Preview of v0.9

Published: 22nd of October, 2012

It has been already about 3 months since the latest release of Photo. The next release (v0.9) is not too far away anymore (though it'll probably be another little while). There will be many changes to Photo, and I'd like to give a little preview of some of them, to show a bit of what you can expect:

The whole code of Photo has been completely rewritten. I re-used bits and pieces of the old code and adapted a lot of algorithms, but I completely restructered the source code to make it easier to maintain and (hopefully) less prone to bugs. In the process of rewriting the source code I was able to implement different ways of dealing with certain things, thus avoiding and fixing many bugs along the way.

Of course, I'll never be able to catch all of the bugs, thus I'm planning to release this time a BETA VERSION before the final release for translation and bug finding/fixing. Watch the "News" area here (or subscribe to the RSS feed) for more news on that :-)

Here's a short preview of some changes to Photo: (NOTE: The here listed features are still to some degree subject to change.)

Thumbnails
Up to now, the thumbnails are shown in a bar at the bottom of the screen. It is possible to hide the bar temporarily (not permanently), but that didn't always work as reliable as it should. Beginning in v0.9, the thumbnails will be hidden by default, and animate in when moving the mouse cursor to the bottom of the screen. That'll make Photo by default use as much space of the screen as possible for presenting your photos. However, as with most things in Photo, you'll be able to switch back to the thumbnails being permanently present (however, t
hey will always disappear when you zoom in/out).

Also, the effect for hovered/selected thumbnails has changed. There won't anymore be some weird glow on the thumbnail, but they'll simply jump a couple pixes up (and guess what, you will even be able to adjust how much they jump).

Zooming
The zoom position will not be kept anymore between two images. Loading a new image will always reset the zoom position (and also the rotation/reflection). In the current state of development, this isn't possible to change/adjust, but it might get implemented before releasing the beta version.

Preferences
The preferences wont be anymore placed in their own window, but their widget is now integrated into the main gui. It'll follow the color and styling scheme of the rest of Photo. It also experienced a lot of extension (more options!!) and re-grouping (better overview).

Shortcuts
Beginning in v0.9, each shortcut will be represented by a tile (i.e. a white-ish square). This helps a lot in keeping an overview over all your shortcuts. The simple listing used in version up to and including v0.8 is a little difficult and confusing. Hopefully not anymore in v0.9!!

File Formats
It'll also be possible to adjust the file formats recognized by Photo. The exact list of formats Qt can handle can vary depending on image plugins installed, operating system etc. So this might come in handy, if you miss a file format or if you want to remove a file format that isn't supported by your system.

Background
It will be possible to change and adjust the background color in Photo v0.9. If you want to have a differently colored layer over your background or a different background color in general (with no transparency), that can now be easily adjusted. It isn't even necessary to restart Photo for that!!

Faster Start
Photo now starts up a lot faster than before. That is due to the rewriting of the code and solving some issues much better than how they've been handled before.
It helps a lot in structuring your code if you roughly know all the things that have to be implemented...

Conclusion
The new version of Photo will bring a lot of really nice (I believe) features and changes. This is just a short preview of some of the changes and (new) features. But there is still sooo much more to come and to be done until v0.9...... :-)