Category: gnome

I’ve been working on replacing the image info sidepane in EOG with an image properties dialog. IMHO, this is a less invasive and more consistent aproach. The sidepane takes too much space of the image view mostly when you want to visualize the image EXIF data. Also, just dumping all EXIF data is not very user-friendly. Therefore, another goal here is to make it more user-friendly.

Current image info sidepane: invasive and unfriendly.

So, in eog-ng there’s an EXIF tab in image properties dialog which at first sight only shows a summary of the most common things you want to see in EXIF (aperture, shutter speed, flash, ISO, date, etc). But I still want to give the possibility to view the whole EXIF data for advanced users. So, just click on the “Details” expander and you can view all EXIF tags. With the navigation buttons in the dialog, you can easily check EXIF data from each image.

EXIF tab in image properties dialog: balance between user-friendlyness and power usage.

I still want some feedback about it and some help on which EXIF should appear in the summary and in what order. Discussion about image properties should take place in bug #313676.

EOG development is going a litle bit slower than I wanted but it’s going very well actually. As I said before, The heavy development is taking place in eog-ng branch which we plan to merge in the beginning of 2.20 development cycle (aka 2.19.x). See eog-ng wiki page for more information. I’ll try to list the nicest recent news.

Tangofied themable EOG icon

Thanks to Ulisse we now have a new official tango compliant icon.

New beautiful EOG icon.

As a wonderful surprise, Carol, my wife, managed to get a brand new t-shirt with the new EOG logo as christmas gift. Isn’t she lovely? :-)

T-shirt with EOG icon. Awesome hun!?

Printing

Thanks to Claudio EOG now have a simple, user friendly and powerful way for printing image. You can define exacly how you want to print the image in the paper and you do this in WYSIWYG way. Side note is that it’s been commited trunk and eog-ng branch. So it will be available already in GNOME 2.18.

New EOG printing UI. Easy and powerful!

EOG website

Thanks to Trond Danielsen we now have an EOG website online. The website uses the project template for consistency. Click here to check it out!

EOG website. Cool!

New collection pane

I’m experiment some new things in the collection pane. Basically, I’m trying to use a one-row-with-horizontal-scrolling aproach. Thumbnails now have a context menu with common used actions. Also, Inspired by the Fickr Organizr I added some buttons to smothly scroll through the image collection. Of course it still needs some polishing and I’d like to get some feedback about it. Comments?

Collection pane experiment.

Image properties

I chose to replace the image information side pane with a image properties dialog. It’s less invasive than the side pane and has navigation capabilities which means you can easily check images info and metadata without having to close-and-open dialog for each image. This is a work in progress. Ideas/comments/suggestions should be posted in bug #313676.

Image properties dialog.

EXIF automatic orientation

As some of you probably noticed, since 2.17.3 (patch still to be ported to eog-ng branch) EOG has support for automatic orientation of images based on EXIF info. One issue stil needs to solved but the general funcionality is already working.

New code base

The code base in eog-ng branch brings a lot of stability to EOG and the code is much more maintanable. Also, in theory (I still need to do some profiling to confirm) the eog-ng code should use less memory and should be faster than trunk. Some useful command-line options were added to start EOG in fullscreen mode (-f), slideshow mode (-s) and with collection pane disabled (-c).

Contribute!

Grab the eog-ng code now and participate! Go go go!

   svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/eog/branches/eog-ng/

I’ve received some emails from people interested in helping on EOG
development. EOG is a very nice project to start contributing (in the
GNOME context) because it’s a simple and useful application. I’ve
written the plans and related tasks for Eog-Ng on this wiki page.

EOG is old in many senses: its code, its look. In the last two release cycles EOG received a lot of love and some very-wanted features were implemented. However, there’s a need to rethink about the future of EOG in terms of its code (deep refactoring/recoding needed) and features. There are some design problems in the current code which are seriously affecting EOG’s stability. Eog-Ng is a branch which aims to agregate all development work related to what we want from EOG from now on. Eog-Ng main goal is to maintain a very solid and stable core with the very basic feature of an image viewer but with support for some extensibility

For everyone interested: contributions are always welcome! Follow the general instructions on Eog-Ng page, assign yourself to one or more tasks, discuss the solution where applicable and hands on code!

Give some love to EOG today and have a better GNOME image viewer
tomorrow! Let’s make EOG rock your world!