New Release: PhotoQt v1.1

Published: 12th of October, 2014

Between the last release and this one, quite a long time has past. More time, than between any other two releases in the past. The simple reason for this, is, that I had to step back from developing PhotoQt for a while as I was finishing up my Bachelor in Mathematics and started my Masters in the same. But I came back, and once again there are again a number of changes, bug fixes and improvements:

Qt5 and QMultimedia

PhotoQt now relies on Qt version 5 as framework. This brings a number of immediate advantages to PhotoQt: Phonon has been replaced by QMultimedia. This reduces the dependencies of PhotoQt and makes maintaining the code a lot easier (no more #ifdef's for that).

Per-session rotation/flipping

Rotating/Flipping an image is now stored per session: Navigating back and forth keeps the image in the orientation they were put in before. Note, that no changes are written to any files!

Quick-Settings

Some rather often used/needed settings can now quickly be adjusted by a slide-in widget on the right (finally found a use for that screen edge). A change there is saved and applied immediately, making it an easy and quick way to adjust PhotoQt's behaviour without having to go through the settings.
And of course, as with almost everything in PhotoQt, if you don't like it, you can simple disable it in the settings (Tab 'Other').

Scaling images

A couple times, I got an email from different people asking for some image manipulation in PhotoQt. I usually told them, that I'm more focussing on the viewer part and am not keen to turn it into an editor, but that I might add some basic functionality at some point. Here is a start: You can now scale images (currently only supported for file formats natively supported by Qt). Although working perfectly fine, it might not be the most practicable way of doing it. Check it out and tell me what you think, how it could be improved, etc.

Filter files

Now you can easily filter the images in the currently loaded directory. You can set a filter either by filename or by extension - or both.

Fake Transparency

Due to a bug in Qt4, fake transparency only really worked for single monitors. However, in Qt5 those bugs have been fixed, and fake transparency can now be used with any number of screens. Also, whenever PhotoQt is restored from system tray, it now refreshes the screenshots. Note, however, that currently fake transparency still only works properly when PhotoQt is run in fullscreen/maximised.

Fade-in Widget class and Animation from top

This is a more technical change and probably not noticeable by 'normal' users. But it's definitely noteworthy, since it caused a massive simplification and unification of the codebasis: All (well, most) widgets now use the exact same code for their look and behaviour - so much easier to maintain and less prone to bugs.
Also, along with the changes in the code, widgets now 'fly in' from the top of the screen (they used to open up from the center of the screen). This helps to hide some glitches in the interface when a widget is very small.

Many bug-fixes

And of course, many bugs have been fixed along the way, a few bigger ones are listed in the Changelog...

What's up next:
For the next release of PhotoQt, I wont be focussing on new features, but I'll put some work into making the existing features work better and fix some of the known issues. Examples: make GraphicsMagick more stable for more exotic file formats, improve thumbnails, improve shortcut detection, etc... Of course, that doesn't mean, that there wont be any new features, but only a few small ones if at all.

I hope, you all like this fresh and hot release. Sorry, it took so long, I hope that wont happen again in the future... Let me know what you think, and please let me know if you find any bugs!

Enjoy :-)