News

News & Updates

As progress for pBrowser continues and features are getting added, not all necessarily being visible, I feel I should highlight enhancements that are worth mentioning.

Current Release Highlights

The most visible highlight is the incorporation of a new look. As thereof, different theming styles for variation are selectable. Alongside a lot of internal work mostly not directly visible has been done. Just to mention a few: the natural sorting algorithm has been refined. Some nasty bugs have been fixed, increasing overall stability. The file copying process has been reworked completely, resulting in better feedback and probably less CPU usage. Also, the current release is compatible up to Java version 16.

And finally the database engine has been replaced. This seems to have helped with stability at the cost of some performance.

Highlights of Last Releases

*Since last release most effort has been spent into making pBrowser faster in operations. Copying files and browsing images does work significantly faster now at the cost of Cpu usage. Optimizations also introduces more bugs which are getting constantly fixed.

*Starting from this release the database being used will be HSQLDB, making the manual download and installation of separate files unecessary.

*Several new utilities have been added and placed into the context menus of the application. The most noteworthy new feature here is the creation of snapshot images for videos and the ability to browse and navigate them. This should evolve later into a tool helping to find duplicate videos in ones video collection. Just for now duplicate videos may easiely be spotted visually and be confirmed by having Media Player HC automatically playing them.

Additionally this release contains lots of small enhancements, updated versions of integrated tools, bug fixes and is compatible with Java version 9.

• Updating of thumbnails due to filesystem activities has been reworked and should be more consistent to common expectation now. The file rotation dialog has been rewritten.

Lastly, lexicographical sorting of files has beed replaced by natural sorting and is being applied by default in file selection lists.

• A new feature has been added aimed to aid in rearraging the order of images. During drag and drop and during scrolling a marker shows up displaying the top most row number in the thumbnail list. And as in general, every new feature with a visibility implact can be customized or turned off.

File Selection and Readability Display have been overhauled as well as the harmonization of context menus all over the application. Operations upon files should be equally accessible within the different panels.

Filesize colorization have been reworked for being fully configurable. Arbitrary colorization rules can be configured, taking file sizes and type into account. Thus it should be far more easy to grasp different file types at a glance by having them colored individually.

Finally "ExifTool" has been integrated to display further metadata of a selected file.

• I have struggled hard with an annoying occasion of spurious file locking. I have found the method checking for updates in the currently visible directory to be the reason. To counter this (for those who have experienced this issue), a new Behavior Optionn is available, allowing the "Poll" method to be chosen from.