Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

Simple Photo Resizer - Please Give Feedback

<< < (10/10)

Renegade:
Renegade, I was in similar situation years ago, but went even more extreme with the ease of use and ended up with this free resizing tool: http://www.rw-designer.com/picture-resize
I added a lot of features over the years, but the basic functionality remained the same. Drag and drop photo or folder on it and it creates resized copies. No GUI, no sliders, no buttons. It can be configured by changing its name... Newbies just drag and drop, power users can do a lot more.

BTW cubic resampling is no good when shrinking images. It is for magnification of images.
-vlastimil (February 05, 2011, 08:12 AM)
--- End quote ---

There are better algorithms, but I just wanted to get it done -- it's the best quality available in the shortest time. The results are more than good enough for casual users. It's not targeted at prosumers or professionals. Heck, I still use Photoshop for resizing some things as Photo Resizer doesn't do everything that I need.

That's a very interesting approach to have the name of the application determine the options. I've never seen that before. I've of course seen differently named versions of applications, but not like that. A very interesting innovation!

One of the "inspirations/motivations" for it is someone I know and who shall remain unnamed -- Asking him to rename a file is a major task. Watching him browse to a different location on his computer is enough to make you want to rip your eye-balls out and scream. While seeing Cthulhu may give you a few insanity points, he'll max you out real quit as you find yourself screaming wildly and attempting to bash your brains out in a padded cell. :D

I've not given him a link for it yet, but he'll be the acid test to see if I've managed to get the UI right. :D

Renegade:
Ok, a few updates...

Over in this thread, I saw deano looking for context menus, and thought it would work well as it doesn't have any impact on the main UI. So, there's a shortcut in the Windows Explorer context menu now for JPG, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and SVG files. i.e. Right-click on one of those image types. I used the least possible impact on the system so as not to take any resources for that. No COM stuff or loading DLLs or any of that nonsense.

Also, someone had mentioned presets, but I just can't see adding in anything to the visible UI as it would clutter things up and get confusing. There's already a lot there for some people. Soooo...

-, +, F2, F3 now size the image to presets by width (height is relative):


* 120
* 160
* 240
* 320
* 400
* 512
* 600
* 640
* 800
* 1024
* 1152
* 1280
* 1360
* 1440
* 1600
* 1680
* 1920
* 2048
* 2560
* 3200
* 100%
Preset were all chosen according to popular monitor and camera resolutions.

They cycle as well. So once you hit the minimum or maximum, it flips back to the maximum or minimum, respectively.

Arrow keys and PageUp/Down keys still work as before. 16px increments for arrow keys and 64 pixel increments for PageUp/Down.

Basically, just "silent" type modifications. No noise in the UI, but a few things to make it easier to use.


Very shortly I will get on top of that nice new shiny Help & Manual license and do a help file even. :) Mostly big screenshots and "how to" task-based stuff for people. (I was soooo hoping to win that, and soooo glad when I did~! :D )

vlastimil:
One of the "inspirations/motivations" for it is someone I know and who shall remain unnamed -- Asking him to rename a file is a major task. Watching him browse to a different location on his computer is enough to make you want to rip your eye-balls out and scream. While seeing Cthulhu may give you a few insanity points, he'll max you out real quit as you find yourself screaming wildly and attempting to bash your brains out in a padded cell. :D

I've not given him a link for it yet, but he'll be the acid test to see if I've managed to get the UI right. :D
-Renegade (February 06, 2011, 03:51 PM)
--- End quote ---

Having such person is a big +. It is too bad that each person can only by used once for such tests.

Anyway, what I wanted to emphasize in my previous post is that you should pick an area and make your picture resizer be totally awesome in that single area. The area may be for example ease of use, resizing speed, image quality, user interface sexiness, understandable documentation, portability, seamless integration with another software, or something completely different. I followed that path years ago and it worked. There is a good number of free picture resizers out there competing for attention (some of them even online services), and being best in something is a must.

Renegade:
One of the "inspirations/motivations" for it is someone I know and who shall remain unnamed -- Asking him to rename a file is a major task. Watching him browse to a different location on his computer is enough to make you want to rip your eye-balls out and scream. While seeing Cthulhu may give you a few insanity points, he'll max you out real quit as you find yourself screaming wildly and attempting to bash your brains out in a padded cell. :D

I've not given him a link for it yet, but he'll be the acid test to see if I've managed to get the UI right. :D
-Renegade (February 06, 2011, 03:51 PM)
--- End quote ---

Having such person is a big +. It is too bad that each person can only by used once for such tests.

Anyway, what I wanted to emphasize in my previous post is that you should pick an area and make your picture resizer be totally awesome in that single area. The area may be for example ease of use, resizing speed, image quality, user interface sexiness, understandable documentation, portability, seamless integration with another software, or something completely different. I followed that path years ago and it worked. There is a good number of free picture resizers out there competing for attention (some of them even online services), and being best in something is a must.
-vlastimil (February 12, 2011, 03:49 PM)
--- End quote ---

Good advice!

I recently re-examined my approach to software and thought that going the simple route is what people really need most of the time. So that's where I'm going to be focusing. Drop dead simple. Super Simple. :)

At the moment I'm working on the web site for it. I'll be adding more there, but for the moment, it will just be this program.

I think I'm also going to try to do an online version as well. We'll see. I'm planning on using Silverlight because it's simply the best technology out there for clientside power. It also looks like it has over 62% market pentration now:

http://www.statowl.com/custom_ria_market_penetration.php

And an interesting blog post on Silverlight:

http://www.uxpassion.com/2009/06/cool-facts-about-silverlight-penetration-market-share/

As for the number of resizers, yeah... Tons of them. I'm not going to try to have the "best" one -- only the most usable and easiest one.

Well, back to the website work. It's getting there slowly... The biggest issue isn't "getting the site done", but rather getting the site and software done in a way that will put food on the table. There's a very big difference there. :)

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page