[KimDaBa] Minor bugs and improvements plus plans for the KimDaBa week.

[Jesper K. Pedersen]

See I always answers my email, it might take time though....
Finally I got past the deadline in the company, and now I've taken a week
of to hopefully get a lot of KimDaBa work done.

So before answering this email, here comes a few updates:

Three major issue, to those of you interested:
- At least reading dates out of EXIF, but preferable reading all available
  information
- calculating and storing MD5 sums of files, so KimDaBa can see when you
  have moved your files around on disk
- running valgrind and kcachgrind to get rid of memory errors and
  bottlenecks.

After that I expect a two week feature and message freeze, where
translators can get a 1.1 release ready, while the rest of us hunts bugs.

"Dario Spagnolo" <spada at zaup.org> writes:

| Hello Jesper and everyone else,
| 
| This weekend I've been stressing KimDaBa a lot ! :) I've entered my
| collection of 1400 photos with a lot of keywords. Obviously I find this
| software very useful and extremely well thought !
Thanks.

| Here is a list of a few minor bugs and improvements I found using the
| 1.0.1 source release. Some were corrected in the latest snapshot so they
| are not listed here.
| 
|  * Thumbnails view :
|   - A few more pixels around thumbnails would make selections easier
I always starts my selection under the images, rather than between them.
I'd rather not make more space between images, as it would allow less
images per screen of thumbnails. Besides this is a QIconView, so I think
layout is kind of out of my control anyway.

|   - There still are few bugs with moving thumbnails around and it still
| makes KimDaBa crash from time to time
also in later snapshots?
Could you please try running valgrind and send me the output next time it
happens. As I said this week will include running valgrind a lot, so I
might stumble on it myself.

|   - Alignment of thumbnails is also a bit fuzzy after moving them
Yeah, I consider this a bug in QIconView

|   - Tooltip boxes go away if I click on empty space (maybe it's not a bug,
| but why is it a feature then ?)
This has been changed a few weeks ago, now the tooltips are pretty fancy
actually, and you toggle them on/off by pressing Ctrl+t,

|   - cutting/pasting images and its various error messages aren't very
| intuitive
Please elaborate, I'm not sure what you are referring to.

|   - "self drop" dialog shouldn't be there at all. If a user self drops an
| image, the program should just ignore the action silently
Fixed yesterday, thanks.

|  * Image Configuration
|   - Saving the workspace makes the program crash from time to time
valgrind output again please.

|   - In the default workspace, the image preview is too small. I suggest
| making the whole window a little bigger and using another layout with
| two columns : first column is for Persons, Keywords and Locations; the
| second column is for a large image preview, a small description and date
| fields.
See that is exactly why it is a workspace, just make the layout you
personally prefer, and press "Options..." at the bottom of the window, and
choose "save layout", and you got the layout exactly as you love it, every time.

|  * A few typos :
|   - "sheels" instead of "shells" and "-prefix" instead of "--prefix" in
| mainview.cpp:574
thanks.

|   - "run fast" in context menu for slideshow should be "run faster" to
| comply with "run slower".
yup, thanks.

| 
|  * New features :
|   - A "Rescan directory" button that would add newly added images on the
| fly and remove index.xml's stale entries (deleted from hard disk without
| KimDaBa knowing it).
Lots of people have already bashed me for the offline mode of KimDaBa, but
its here to stay! - if no one else, then *I* use it ;-)
Here is my plan for a fix to this:
1) rescan is on my TODO, and will be implemented soonish
2) In the browser (or somewhere else, I'm not 100% sure yet) I expect to
have an item for searching for images not available, that way you can find
the images that no longer exists on disk. 

|   - A keyboard-only mode in the Image Configuration (it's almost there
| yet, it mainly lacks a better tab order for switch from one field to
| another)
right, on my BUGS lists.

|   - EXIF support ! (yes I know it's already in the changelog!)
Yup will work on it this week.

| Just for info, I have just submitted a french GUI translation and I have
| contacted Achim (who maintains an unofficial Debian Woody package) to see
| if we can get KimDaBa officially supported by some Debian maintainer.
Great, let me know when its there, plus the name of the maintainer (hmmm I
think I already said that)

Cheers
Jesper.