image viewers: a different approach

[Benjamin Meyer]

On Wednesday 26 October 2005 7:41 am, Michael Olbrich wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have been following the discussion on KView and I think we need to
> take a step back. Focusing on individual applications will only result
> in chaos.
> The first step would be to look at the different tasks we want to
> accomplish. For me there are 4:
>
> 1. basic viewer. For links on webpages, emails and individual local
> images.
> Features: fast, incremental loading, zoom. Maybe scrolling by dragging.
> This is probably somewhere between khtmlimage and KView.

Just to clarify, not KView, but the KView part correct?  This is really 
something that is embedded within applications, not an application.

> 2. Enhanced viewer. For image folders (photos). Basic manipulation.
> Features: previews, step through images, rotate (and save), exif
> manipulation.
> Most of the current viewers fit more or less in this category.
>
> 3. Image organization. Not so much a viewer but closely related from the
> users perspective. From a simple folder layout to a database, depending
> on what the user wants.
> Kimdaba belongs in this category. Afaik digikam has such features as
> well.

I don't really see a difference between #2 and #3.  #2 really seems to be a 
relic of 1998 where everyone was writing there own photoViewer2000++ and 
cramming as many things into it as possible, but being crap compared to 
photoshop.  Enhanced viewers are both crappy editor and crappy organizers 
because of how they define themselves.  Much more usefull as shown by 
countless companies producing applications such as iPhoto are image 
organization applications with basic manipulation.

> 4. Image manipulation. That's the other direction from 2.
> We have krita here.

Really there should be three, not four

1) Image viewer component that any application can use
2) Image Organizer with basic editing tools
3) Image Editor

-Benjamin Meyer

-- 
aka icefox
Public Key: http://www.icefox.net/public_key.asc
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