News
Second Snapshot Ready23 Aug 2006
Today I fixed two crashes in KPhotoAlbum, one which occurred when scrolling in the thumbnail viewer. The other occurred when clicking on the date bar with the middle or right mouse button.
In addition two smaller issues has been addressed. First it is now possible to bind keys to rotate the image in the annotation dialog. Second, clicking on an image in the thumbnail viewer will no longer start a new viewer, but reuse the old one.
Finally, a new splash screen has been added. This is the beginning of a contest to create a splash screen for KPhotoAlbum.
First Snapshot of Next KPhotoAlbum version available22 Aug 2006
OK, we are slowly approaching the next release (well I expect 2-3 month till the actually release, but this also includes all sort of freezes). So it is time to get started creating snapshots for you all to try.
And there are many good reasons to try out this snapshot, but most important is of course to get rid of bugs, so you don't have to be bothered the next year with an annoying bug similar to the selection bugs in the thumbnail view that must have annoyed you like hell.
In this snapshot you will find these new features and bug fixes compared to the 2.2 release:
- Support for video files. KPhotoAlbum will now find all your videos, and create thumbnails for them (if you have the right software installed. If it doesn't have a look at MPlayerThumbs). With the video support you will of course be able to annotate your videos like you may annotate your images. And of course you may also show your videos, either in the viewer, or if that does not work (good enought) by invoking an external viewer from the context menu.
- Hierarchies in the browser The browser now shows the hierarchies among your categories (Las Vegas is in USA kind of stuff). These hierarchies are also shown in the annotation dialog.
- Improved Annotation dialog The annotation dialog now hides items as you type in the line edit, and that way makes it so much easier to find the name of a person whom you only remember the first part of.
- Selection problems solved. And to the relief of so many of you, the selection problem from the previous release have now been fixed.
The Icon View stay and gets improved20 Aug 2006
A few weeks ago I was considering throwing the icon view used in the browser out, but by accident I tried it with a larger icon size, and found that to be really useful. So now it is possible (in SVN) to configure the icon size, to e.g. look like this:
Jesper's Personal Blog11 Aug 2006
If you want to see what I'm up to, how KPhotoAlbum development is coming along, why not have a look at my Blog.
Progress of SQL database back-end06 Aug 2006
Tuomas Suutari is working on a Google Summer Of Code for adding an SQL backend to KPhotoAlbum, and I asked him to provide all of us with a progress report, so here it is.
I just merged changes from my developing branch to actual KPhotoAlbum source code tree (i.e. trunk). This means that now there is already some kind of alpha version of the SQL back-end in KPhotoAlbum.
Currently it's capable of storing almost all the information that the XML back-end does. Only member maps are not yet saved. But code for that is almost ready.
Next stage is to get error handling work, so when connection to database server fails, back-end does something more reasonable than just crashes. And also optimize few database calls to be more SQL friendly. (This is because currently many parts in the code assume that database is in fast memory, which leads to quite different approach than with SQL storage.) Then some kind of configuration dialog has to be done, so user can type username and password to server somewhere.
So there is still some work to do, but things seem promising. Though still some more testing of the back-end has to be done after the SoC project, but you'll get the SQL support eventually.
KPhotoAlbum news feed05 Aug 2006
KPhotoAlbum's news section can now be monitored through your favorite RSS reader, simply point it to http://www.kphotoalbum.org, or http://www.kphotoalbum.org/news.rss in case it don't understand the first.