[KimDaBa] Re: [Kimdaba-announce] New snapshot including the date bar available

[Robert L Krawitz]

   From: "Jesper K. Pedersen" <blackie at kde.org>
   Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 17:34:35 +0100

   Integrating the date bar in the application was way easier than I
   anticipated, so a new snapshot is now available which includes the
   date bar. The date bar both shows the statistics of your images,
   but may also be used for navigation, simply click on a date in the
   date bar, and you will be shown images from that date. At
   http://ktown.kde.org/kimdaba/datebar.jpg you may see what it looks
   like.

A few comments:

1) The first row or two of thumbnails is jumbled.  This seems to be a
problem with some thumbnails being vertical and some horizontal form
factor.  I have about 5 horizontal shots, followed by 1 vertical,
followed by more horizontal and vertical shots.  The thumbnails after
the vertical shot are all displayed too low, so that they run into the
second row.  Strangely enough, it appears to only be the first row
that has this problem.

2) Dates are always displayed in European style (DD/MM).  This should
be taken from the locale; it's very confusing to me.  I found code
like this:

        return date(unit).date().toString( Qt::LocalDate );

to be more to my liking (it uses ISO dates).

3) It would be nice to have an option to display 4-digit years (this
is a personal peeve of mine).

4) Feature request: clicking on (or selecting) a range from the date
bar should narrow the view to cover only that range.  Thus, if I
select the month of October 2004 it should reload the thumbnails with
only those images.  It should also be possible for me to select a
range from the date bar (not just a single date).  This would be
particularly useful in category view; in thumbnail view, either
restricting the view or selecting the images in question would work
better (perhaps this would be a good user option, since it's likely to
be strongly a matter of taste).

5) It would also be nice to have a faster way to scroll the bar.

6) Another possibility would be to have multiple date bars, with
different resolutions.  I run my screen at 1600x1200, so maybe this is
more practical for me than for others :-)

7) The category for people is named "Personer", which is not an
English word ("People" or "Persons" are correct).  This has been the
case since the 12/07 snapshot.

8) Please remove the QT_MAX_IMAGE_SIZE code from both utils.cpp and
imageloader.cpp, per my previous email (simply check the result of
QImage::load() to prevent a crash).  It does somewhat work around the
problem, but it's not the ideal way to do it (a better way to do it is
to set this in the kdeglobals file).  It also makes it impossible to
run a binary compiled on a SUSE system on a non-SUSE system.

9) At startup I get a message to search for images with incomplete
dates.  However, the default option for Display Images with Incomplete
Dates (search for images with valid date but invalid time) doesn't
actually select the right images to fix up.

   So far KimDaBa have had no need for your images to be sorted, but
   the date bar works by far best if they are (Jumping to a given date
   will show all images from that date). KimDaBa thus have a new
   function to aid you in ensuring that all your images have valid
   dates (which might be something as simple as 1998-2001). Once you
   have given all your images a valid date, use the sorting function
   from the Images menu to sort your images.

   Previous versions showed the thumb nails of your images in folder
   of 100 images per folder, but for the date bar to work, all images
   are now shown in one folder. The previous setup was not by design,
   but simply because I couldn't figure out how to avoid loading all
   thumb nails at once. Now, fortunately I found out, so showing
   10.000 thumb nails doesn't course your computer to load gigabytes
   of memory. Let me know if you have a very good reason for re-adding
   the folder view with each 100 images.

I don't know how much I like this change, although it may simply be a
matter of getting used to it.  It seems to work well if I'm in a large
but restricted view, but not so well if I'm looking at all of my
(6000+) images.  However, the memory consumption is now impressively
low (97 MB -- times sure have changed -- is now "impressively low").

Unfortunately, I'm not going to have a lot of time for coding.  I
really need to put more time into my primary project
(Gimp-Print/Gutenprint) as we prepare for our 5.0 release.  I imagine
a lot of KimDaBa users would really like to have a Gutenprint 5.0
release :-)

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf at uunet.uu.net
Project lead for Gimp Print   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton