Notices

I like the C2 slide show feature very much: cleaner than Quiver with nicer transitions, but I do prefer Quiver's navigation screen. Vertical kinetic scrolling seems much more natural than horizontal kinetic scrolling.

Quiver also seems to be able render thumbnails faster than C2, but the main images seem slower - or maybe this is the UI feel. At any rate, I prefer Quiver for photo navigation and C2 for the slide-shows. Nice to have a choice, but I want the best of both worlds!

1) C2 slide show allows the screen to dim. Bug or feature? Quiver does not do this.

2) It is possible to have C2 play music while viewing a slide show, but you can't adjust the volume while looking at slides. C2 slide show does not presently use the min/max buttons which could be used for a volume control - as they are in the music player component.

3) Quiver seems to know the orientation of most my photos - this is good when showing a slide show, but bad when simply viewing pics one at a time as it reduces the picture area. I would like slide shows (and only slide shows) to auto-rotate pictures.

Hi Dont

We are starting, there's a little bit of features that are out, you just said some of those.
So, the horizontal navigation is not actually to navigate.. but will give us place for a " option button" where we want to provide more special features than in slide show (like send to flickr etc) you can check this on my first video on marceloeduardo.blip.tv

About the vertical x horizontal : Well, sorry for that, sometimes we need to do decisions and this works better in our vision =) But I'm again happy to see that there's good options out there to the other kinds of usage.

Quiver rendering faster thumbnails: We load a lot more thumbs them quiver, but I will not go into " who's faster" but are you facing problems even after the fast usage? We added some delay to the loading also to avoid "clashing" with the scrolling effect. If it was a grid it would faster.

1) Well, this was not supposed to happen we will fix it. We also will make sure screen is controllable for those who have power on etc. (so expect a nice " settings" addon here)

2) This is a known issue. I have all the specs for hardware keys made.. and even in photo were people would like to have it as zoom, it will be for volume.

3) We will improve it, also update the rotated thumbnails and so on. Iwas really sad that my camera (writes the orientation to exif) showed everything in portrait on canola. This will be fixed.

dont : thanks for the very detailed suggestions. We will for sure keep our work because is quite near of what you said, and I hope it makes you enjoy it more.

BR

Marcelo

Marcelo:

Thanks very much, yes I fully understand that you are in beta mode. I like Canola very much - my suggestions are just that - suggestions for things that I would like to see in future.

I also like Quiver very much too! Since my original post I discovered some preferences in Quiver that allow me to configure it's slide show to my liking. If you have not tried Quiver then please do so, there are some nice ideas in there.

Don.

Hi again dont =)


Actually I have, and for example I don't like the fact that theres thumbnails on the slideshow, gtk scrollbars in the zoom, but I do like it's speed. I actually showed the guys and asked the same zoom effect =)

It is just a matter of time, and for sure we already have a concept, but the speed from quiver in certains areas is inspiring =)

hey guys..

in quiver, the default settings for the slideshow might not be the optimal settings. by default, when you start the slideshow, it doesn't go into fullscreen mode, and it doesn't hide the film strip. both of these are configurable if you go into edit->preferences and click on the slideshow tab. i will probably change the defaults in a future build as the current defaults are not what most people want. as for transitions in the slideshow, the way i've implemented them, they are far too slow so don't even bother turning them on . animations and transitions are some of the benefits that canola gets from using a fancy UI library (evas) that is optimized for 16bit display.

if you don't like scrollbars showing up in quiver when you zoom in, you can turn them off (edit-> preferences, click on viewer tab and select "Hide scrollbars").

also, i'm not so sure about the statement that canola loads "a lot more thumbs them quiver". i think canola and quiver load the same number of thumbnails. canola may, on average, keep more of these loaded thumbnails in memory but there will certainly be times when quiver has more thumbnails in memory. quiver keeps about 13 pages of thumbnails in memory(6 pages up, 6 down, and the current page). so if you have 4 thumbnails per page (really big thumbnails) quiver would only be storing a maximum 52 thumbnails. if, on the other hand, you have 96 thumbnails on a page (really small ones) then quiver would be storing a maximum 1248 thumbnails in memory.

i agree with Don that horizontal scrolling is more difficult than vertical scrolling. for instance, if you are holding and using the device with just your left hand, it's much easier to do a vertical scroll with the thumb than it is to do a horizontal one. i think i could live with this (horizontal view) if i didn't have to do so much scrolling, but the way the photos are sorted, more scrolling is required than should be. for instance, to browse a set of images in order you must focus your eyes on the top row, scroll across to the end, then scroll all they way back to the start, now focus your eyes on the second row.. then repeat for the third. this is tiring for large image collections as there is no other method to move around the thumbnail view other than finger dragging. so if you wanna keep horizontal, i'd at least make two important changes:

1. add a position bar - there's a lot of empty room there at the bottom for a position bar (like the one in the audio / video playback screens).

2. instead of laying out images like this:
1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9

do it like this:
1 4 7
2 5 8
3 6 9


canola2 looks like it will become a very nice program as the bugs are ironed out. good job! i'm also glad quiver can be of some inspiration to the canola team.

cheers,

mike

Hey Mike:

Nice job on Quiver. I keep flipping between Quiver and C2 and like them both a lot. You should steal C2's transition code if you can

Any comment on my original point 3? Not auto-rotating (maybe as an option) when navigating, but keeping auto-rotation for slide-shows?

C2 and Quiver folks:

Once I started using my IT for photos I immediately wanted to be able to do some minimal image touch-up... cropping, red-eye, brightness, contrast, sharpening...

Viewing exif data would be nice too.

I find there is slight distortion on some of the images when they are shrunk down. (when you click to view the images). as a fashion photographer. having image distortion is a big nono. but I love this view, its the absolute best out there. apple/microsoft couldnt have come up with something better. cheers.

don:

stealing the canola transition code... i wish it was that easy... i can probably make some modifications to my transition code that will make it work on the internet tablet but it will require quite a bit more memory. i'll do some experiments.

in regards to your third point, i had plans to create a new image view ( under view->zoom menu), similar to the fill screen view, that would also rotate the image to maximize the viewable area. If/when I do that, I could also add an option to the slideshow preferences that would let you pick a different view mode for slideshows.

i may eventually add some very very basic image editing features. probably start with just crop, rotate, and resize.

also, quiver already lets you view exif data. just click the view->properties menu item.

mike

kingka:

I was wondering how useful the tablet might be for professional photographers.

Some kind of custom application aimed at professionals so that they could use them on site?

Or do you just fire up a lap-top? Or nothing at all?

Hi Mike,

We do not keep offscreen pages of images, trying to be light on number of images in memory. Also, we experienced some problems loading the images from flash, doing that for 5-6 thumbails can freeze the kinetic for a frame or two, that's why we do loadings on timers, this way we keep the animations smooth. Leo, the guys that wrote this screen, re-wrote this piece of software many times in order to make it not block, be responsive and so, he still think that some bits can be changed, but all in all, there is no much room to improvements... one of them would be threaded loading of images in Evas, but that's bit of pain to get right (but we'll try)... What make things bit more difficult is this "organic" layout, we cannot use tricks like we do in cover view.


This was a marcelo requirement already, actually for all screens, including lists, album grid, ... it would also react to clicks, going to that position... but unfortunately we couldn't make in time.

I suggested this at the beginning, but if you implement that you may end with lines that end pages before the other, that's difficult to solve... this problem is even harder since we have horizontal scrolling... so help me beat Marcelo on that ;-)

As for Quiver, that's a great piece of software, thank you! If you want to move it to Evas, I can help with tips and tricks, it's really powerful.