Announcing my small OS X application: BTFlip

btoth

Person that uses a Mac
I didn't know where else on this forum to place this, so I thought The Cafe would be suitable.

I've developed a small utility program called BTFlip that can be found on my server here: http://software.inhomeca.com. I developed it based on a feature that I wanted for my own personal use - being able to flip through images in a folder really fast.

Version 1.0 accomplished what I intended it to. It's multithreaded for background loading of images which makes flipping through images pretty fast. You can flip through images using the toolbar buttons, up and down keys, or a scroll wheel. There are four different ways to view images (different scaling and resizing methods). And, it contains a preview draw with thumbnails of the images contained in the current folder.

Please check it out, let me know what you think, especially if you should find a bug. (If anyone is any good at icon design, it could use some nice Aqua-like icons, :D)

BTFlip - http://software.inhomeca.com


- Brian Toth
 
Nice. I'd map the resize widget to resize to the dimensions of the image currently being viewed though, not to the screen size (that's what option+widget is for) :)
 
it doesn't work well with hi res or maybe it's the big file size, but for regular web picts it was fast!!
 
yeah, nice work! i was thinking that it sounded like QuickImageCM. but i definitely like the way you did it. like someone else mentioned tho - it would be nice if it auto fit hi-res images to w/in screen proportions.

but nice work!
 
quiksan said:
yeah, nice work! i was thinking that it sounded like QuickImageCM. but i definitely like the way you did it. like someone else mentioned tho - it would be nice if it auto fit hi-res images to w/in screen proportions.

but nice work!

There is an option to auto-size the window to fit the images and if the image is too big for the screen, it will scale it to fit the largest size that it can. Is that what you're referring to?


Thanks for the comments.

Seems very much like Preview though...

Are you referring to the speed at which it loads? Or the functionality?

Large images do load slower, most noticeable when using scaling. Though, depending on how fast you flip through all the images it usually doesn't cause a problem with the multithreaded nature of the image buffering.
 
btoth said:
There is an option to auto-size the window to fit the images and if the image is too big for the screen, it will scale it to fit the largest size that it can. Is that what you're referring to?


Thanks for the comments.

ah, yeah, that's it. sorry, I was working with one hand, while holding my baby, so I wasn't paying full attention. cool!!!
 
Interesting app. Though I'd rename it. I avoided this thread for a while, thinking it had something to do with bluetooth. I though it was Drag N Tooth or something of that ilk.
 
It was supposed to be called FlipBook, though that name seemed heavily used and I'm not the creative type. :D Name suggestions would be appreciated, something catchy and Apple-like.

I've been working on adding features to the next version, though I'd like opinions about the preview drawer... it does slow down when trying to quickly scroll through large images in its current state. I have a few different solutions to this but they all have advantages/disadvantages.

1) The current way loads the images when they are requested: Good - thumbnails load really fast at the start and it takes up very little memory. Bad - if you want to scroll really fast the the bottom, you'll notice jerky movement if you images are very high-res.

2) Load all thumbnails into memory: Good - no lag while scrolling. Bad - initial load time is slower even with it being in a background thread. And, it obviously take more memory (though that might be acceptable).

3) Load thumbnails like Preview does, while scrolling, use a temporary image and then load images when the user stops scrolling: Good - fast, smooth scrolling, fast initial load time. Bad - I don't really like it because unless you know the image you're looking for is at a particular place in the list, it makes it hard to find what you're looking for. :)

Maybe it's not really that big of an issue, maybe the other feature will outweigh the drawer anyway.
 
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