Misc Ideas
Posted: Wed Nov 07, 2007 11:48 am
Hi,
A great deal of us here at our company use XnView. We think it's great and so have bought some licences and now use it a lot. Pierre knows who I am as I pester him on Instant Messengers a bit too much!!
We think the new version's great. There's just a few things, in our opinion, that would really help:
(1) The entry for the status bar that previously read the palette of the image and said "256 Grey Scale" or "16 Grey Scale" has been taken out of the few recent versions presumably to make way for cursor co-ordinates.
Whilst the "8bpp", "24bpp" etc. is still there, it would be most helpful to have this returned. If you, for example, open up a 256 Grey Scale image and convert it to 16 Greys so it compresses better in many algorithms, XnView shows no change any more and just says "8bpp" for both 16 and 256 Grey, 256 Colour and a few others. Obviously this is correct, but only 16 colours of the palette are being used and XnView does not make this obvious to the user any more. Oddly, this is still present in the Browser, and there the status bar takes up a lot more room!
Perhaps simply readding it, or rearranging the status bar, or offering a checkbox to choose between cursor co-ords and number of greys is in theory pretty easy (and would be ideal), whereas adding a status bar customiser is probably overkill for such a small problem and would create Pierre a lot of work. Cursor co-ords is the most logical thing to swap using a checkbox, because average users don't really need cursor co-ords when working with large numbers of images, and words like "True Colours" look more friendly.
(2) In the Batch processing dialog, importing and exporting the ListView box to a textfile would be brilliant! Then you could create a list of the files you want to process and import them into XnView rather than use nConvert. The normal format for stuff like this every line being taken as a filename, disregarding double-quotes, and no column header (it's also the way another package works which we'd rather not use)! The Script frame in this window does not perform that task.
(3) Searching for bit depths in the find dialog would be superb -- but obviously isn't necessary as it's not been present up until now.
(4) When browsing across UNC paths in folders with over 3000 images (there are reasons for that!), if you open up an image then go forward or back there is a large lag whilst waiting for the second image, but after that it is okay. I think this is perhaps because it takes time for XnView to locate the previous/next logical image with the current sorting algorithm, but I do not know for sure.
I know, it sounds like I'm asking for a lot! From programming experience (1) and (2) should be exceptionally easy for Pierre, as he's got the framework in place. (3) and (4) are probably harder, *but* they're also not as necessary.
We're not expecting anything! It's just ideas I have come up with, and I think little things like that would help some other XnView users too!
- Greg
A great deal of us here at our company use XnView. We think it's great and so have bought some licences and now use it a lot. Pierre knows who I am as I pester him on Instant Messengers a bit too much!!
We think the new version's great. There's just a few things, in our opinion, that would really help:
(1) The entry for the status bar that previously read the palette of the image and said "256 Grey Scale" or "16 Grey Scale" has been taken out of the few recent versions presumably to make way for cursor co-ordinates.
Whilst the "8bpp", "24bpp" etc. is still there, it would be most helpful to have this returned. If you, for example, open up a 256 Grey Scale image and convert it to 16 Greys so it compresses better in many algorithms, XnView shows no change any more and just says "8bpp" for both 16 and 256 Grey, 256 Colour and a few others. Obviously this is correct, but only 16 colours of the palette are being used and XnView does not make this obvious to the user any more. Oddly, this is still present in the Browser, and there the status bar takes up a lot more room!
Perhaps simply readding it, or rearranging the status bar, or offering a checkbox to choose between cursor co-ords and number of greys is in theory pretty easy (and would be ideal), whereas adding a status bar customiser is probably overkill for such a small problem and would create Pierre a lot of work. Cursor co-ords is the most logical thing to swap using a checkbox, because average users don't really need cursor co-ords when working with large numbers of images, and words like "True Colours" look more friendly.
(2) In the Batch processing dialog, importing and exporting the ListView box to a textfile would be brilliant! Then you could create a list of the files you want to process and import them into XnView rather than use nConvert. The normal format for stuff like this every line being taken as a filename, disregarding double-quotes, and no column header (it's also the way another package works which we'd rather not use)! The Script frame in this window does not perform that task.
(3) Searching for bit depths in the find dialog would be superb -- but obviously isn't necessary as it's not been present up until now.
(4) When browsing across UNC paths in folders with over 3000 images (there are reasons for that!), if you open up an image then go forward or back there is a large lag whilst waiting for the second image, but after that it is okay. I think this is perhaps because it takes time for XnView to locate the previous/next logical image with the current sorting algorithm, but I do not know for sure.
I know, it sounds like I'm asking for a lot! From programming experience (1) and (2) should be exceptionally easy for Pierre, as he's got the framework in place. (3) and (4) are probably harder, *but* they're also not as necessary.
We're not expecting anything! It's just ideas I have come up with, and I think little things like that would help some other XnView users too!
- Greg