Fullscreen interface similar to FastStone
Posted: Sat Dec 02, 2006 7:43 pm
Have people tried FastStone viewer?
I keep coming back to xnview for a number of reasons - performance and tabs being biggies. FastStone has no read-ahead at all, browsing large folders is too painful. But in view mode it has some very unique user interface elements that I think XnView could benefit from, even if it doesn't copy outright. (One of which is that it came configured almost exactly how I would want it, but that's outside the scope here.)
I realize you're not looking to make a clone of another product, and that such features would take quite some time to implement even so. These are just ones that make it feel "right", by placing everything the view mode has and more into a clutter-free fullscreen mode. I hope others might have their own ideas, as well, here.
The other viewer I like - CompuPic - isn't free and isn't actively developed; really the only reason I like it is the crazy-awesome performance. Certain features - like different color folders based on whether they've been thumbnailed, and maximum magnification - are interesting, but don't grab me.
I keep coming back to xnview for a number of reasons - performance and tabs being biggies. FastStone has no read-ahead at all, browsing large folders is too painful. But in view mode it has some very unique user interface elements that I think XnView could benefit from, even if it doesn't copy outright. (One of which is that it came configured almost exactly how I would want it, but that's outside the scope here.)
- View:
- Most interesting - mouse up to the very top of the screen and a whole mini-browser shows up, along with the menu and navigation. This makes an excellent alternative to switching back to the regular browser for quickly skipping images, while retaining all the benefits of full-screen mode. (The issue I have is that it's way too sensitive. Mouse off it by one pixel and it's gone, and it only shows up at the very top pixel.) In XnView, this could incorporate tabs as well.
- The scroll wheel works as you'd expect in the minibrowser - scroll the browser, not switch images or scroll the image.
- On the other three sides, you have a toolbar, a list of common operations, and an image info panel.
- If you click and hold on the image, it switches to full-screen panning mode. As long as you hold it, it stays at 100% zoom. (And it has the "infinite scrolling" so no screen borders to deal with.)
- Faster zoom-in, since it only scales what's visible. The flip side is that zoom+drag is visibly laggy.
- Saving: When you save, the advanced option switches you into the equivalent of xnview's export. This is really nice, it'd be good to integrate the Export dialog instead of the Format Write tab when saving to a supported format.
- It's cute the way it puts the image size and type under the image. Personally, I like XnView's colors better though.
I realize you're not looking to make a clone of another product, and that such features would take quite some time to implement even so. These are just ones that make it feel "right", by placing everything the view mode has and more into a clutter-free fullscreen mode. I hope others might have their own ideas, as well, here.
The other viewer I like - CompuPic - isn't free and isn't actively developed; really the only reason I like it is the crazy-awesome performance. Certain features - like different color folders based on whether they've been thumbnailed, and maximum magnification - are interesting, but don't grab me.
) /Georg