Re: Becoming a new contributor
fungi@yuggoth.org wrote:
> Out of curiosity, what benefits does it provide over, say, using
> xview from the xloadimage package? Smaller binary or resident memory
> size? Requires less processing power? Easier to use?
Good question. (I am tentatively calling this program "photo-album", and for convenience I'll use that name here.)
Benefit 1: A list of thumbnails to browse through.
Benefit 2: Better image scaling. Find some photos larger than your screen and run "xview -global -shrink *.jpg". The first image shown will be scaled down. Now press "n". The second image reverts to full size. Also, xview scales by skipping/repeating pixels. photo-album uses this fast but rough method at first for performance; then, once it has had time for the calculation, it uses the slower but better-looking averaging/linear interpolation method. (Thanks to eog for the idea.)
Benefit 3: Better desktop integration. By using EWMH hints, photo-album runs maximized (rather than 90% of screen size) and uses a thumbnail of the current image as the window's icon. (Again, thanks to gimp for the idea.)
This is not to discredit xview. Even though photo-album is designed for older systems (I run it on a decade-old 300MHz system), it still looks obese next to xview. And xview has some advanced features that photo-album does not (and will not) have, such as loading images onto the root window.
In the end, photo-album is meant to serve a more specific purpose than xview. xview can be used for many different things: viewing photos, setting desktop wallpapers, zooming in on faxes, etc. photo-album is intended, not to replace xview, but to do one particular thing -- viewing photos -- better.
God bless,
John
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