum has no description.
Subsequent descriptious would not be printed out in the slideshow mode.
I also fixed the annoying feature of the prev/next buttons moving so you
have to actually move your mouse back and forth to keep clicking.
Needless to say after fixing these bugs you still have to move your
mouse in Konqueror in order to click again, but I believe as a result of
reporting this bug in Konqueror almost six months ago this is now only
recently fixed in KDE CVS and will be work in KDE 3.2. Maybe then I can
switch back from Firebird, which takes way to long to start up for a
light weight browser IMHO.
I also pritied up the Slick theme a bit, moved some stuff around some
and put in chrome-like rounded borders which are "lit" from the upper
left corner. My friend who wrote the Blue Shifted theme has also been
hard at work and has sent me a few updated versions in recent days.
Which brings me to a question, would you rather me update these themes
right away on this web site, or wait until the next release? I think
sooner than later is a good idea. :) On another note, what themes should
I include with Album Shaper? I feel pretty strongly that at least ONE
theme has to be included, otherwise the program can't even save. But how
many, and which ones? I guess I'm partial to Slick, but do people still
want Classic to be around by default? Should I include more themes by
default? I think eventually Slick will become the generic theme (kinda
like in Winamp) and others users can install eventually from within the
program itself. Anyways, I'd like to get feedback on this so if you care
please writer me.
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11/18/2003
|
Blue Shifted
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|
Added Blue Shifted theme to the themes page.
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11/18/2003
|
New Web Site Done
|
|
I finished putting up screenshots from the various versions so now the new web site is
essentialy done. At some point I need to writeup something about the backend of Album Shaper
and how the code all works, but for now the doxygen docs will have to do. :) Enjoy the new
web site.
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11/17/2003
|
Writing Themes
|
|
Documentation on writing
themes is now online. In fact a friend of mine just spend all day
yesterday writing his own theme. Expect to see more themes and
translations popping up on the themes and translations pages!
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11/13/2003
|
Creating Translations
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|
Documentation on creating
translations is now online.
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|
11/07/2003
|
Updates
|
|
Life has been a bit crazy recently so that's why nothing has appeared up here in a while.
I'm currently giving this web site a facelift, reoganizing the information that is already
here a bit better, and also adding quite a bit. If you'd like to see what it's going to look
like you can here. As you can see some pages are blank. The annoying
work, recoding up the contents html to use a slicker SSL approach is done and working so now
I just have to flush out some of the pages a bit more. What else? Well, no pressing bugs in
Album Shaper have been found after that foreign characters one, which is now fixed of
course. :) I'm thinking of writing a few themes to better demonstrate the HUGE potential
thems have and just how versatile they are. I'm thinking of writing an online auction theme,
and a massive coversheet theme. I have big dreams for making the Slicker theme much Slicker
but I don't know when I'll work on that. If you have a theme idea give me a hollar or even try writing it yourself and send me a
copy. Your best bet it to modify one of the existing themes to get you started.
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10/20/2003
|
Swedish and Spanish translations coming
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|
Yeah! Two people have already volunteered to translate Album Shaper into
Swedish and Spanish respectively. The first translation, with the
exception of the handbook, is already complete! A small problem was
discovered concerning international characters. The XML file written
out is in Unicode format, not UTF-8, which XSLT themes require. Doh!
Luckily fixing this requires adding one line of code. These are the
kinds of
bugs I want to track down before releasing 1.0. So on that note, I'll
update you all on my plan for 1.0. I consider 1.0a3 to be a fairly rock
solid release. If you find a bug or soemthing that seems screwy contact me right away. I plan on releasing a
number of beta versions (so 1.0b1, 1.0b2, etc) over the next few weeks.
I'd like to see 1.0 before the end of the year. No
new features before now and then, just stability improvments, and I'll
ship any themes and translations people get me. How does that sound? :)
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10/19/2003
|
How can I help out?
|
|
If you're reading this I suppose you're interested in Album
Shaper, perhaps you've already grown to like it. Unfortunately while the number of features
and platforms supported by Album Shaper has, the burden of development has
increased. However, there are many ways you can help out!
First, Album Shaper now supports
internationalization, but without a given translation the menu's and buttons will appear in
English! Become a translator. Contact me to let me know you'd like to
translate Album Shaper into another language. The process is easy, and provides instantanious
results without compiling a line of code. Interested? Let me know.
Next, with Album Shaper 1.0a3 and above all HTML output is completely themeable. That means you can
pick what files are created, what their names are and what their contents are. You can create one
big coversheet of all your photos in all your subalbums, or you can split them up similarly so the
way the Classic and Slick themes do. You could create an online auction theme, create special
buttons and other images and backgrounds to be included in your albums. The process is easy and
requires 0 lines of C/C++ or compiling. All themes are written in XSLT which is a language for
converting XML files into other files (in this case HTML). Check out the Slick theme to see how
this is done and make your own theme today. Themes consist of a directory named for the theme, with
a theme.xsl file which defines how the exporting will work. An optional description.html file
describes how your theme works, and through preview.png files you can provide any number of
previews of your theme to appear in the save dialog. To create a new theme simply make a copy of
one of the existing theme directories with a new name and start modifying the theme.xsl file. If you need help or would like to contribute a theme you've written contact me.
Finally, if you're not interested in hammering out translations or writing your own theme, consider
making a donation. Money will be used to buy new hardware for
developing the code on, or purchasing books or development licenses so new features can be written
or new platforms supported.
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10/18/2003
|
Updated Handbook
|
|
Still not sure if you want to download and try Album Shaper 1.0a3? Check out
the new handbook and see how the interface has changed and the new
themes feature that has been added. Album Shaper is more powerful and
stable than ever before. What are you waiting for? :)
By the way, regarding themes, are you unhappy with the look of Album
Shapers output? Write you own theme and send me a copy. I intend to add
a themes section to this website soon. Perhaps your theme will get
included in a future version of Album Shaper!
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10/17/2003
|
Album Shaper 1.0a3 Released!
|
|
Album Shaper 1.0a3 has been released!
Go
get it! Album Shaper now runs on BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows! An updated handbook and
additional information about all the new features and how to take advantage of them coming soon!
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10/10/2003
|
Release Monday?
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|
Won't get a Windows binary till Monday. If you're reading this, you'll
have to wait a bit longer. :)
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10/09/2003
|
Release Friday?
|
|
I think ALL problems have been settled. The reelase on Mac OS X is all set, dmg file in hand
to be put online. Linux/FreeBSD? Compile from source my friend, that's what I do, and no
problems are known. Finally Windows. I think the last problem for Windows is now solved. I
hope to get a new exe tommorow, then put together the windows installer that night and
upload everything to Sourceforge as well. So I'm hoping to get 1.0a3 FRIDAY.
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10/08/2003
|
Last few things
|
|
Got another binary for Windows and everything looks good but one stupid bug loading theme
preview descriptions. Doh! It's no showstopper, but stupid and easy to fix so getting that
recompiled. The code seems to be working great otherwise on Windows, Linux, and presumable
FreeBSD. I have been playing around with MacOSX and have made the necessary changes to get
it compiled and running as a bundle so you can click on it from the finder in OS X!
Everything works flawlessly as far as I can tell, except an annoying issues with libxml and
libxslt. The binary I have compiled is dynamically loading up libxml and libxslt from
/usr/local/lib. Clearly I can't expect Mac OS users to download, compile, and install these
libraries. Bundles should support embedding dynamically loaded libraries in them, or I
should be able to link in static versions of these libraries. unfortunatally I seem to be
hitting a wall. there is very little documentation on doing this using qmake and qt. If
anybody out there reading this has any clue how to help me please give me an email. Heck,
you can even check the albumshaper module out of cvs and give it a whirl and see if you can
get a copy compiled that does not require these libraries be on a users system. Getting the
recompiled copy for win32, and handling this issue, are the only remaining roadblocks to
releasing 1.0a3. :)
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10/06/2003
|
Windows Installer
|
|
No, 1.0a3 isn't ready yet. Still tracking down the Windows load album
bug and getting Mac OS X support cooked up. My housemate got his new
powerbook so we'll see if we can get that working Tuesday night since
Monday's I don't get home till after 10pm. Last night I put the
polishing touches on the Windows installer. I'm using Nullsoft's NSIS (scriptable install system).
It's damn nice, very powerful, and open source. They have some decent
documentation and a few examples but I find real world examples easier
to navigate, so someone out there may appreciate that I will be putting
my nsi script file up when I release 1.0a3 so you can learn from it as
well if you'd like. You can see
of the windows installer here if you'd
like. I also put in a few small
optimiations like using QT to determine the current date instead of
using standard C calls which involved more code and are potentially less
platform independent.
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10/01/2003
|
Delays :(
|
|
Got 1.0a3 compiled for Windows. It looks much more slick now with the
fixed buttons, application icon, all the fixes and features for 1.0a3 as
well as the new windows installer. Then I noticed the first bug, theme
previews and descriptions were not displayed in the save-as dialog. Doh!
Tracked that problem down, and though the program was working nicely
again. Then I found a much more glaring bug, it crashes when loading any
album when in Windows. Clearly this needs to be fixed before the next
release. Tracking this down right now. I made a few minor mods during
the wait to the handbook, and last night added a tiny easter egg, but it
probably won't be included till the next release, 1.0a4, or whatever
it's called. You won't see it for another eight months anyways. My
friend still hasn't gotten his new powerbook yet, so MacOSX support
hasn't been worked on yet. Delays suck. :(
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09/24/2003
|
Just waiting on Mac OS X
|
|
I believe the final bugs in 1.0a3 have been fixed, the
last involved loading and was quite serious. I just updated the handbook to reflect the
changes in the program, i.e. the new save-as dialog with theme selection, new sample html
output using the Slick theme, buttons have changed a bit, progress bars, etc etc. Once I
actually release 1.0a3 I'll update the version of the handbook on this site. Now the only
remaining issue is Mac OS X support. I've been waiting on a friend to help me compile the
program under Mac OS X, and determine what, if any, changes need to be made. He's been very
busy, but luckly one of my housemates just bought a powerbook and is going to help me get it
working. This is actually ideal since I'll be able to actually see it myself running, and
the process should theoretically go faster. His laptop gets here Friday, so this weekend or
early next week I'll try to get that done.
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09/09/2003
|
Bugs reported
|
|
A few bugs in the code have been reported. The first involved rotating images, followed by
attempting to crop them and having the selection interface all messed up. This bug actually
existed in 1.0a2 as well, but I fixed it simply by removing a few lines of code. Turns out a
function was being called that updates the image resolution for us and flipping the
width/height was not necessary. The other bug regarded changing themes of a subalbum.
Currently this requires using save-as and selecting a differnt theme and saving to the same
directory. this is super fast since Album Shaper realizes all you need to save out is the
new html and xml file. I don't see this as a problem, and the interface makes sense to me.
Alternatively a settings panel could be created where various album settings could be set,
like thumbnail sizes, theme used, etc. This will require a bit of work and won't be in
1.0a3. The last two bugs appear to have somethign to do with the new use of XSLT. One
involving loading an old album created by a previous version, the other invovled using
save-as. I can't repro these bugs just yet, but I won't release 1.0a3 until these are sorted
out. On my machine I am able to create albums in previous versions of album shaper, load
them up in 1.0a3 just fine, and use save-as without problems. In fact 1.0a3 albums can be
loaded in previous versions, but it is a little slow since the md5's are stored a bit
differenetly. Still working on getting support for Mac OS X.
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|
09/03/2003
|
Final preparations for 1.0a3 underway
|
|
Last night I completed the last few things I wanted to do before 1.0a3.
As of right now I know of zero bugs in the program. I fixed the last
remaning ones and put together schemas documenting the XML 1.0 and 1.1
formats used, patched the installer to copy over all new files to the
share folder on unix systems, and tested out the latest code on all my
albums. It appears to be working beautifully. 1.0a3 has a LOT of major
bug fixes, it's faster and more responsive due to various GUI changes,
it can easily be internationalized by anyonce using Qt's Linguist to
translate all buttons/labels, the handbook documentation, even the html
outputted can be translated thanks to the new theme support. The html
output has been slightly improved, and the door is wide open for anyone
now to write their own themes that can do anything. The html filenames
are completely arbitrary, heck, what files you export at all are
completely arbitrary. Album Shaper has become what it was meant to be: a
piece of software which facilitates organizating and annotating your
photos into hierarchal albums. That's it. The user now has complete
control over what the output looks like since s/he can write their own
theme using XSLT (or use a provided one) and they control the actual
organization and annotation of their albums. So things are on track for
the 1.0a3 release sometime soon this month, September, which is what I
predicted a while ago. The only remaining issues involve distribution,
like getting this to play nicely with Mac OS X, and possibly providing
statically linked binaries.
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09/01/2003
|
More Improvements, lack of Internet Access Helps/Hurts?
|
|
So starting on Friday things have been weird at home. When I got home
the power was out, and had been for a while. The phone kept ringing but
had a buzzing sound when you picked it up. So the phone was dead too.
Eventually the power and phone came back on, but then our internet
access died and remained dead all weekend (it's still dead now). This
was annoying, and made doing some work difficult, but ultimately may
have made me more productive. :) I fixed a bug with the new
modifications tester so that when you switch which subalbum you are
looking at it doesn't think the album has been modified. I also hacked
up the support for converting old xml files to the new format. I really
like how the code ended up. I have an XSLT stylesheet that is applied to
the current xml file. If it's not up to date it applies the correct
template and updates to the next latest version. This process iterates
until the file has been completely patched, at which point the new xml
file is actually saved out. Aka I only do one read and one write to
disk. Since I didn't have internet access I couldn't learn how to write
up a DTD spec for the XML format I'm using but I have that with me now
so tonight I'll write that up. I have a very weird bug that has cropped
up with saving out the XML file so I plan on tracking that down next.
All in all the pieces are really falling into place for the nex release:
1.0a3. :) I still need translators though!
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|
08/29/2003
|
More Progress
|
|
More progress tonight. Fixed a small bug in save-as where it was actually saving out twice.
Oops. I applied that patch I mentioned earlier which was basically a bunch of minor
optimizations in photo.cpp. I changed the way I'm writing out the path to thumb's in the xml
file slightly. Then I ran into a few bugs. First I found that sometimes the xml file being
written out is odd. the modification date for the thumbnails is sometimes very wacky and
sometimes the md5's are not being saved out properly. Then I noticed that when switching
which subalbum you are viewing the modified bit is being set so album shaper thinks you
shoudl save before you quit. Doh! So progress, and more work to be done. Getting there. I
might take a break form these bugs and finish the DTD and update thingy tommorw, then debug
this stuff.
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|
08/28/2003
|
Progress
|
|
- Albums now store their creation date as well as their last modification date. I've
updated the Classic and Slick themes to make use of this new date on the coverpage of an
album. For older albums the creation date is assumed to be the last modification date (since
this is the closest guess one can make). You can easily change the original date in the XML
file though if you like. :)
- A check was put in when saving an album to make sure the theme being used exists on the
user's machine. This problem can occur when the original author has a particular theme on
his machine and a secondary user opens the album and tries to resave it using ctrl-s and the
original theme is not found. Instead of crashing an alert is now brought up, alerting the
user to this problem, then proceeding to the new save-as dialog where they can select the
theme they prefer.
- The album class now has an additional field: modified. This field is maintained and
allows for alerts to pop up before quitting/creating a new album/loading a differnt album if
unsaved modifications exist. As a result if no modifications exist hitting ctrl-n does not
pop up an alert even though nothing is to be lost. :) More importantly if you've change
something Album Shaper will remember and make sure you want to lose those changes unless you
accidentally use xkill on the application.
- All couts and includes to iostream have been removed. The one exception is md5.cpp
which uses cerr. I didn't write this code and don't really want to modify it that much.
These errors should never ever occur. All alerts and error messages now use the new
AlertWidget and QuestionDialog's.
- Albums now save out the thumbnail and slideshow image sizes at the top of the xml
file. This information may prove useful to theme developers so I threw it in there. My
intention is to have ALL information that exists to be exposed in the new XML format, so a
few other minor changes will go in over the next few days, which I kinda outlined in
yesterday's post.
So as you can see I got a little done tonight. Tommow my task will be putting in path's to
files in the exported xml, updating a very outdated DTD Rich Unger whipped up for me, as
well as hacking up an xslt stylesheet that converts the 1.0 XML format to the new (and daily
evolving) 1.1 XML format. In addition a small amount of code will need to be written to
actually apply this (and eventually a chain of stylesheets) to the existing XML file on disk
before loading.
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|
08/27/2003
|
Themes cleanups
|
|
I split up the two themes that will be included in the next release of Album Shaper in
multiple xsl files. This cleans up the code a bit as I've broken it up into multiple
templates. If you want to use portions of one of these themes in your own it's a lot easier
now. I also fixed up the Slick theme to use div elements instead of form areas for the photo
number and photo description in the slideshow mode. Cleanups were also put in place to
remove old html files before exporting new ones since future themes may export various
differntly named sets of html files and while experimenting around with what theme to use
your export directory should not be polluted with a mixture of stagnant html files! The xml
file exported now has a version number on top. I need to save our image sizes to xml for
theme use, then writeup an up-to-date dtd for documentation purposes. Then get the
translation code written to update old xml files to new ones using xslt again. This should
be fairly straight forward. Finally got ssh keys working so I don't have to type in my
sourceforge password every 5 seconds will interating with cvs, phew! It's so much nicer. I
think that is really a requirement to getting your machine setup now. :) I need to add paths
to the image files in the xml format, as well as check to make sure when saving out to the
same directory when doing a save-as (to change the theme for example) that it is as
effecient as possible. Adriaan de Groot was nice enough to send me a patch for various
things, mainly effecieny things like using QImage's built in flipping capability and using
QString:null instead of "" whenever possible to avoid constructing empty QString objects. As
you can see there are only minor things left before the next release. I'll post more as I
progress on these things, but hopefully development will speed up a bit. I'm anxious to get
this release out. Subsequently if you speak an additional language to English and would like
to see Album Shaper translated please contact me! I'd like to
see Album Shaper avaible to as many people as possible and without translators I'm a bit up
the creek right now. Enough, time for sleep before my 9am class tommorow morning.
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|
08/20/2003
|
Major bug fixes
|
|
I squashed two bugs tonight. I feel good. I will sleep well in a minute. :) First I fixed a
reported bug (actually the only reported bug to date) where after rearranging photos and
saving out your album further batch affects or editing resulted in the wrong photo being
rotated/flipped/edited. So basically very weird unexpected behavior has been quashed. Next I
fixed the long annoying me bug where Album Shaper would sometimes crash when attempting to
load up a new Album. The problem was not loading the new album, it was cleaning up the old
gui stuff and showing the new album contents on the screen where problems occured. This bug
was actually fixed by removing legacy code that was not needed any more. It seems to be
working perfectly now. Whoo hoo! So as of this time there are no known "bugs" in Album
Shaper. Of course there are minor issues with small save (since that got all trashed when
working on the XSLT stuff) and other mods I need/want to do with the XML format changing and
potential optimizations to save on disk space. I updated the changelog and organized it by
features/bug fixes/etc and noticed that there are quite a few big feature improvements and
quite a few important bug fixes in the code in CVS. So I'm getting fairly anxious to get
this puppy ready to release. :)
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|
08/19/2003
|
Updated the roadmap
|
|
The roadmap was painfully out of date, which if you have been reading these news entries you
would know. I did my best to update it with all the major features and fixes that have been
going on, as well as moving around some features that are being put off, and listed actual
and expected release dates.
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08/19/2003
|
Improved drag-n-drop
|
|
So I went for that bike ride: 62 miles. Just about died when I got home. Didn't plan on
going that far, but damn it felt good. Lost over 5 pounds too, but mostly water since I
regained it very quickly after not eating much that night. Somehow I got away from Album
Shaper development for a little while. Things have been a little busy around here with my
thesis project etc. Tonight I sat down and worked on a few things. I improved the new save
dialog as per some people's comments. I added tooltips to most buttons and a few other
widgets throughout the program. Then I hacked up support for multiple drag-n-drop
rearrangement within subalbums. What does this mean? Say you have a subalbum with 6 photos.
If you select the 2nd, 4th, and 5th photos, then drag them in front of the first photo the
new order will be 2-4-5-1-3-6. Hopefully you get the idea. You may run into a situation in
which you need this. More likely you'll run into a situation where you have a slew of photos
at the end of a subalbum that belong at the beginning. Before you had to select each one by
hand, then drag it up to the top. Now you can select all photos and then move them as a
group. Very nice, especially since discontinious groups are allowed. I'm sure this feature
will please quite a few people there. If not it's been something I've been dying for for a
LONG time now. So that just about does it for features for the next release. I now want to
work on various necessary modifications (due to the XML format changes), a few
optimizations, and more importantly addressing a few bugs (reported and suspected). Of
course if you can't wait for the next release you can get the "latest and greatest" code
right now from CVS. Just don't complain to me it kills your pet fish. :)
|
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08/10/2003
|
Theme support + new save interface FINISHED!
|
|
Getting up early on the weekend every day and programming works out well. Today I finished
the new save interface and hooked it up. When saving an album for the first time or using
the save as option the new dialog box allows you to chose the output directory in a much
nicer manner, as well as select and preview various themes for exporting. I have made two so
far. The first theme resembles very closely the original HTML output, I call this Classic.
The second theme, Simple, added a few button icons to show resource file support. Otherwise
right now it's very similar. I plan other minor changes, but what I'm excited to see if very
creative theme development by other users. I mean, all you have to do is modify a text file
and put the appropriate files in the theme directory. It's easier than making skins for
Winamp. I even have it remember what theme you used last for that album, even from loading
it fresh from XML, and it also defaults to the last save directory. The dynamic slideshow of
theme screenshots I think is also a nice though. So I'm very happy with how this has turned
out. If you'd like to see a development version you can download this very very alpha copy
here. I know of various bugs with the new small
save option that I broke doing the themes stuff, so don't use thise copy of Album Shaper,
but if you'd like to se the new theme selection interface go right ahead. Ok, now I think
I'll go for that bike ride. :)
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08/9/2003
|
Resource files support, new save interface
|
|
Today the weather in Ithaca, NY just sucked. It was misty in the
morning, then rained on and off all day long. I wanted to go on a 40-50
mile bike ride, so much for that. So what did I do instead? Develop
Album Shaper of course. :) I whipped up the new save interface that lets
you select which theme to use when saving out your album. The interface
has worked out very well. Themes can have screenshots, multiple in fact
that can be flipped through along with a description of what the theme
will provide. So full theme support is *almost* finished. ;)
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08/7/2003
|
HTML output now done with XSLT
|
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I've just finished my first XSLT theme which exports html files in the same way (more or
less, visable almost identical) as the original c++ html output code. What this means is
that the new XML format is sufficient to write themes and that XSLT has been coupled with
Album Shaper successfully. The next step will be allowing themes to have resource files, as
well as updating the UI to allow selecting the particular theme to use. I smell another
release of Album Shaper on the horizon =-)
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08/6/2003
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More theme progress
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While a specific theme is hard coded right now (the save interface does
not allow you to pick which theme to use for exporting your album) I
have now gotten Album Shaper to export the main Album.html page
completely using XSLT. The theme is pretty short (160 lines) and
undoubtedly can be improved. I am new to XSLT. :) Tonight I'll see if I
can get the thumbnail and slideshow html output working as well. Next
will be supporting resource files (so themes can include button images
and stuff), as well as modifying the save dialogs to support picking
which theme to use.
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08/5/2003
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Themes are coming...
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Themable export support is coming along nicely. Who knew XSLT was this cool? :)
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08/2/2003
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Internationalization
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I was away on vacation for two weeks so that's why no news was posted
for a while. I have been busy though, coding on Amtrak train trips, in
the car, and back at home. Various bug fixes have been worked on,
including a major bug in cropping that is now fixed. The majority of
work I have been doing regards internationalization. Qt provides
wonderful support which makes this effortless. Regardless I had to make
a lot of changes with text, buttons, and the new handbook so that
everything was translatable. As of now everything but the default Album
and Subalbum images have been fixed, as well as the actual output that
is generated when you save out your albums. That brings me to my next
project: XSLT and themable exports. The XML format will be changing
slightly in the next version of Album Shaper which requires a nice way
of updating old albums so they are loadable. XSLT will do this as well
as allow people to make themes which dictate how albums look when they
are saved out. This will make internationalization easy because you can
simply make an Italian theme and boom there you go, no code changes
needed whatsoever. :) Once I get the XSLT stuff going I'll get a test
version for people to play with or something and at that point will
start soliciting translators. If you like Album Shaper and would like to
see it in your primary language this is your time to speak up!
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07/21/2003
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Progress
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Fixed a major cropping bug that went unnoticed in 1.0a2. Various GUI
cleanups (backend and frontend thingies). Had a professional editor look
over and edit the handbook which will be included in the next release.
Redid the About box which now includes credits for all those that have
helped me develop the program. Started reading up on XSLT which I plan
on using for themable exports, we'll see. At home on vacation right now
so development is a little slower. :)
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07/17/2003
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About dialog revampted, XSLT work coming up next
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Last night I finally revisted the about dialog. It was one of those
legacy pieces of crap I had in there from the beginning and really made
the program look cheasy in my opinion. The new version actually pulls
most of it's text out of an html file located in a new text folder which
should make internationalization easier in the future. Eventually I need
to make all the text in the program loaded from separate files so
language selection is easier. The next big step will be working on XSLT.
Rich Unger has been writing me and telling me about all the virtues of
XSLT with the eventual goal of themable exports, a very nifty and
important feature. It looks like XSLT will become essential for
converting older xml files to newer formats so I need to read up more on
it. Next week and the following I'll be heading home to the midwest,
back to the the land of 14.4kbs dialup so if I don't update this page in
ages don't worry that nothing is being done. It's more likely that I'm
just not willing to deal with such a slow connection.
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07/14/2003
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Faster loads
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It looks like the xml format for Album Shaper will change slightly for
the next release. This was necessary for a few reasons and will leave
room for further improvement in the future. Album Shaper will be able to
load old albums and when resaved they will be converted to the new
format. The first feature the changes have already enabled is a huge
performance improvement in loading albums. Instead of ocmputing md5's on
images to see if they have been alterted since thumbnail and slideshow
images were created Album Shaper first checks the images modification
dates/times. Only if these differ will the md5's be computed and only of
the md5 is differnt will the images be resized again. Resizing images is
very expensive, computing md5's is cheaper but on large images and lots
of them (large albums) this is also expensive. Now this too is avoided
and albums that took a few minutes to load now do so in a matter of
seconds. The program feels a lot snappier!
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07/13/2003
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Size on disk
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Since it's after midnight I suppose it's fitting to change the date for the message.
Finished ripping out old save/load dialogs and went back to the album statistics dialog and
implemented the size-on-disk feature. pretty nifty. now to make that window look pretty.
maybe I'll work on fast loading first though. Too many things to work on. :)
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07/12/2003
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Progress bars
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The new status widget has been completed and pluged in. It provides a place for status
messages (e.g. "Album saved.") as well as progress bars for longer actions such as batch
image effects, addding photos, loading and saving. I think it looks very nice and makes me
feel like the program is more responsive just because I see stuff going on. :) The old
load/save dialogs are now no longer needed. They do provide more information but only slow
down the loading/saving process and in my opinion don't look very professional. So the next
step will be to rip them out entirely. I'm not entirely sure what I'll work on next, perhaps
the add photos dialog?
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07/10/2003
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I lied...
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You actually thought I'd work on what I said I would? Lol. I ended up
spontaniously putting a new feature in Album Shaper: small save. Yes,
the name sucks, I need to come up with something better. Lemme explain
it first, then send me suggestions for a better name. Often you want to
put photos up online for people to see briefly when the full size images
are not necessary and they usually take up the bulk of the space. Small
save exports everything but the full size photos and does not include
hypertext links to those photos in the slideshow or thumbnail modes.
Simple feature, very useful. For example is reduced the size of an album
I just made from 240 megs to 24 megs! This will only get better as
digital camers get better and take higher res pictures since the
resolution of the thumbnails and slideshow images I create is fixed.
Anyways, it's slightly buggy I think but appears to be working well. If
your dying to use it try getting it from CVS. In general check the bugs
file in the docs folder to see what outstanding issues I know of at any
time. I also keep the changelog up to date so you can see what stuff has
changed since the last time you have synced up.
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07/09/2003
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Where have I been?
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Things have been a little crazy around me recently. I went camping, got
really sick, and have since then gotten better and tonight will get back
to programming again. Over the break while using Album Shaper to make an
album of my camping photos I hacked up an album statistics window. It
tells you the number of photos, subalbums, and the approximate size on
disk of your album in it's current state. It's 99% done. I'll next work
on the loading/saving dialogs which I hate right now and I have a
complete redisign down on paper right now.
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06/27/2003
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Internationalization
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I just got an email from a distribution regarding including Album Shaper
in an upcoming version. This is a very exciting prospect but they need
Japanese support. If anybody out there has experience adding
multi-language support to a qt app please email
me.
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06/26/2003
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Stating to use CVS
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Last night I checked the latest source code into CVS. I used to backup
on random systems but this was becoming a pain and I really don't want
to lose my work. More so I figure there is starting to become enough
interest out there that some people may want to use the bleeding edge
code. If you decide to please don't send me bug reports or complaints, I
probably know if there is a problem with recent changes and just havn't
fixed it just yet. CVS code should always compile and run, just some
features may be a little buggy. You can browse the code online here
but right now ViewCVS tells me it's 24 hours behind and as of 24 hours
ago the code wasn't in CVS so you can't use it for another day or so. Go
figure. Read this
page to find out how to check the code out of CVS anonymously.
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06/24/2003
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Development continues, expect a Mac OS X port in the next version
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Updated the documentation page to put cute operating system icons in there. I uploaded a Mac icon, although
I'd like a nicer one, in anticipation of the Mac OS X version which will be available for the next release,
now that Trolltech has released Qt GPL for Mac OS X! Found and fixed a
bug in which photo descriptions are lost if MD5's have changed. Never actually tested that feature, ran into
it oddly when going between making an album in Windows and then modifying it in Linux. For some odd reason
the MD5's for files are changing. That should not happen. I'm going to optimize loading to look at file sizes
and modification dates prior to computing MD5 checksums to make loading a bit faster. Tonight I'll hopefully
start working on progress bars for time intensive actions which right now you can tell are progressing but
you have no idea how much time is left. I also plan on cleaning up the save/load dialogs as well as writing
my own add photos dialog so you can toggle on and off using filenames as photo descriptions.
I've been gettings a lot of great email's recently and just wanted to thank everyone again who has written
me. Out of all of them I've only gotten one bug report, which can't be bad, and many interesting feature
ideas such as themeable export, cd/dvd burning, and much more. There are so many cool things I can do with
this program it's hard to constrain oneself to one thing at a time but that is what I have to do. For the
next alpha I'll try to squeeze as much as I can in there but rock solid stability, finshing up the editing
interface and tools, improving dialogs and adding progress bars are my top priorities. Don't think your ideas
are being lost! They will come in time. Considering I have developed the entire application over the last few
months on my own and it is my first Qt app I think things are going fairly well. :)
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06/17/2003
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Handbook encorporated into Album Shaper itself
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Tonight I read over the handbook and fixed a bunch of grammar mistakes, spelling thingies,
typos, and reworeded a few small things. Minor stuff. I havn't updated the version online
yet, I will over the next few days. I've encorporated the handbook into Album Shaper itself
now. Under the help menu there is a handbook entry, something I've wanted for ages, and it
was so easy! QTextBrowser rocks, that's all I can say. :) Qt impresses me more every day,
the only thing I am wishing I had was a real nice IDE to develop in. Right now I develop
using Kate and compile from the command line. Not exactly the ideal setup, especially since
I have no nice IDE debugger. Sigh. The options in Linux IMHO are pretty poor for C++
development right now. KDevelop is plain scary (why does it make so many files just for
compiling your projects?). KDEStudio hasn't been updated for KDE 3.X and KDE Studio Gold
costs $. I really wish there was an IDE comparable to IDEA for Qt programming on Linux. I'd
pay money for it if it was anything like IDEA and right now nothing is. Back to Album
Shaper, now that the handbook is essentially done for now I'll be moving on to either new
features or bug fixes. I have one bug report I havn't tried to reproduce but havn't run into
it byself by accident yet. I want to start putting in progress bars for the long actions
like adding photos and batch effects, as well as putting in a slide show preview in the
program itself (this is something a lot of people have asked me for in person, and I have to
agree with them that it is needed). I'm also anxious to improve the output of Album Shaper,
adding rounded edges and drop shadows to the thumbnails and in general making the albums
produced more asthetically pleasing. I think the Album Shaper web site and handbook look
pretty damn good. Your albums should as well! Well, enough for tonight.
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06/16/2003
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Album Shaper Handbook now Available
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One of the big things before the 1.0 release is solid
documentation, so tonight I sat down and finished up the first version of the Album Shaper handbook. My intent is to have this
available online here, as well as on your machine when you install Album Shaper. I warn you
this is a first version. It's after midnight and I have not proofread any of it, or even
spell checked it at all. I'll of course get to that very soon but it should be readbale now
in case you're having trouble using Album Shaper. You can find it in the documentation section.
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06/15/2003
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FreeBSD Binaries
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I just put Free BSD binaries online. Not sure if anybody wants them since compiling from
source is relatively trivial but what the heck. They are not statically linked against qt so
you'll need the runtime library. My laptop is essentially fixed (new hard drive and clock
battery) so it actually runs now (new Slackware 9.0 install, yeah) and I can get back to
developing Album Shaper on it instead of my older slower desktop. I've gotten quite a bit of
response from the second alpha in only a few days. A few people have contacted me about the
program, one person even told me of a bug, and downloads in general are rather high. Right
now I've only been contacted by people running the program in Linux. If your using Album
Shaper under Windows or another OS or know somebody who is please tell me. I'd love to know.
I'm currently starting to write up the Album Shaper Handbook, actual documentation that will
accompany the next release. Once I'm happy with that I'll go back to the code and fix bugs
that have been reported, work on features, etc. My plan is to continue to release alpha's
until I've nailed down all the features I want for the first major release (1.0). I'm
getting close but some very important things (aka documentation/help system) remain. My aim
is to make every alpha the last but if things are taking too long I'll release another
intermediate alpha. So that said my goal is to make 1.0a3 the last alpha, we'll see what
actually happens. :) Oh yeah, one other thing, if you like Album Shaper please go to
freshmeat and rank it. Right now Album Shaper has no ranking on there, meaning nobody has
ranked it. I'm not sure exactly what the rankings mean but a good one would feel good. :) On
another note, if you're worried about how stable the latest alpha is, I just created an
album consisting of over 300 photos over 9 subalbums. All subalbums are annotated and I
needed to do a lot of drag-n-dropping to get everything organized just the way I liked it.
Throughout the process I saved and loaded the album a number of times. So I'd say 1.0a2 is
pretty stable. I'm using it. :)
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06/11/2003
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Album Shaper 1.0a2 Released!
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The second alpha or 1.0a2 of Album Shaper has arrived! Enjoy many bugfixes (see changelog),
some new features, and Windows support! Go download it today!
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06/7/2003
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Fixes...
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Found a html glitch which made some pages in the just to be released
version of Album Shaper unviewable on a very old version of Netscape. I
patched this problem and also fixed all html output so it is
validatable. Linux isn't on my laptop yet so development is going on on
my desktop...
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05/22/2003
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Roadmap updated...
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I updated the roadmap to match what I just wrote about. As you can see I
am technically ready to release the second alpha as soon as I get my
computer working =-)
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05/22/2003
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Setbacks, plans...
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Don't let the title confuse you. I have made a ton of progress on Album
Shaper, but the number of changes since the last alpha is bothering me.
I don't think it's benificial to release the next version and call it
beta. What does that mean? I think I will very soon (read 1-2 weeks or
less) release a new version of Album Shaper. This will be the next
alpha, or 1.0a2 for those counting. This alpha will not include exposure
adjustment or red eye reduction, but will include the new editing
interface with inversion and cropping tools, as well as a whole slew of
other new features and major bug fixes. Album Shaper has come a long
way. It has a long way to go. The other day I put together a HUGE album
consisting of ~300 photos taking up over 850 MEGS. I wasn't sure if
Album Shaper could handle this but it did and very well I must add. I
did this all on my slightly older laptop running 700mhz with 256 megs of
RAM. Then all of a sudden right before I was about to finish the hard
drive crapped out on me. After prodding with it all night I got all my
data off, but right now my laptop is a very unreliable machine. At any
time Linux craps out, scrolling "SIGBUS" on one of the tty screens. My
laptop is my development machien for Album Shaper and while I have a
much older pII 400mhz desktop sitting on my desk I'm not exactly
thrilled about working on it. What this boils down to is I'm just about
ready to release what I have right now as the second alpha, this time
I'll release it for linux and windows at the same time, but this laptop
thing may slow me down by a week or two until it gets fixed. :( Of
course if anybody out there wants to help me upgrade my ancient desktop
so it becomes a viable development machine again please contact me. :)
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05/19/2003
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Even more bug fixes
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I've fixed a number of bugs in Album Shaper over the last few days and
it's beginning to feel like a solid piece of code again. :) I only know
of one bug right now which is a stange segfault condition occuring when
loading an album after work as been done. Very weird. The changelog has
gotten so long that I am anxious to get the next version out ASAP. I
suppose I should work on red-eye reduction now?
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05/13/2003
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Getting closer to the beta...
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I was busy with the end of the semester but now that is over and Album
Shaper development has started up again. I've fixed the button image
handeling such that Album Shaper can now be run from any directory in
unix and will properly load images as well under Windows. I also changed
the standard installation directory to /usr/local/bin for unix and
/usr/local/share/albumshaper for things like images and future config
files. I've been playing with tone mapping and histogram equalization
and hope to get both of those working in the next day or so. The
alorithm for red-eye reduction has been written out on paper so now it's
just up to me to code it in and test it out. I'm pondering not including
directory import in the beta since it's not a big deal for me. Email me
if you have an opinion on this stuff. Right now I don't have a good
handle on who is reading this updates or what they are interested in.
I'd also love to know how you found out about the project.
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04/30/2003
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More bugs found and fixed, reverting and inversion added
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I found another serious bug in save as today where images were being
removed from a previously saved Album in some cases. I have no idea how
I botched up save-as so bad but basically don't use it until the beta is
out. I also made a minor fix to selection, added inverting the selection
and the revert button to the editing interface. I think I'll work on
red-eye reduction next.
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04/27/2003
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Cropping done :)
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I decided it was to hard to walk away from a working selection interface
so I cleaned up the resizing code a bit so the editor could use it as
well and implemented the cropping button. It works pretty well, very
easy to screw up all your photos. Yeah! Now I need to put in that reset
button =-) Hehe. Then either exposure/contrast adjustment or red-eye
reduction. Hrmm....
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04/27/2003
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Selection actually working :)
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Didn't get to work on Album Shaper until today. Found out that my
selection code was really screwed up. I fix a number of bugs and now it
works beautifully on new images and loaded images, under all scenarios.
The selection rectangle is now a dashed white-black line, so very close
to but not quite marching ants (do you really want marching ants? Maybe
the next version will add this, we'll see). I also added a the
standard Ctrl-A keybinding for selecting the entire image. Yipee! Now I
can FINALLY go on to implementing the buttons. :)
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04/21/2003
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Selection essentially working
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My time is very limited right now, with the end of the semester, finals,
research project, and final projects, but I'm letting Album Shaper slide
at all. Development is just slower than I'd like it at times. This
weekend I got the selection interface essentially all finished. When
photos are opened in the edit mode you can now select regions of the
photo to apply red-eye reduction or to actually crop. The next still will
be to hook up crop, which should be trivial. In order to do this I'll
have to start loading up images again, which I'm not sure how I want to
do. Loading images is expensive, at least their full size versions. I
think I'll take the lazy approach and only load up an image when a tool
is applied (like crop/red eye, etc). Once an image is loaded it remains
loaded until you leave edit mode. This will allow the user to go into
edit mode just to view a larger version of an image without having to
wait for it to load up since they won't need the full version if they
won't actually be applying any correction tools.
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04/16/2003
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Screen shot
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Got image large previews working....finally. And for the heck of it I
put in image inversion. I don't really plan on keeping this in here as a
feature, since when have you ever wanted to invert your digi cam
photos?!
But here's a teaser screen shot. Now I need to actually
implement all the code to make those buttons down there do stuff. :)
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04/15/2003
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Bug fixes, beware
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I was using Album Shaper over the weekend to shape up a large number of
digital photos I have. While it worked well on most stuff, I found I
major bug when putting together the final album. I tried to take an
existing album, insert new photos, and save it under a new name. Big
problems. Seems save-as was busted after I put in all kinds of
optimizations at the last second before the alpha release to minimize
memory usages. Bottom line the images were not getting copied over and I
lost some stuff stupidly deleting folders before I checked the final
output was working. Oops! Well, tonight I fixed that bug, a simple
stupid one involving rotations that wasn't nearly as serious, as well as
put in a few small features like auto scrolling to latest inserted
images when doing a big add/rotate. Progress being made, but Beta won't
be out for a little while.
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04/09/2003
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Advanced Image Manipulations
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I've begun the task of implementing the large image view feature, as
well as the various advanced image manipulations (cropping, red eye,
exposure adjustment). I've got the basic GUI widget layout complete with
buttons and all sockets hooked up. Should be able to use it to view in
larger form images very soon now. Manipulations will take a little time
each, red eye will take the most time but I've already through it out
pretty well.
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04/08/2003
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No more binaries for now, expect windows binaries as well for next
release
|
|
I've got my hands full of work to do right now for the beta release and
the images dir issue (see road map) is
something that really needs to be fixed so I don't think I'll release
any more alpha binaries for other platforms. If you'd like to watch my
progress the road map is being updated as I fix major things, all little
modifications will be available in the upcoming change-log.
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04/05/2003
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Moving on to the beta release
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|
It looks like the fixed tarballs I uploaded have propagates to all the
sourceforge mirrors so now you can download the alpha in tgz form from
the download page or the sourceforge project page. :) Later today I'll
add a statically linked against qt version for Linux, as well as
binaries for FreeBSD. I just added a few items to the road map for the
Beta. If you notice any problems have suggestions contact me. Now it's time to get back to real
coding. :)
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04/04/2003
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First Alpha Release!
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Album Shaper 1.0a is released! Download it and try it out today! Get back
to me with bug reports.
Update: Ugg. Somehow the tgz files I uploaded got screwed up,
ending up just being tar files (not gziped at all). All files
downloaded from the download page now work. Hopefully the update I
uploaded to the Sourceforge system will spread to the mirrors
eventually.
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04/03/2003
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New name, released web site, alpha release very very soon.
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|
So a few nights ago when submitting this project to Sourceforge I discovered
another project called AlbumMaker exists. Jeesh. I looked through stuff on Sourceforge, Freshmeat,
and searched online several times for other photo album software and never came across this. I
don't know how I missed it. Well, the program has been renamed Album Shaper. So tonight I went
through the code changing all references from Maker to Shaper. I fixed up a make-install target so
you can install it on your machine easily, and fixed button image loading such that you can run the
program from where ever on your system. I made a small change to the HTML output and tested out the
program on a large Album (65 Megs worth of data). It worked very well. I noticed a small bug with
moving a photo from one subalbum to another and then setting the album representative image so I
want to fix that before I release the Alpha. Other than that there are no known bugs, just plans
you can find in the road map. Well, enough for tonight. Look for a release soon!
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03/28/2003
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Alpha version almost done!
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Put final touches on alpha version of Album Shaper. Took
screen shots and finished web site.
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03/18/2003
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Web Site
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Created Web Site
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