Re: [Pikture-devel] iPhoto's thumbnails...

[Jonathan G. <jgr...@li...>]

Carl Pelletier wrote:

> Ok nice, that show that they do nothing really special. Great point :-)
>
> I make a couple of search on google and I saw many talk about the 
> performance issue with the thumbnails sliders. So, sure it's realy hot 
> looking feature, but is that realy usefull? meaby we can provide like 
> 2 to 6 predefined size? Imagine a guy who have 800 pictures in a album 
> or in a search result album, this will not decrease the performance of 
> the application ? I not convinced that is a pratical feature. It's 
> look good, but is that realy important? Give me your opinion on that.
>
>
> I started to look at imageMagick C++ API, this thing realy ROCK :-) I 
> think we must use it. This thing have been develop exactly for what we 
> wont to do. And it's look to be realy easy to use.
>
> More on this realy soon.
>
> What tool you will use to make the uml ? Cause I want to do the same 
> for   the gphoto API and the imagemagick one.
>
> I saw only 2 not quite ready open source projet yet: umbrello from KDE 
> and dia from gnome.
>
Ok, I finally have some time to answer. Sorry for the very slow response 
time... I came back home yesterday at 11:30PM and didn't have to to 
reply yesterday during the day either.

Concerning UML, Umbrello is absolutly fantastic so far. It works great 
and has gets the job done really well. I've been using it for a while at 
work too and I havne't had a single problem with it yet. That's what I 
am using for pikture.

For ImageMagik, I know it's really well done. All I want to make sure is 
that KDE doesn't already have these capabilities built-in. If it does, 
then we'll use KDE isntead. Otherwise, ImageMagik is the first choice.

Concerning iPhoto, there is no performance problem in iPhoto with the 
slider. Quite the contrary in fact. It works really well even on older 
hardware like mine. iPhoto *is* slow to load and display 
thumbnails...but this has largely been fixed in the latest version and 
the problem is not with the slider...merely the way they load data. I've 
been studying their files and it's pretty weird. They have several .db 
binary file that they seem to load every time + the lib itself is in a 
plist file, which is a glorious name for an XML file with a lot of 
overhead :) Not exactly the best way to do so. We will have a good 
advantage here.

File I/O is also quite slow on PPC for some reason, so again we should 
get some gain there. I really think we need this...it works great and 
people love it. It's the kind of eye candy that makes Apple products 
"cooler" and that's what people want. No point in not giving it to them. 
If you hardware is too slow, then simply don't use it...so it's 
available for those with proper hardware and the rest can deal with 
small thumbnails.

Another thing that makes Apple's display slow is that they actually draw 
a shadow beneath each thumbnail! It looks cool, but it's way too slow.

We'll have more time to discuss this tonight anyway.