Few more bugfixes in this release:
.jpg instead of .jpeg
You can use a rotation of 0, and I added it explicitly to the list of values in the popup. A lot of people didn’t seem to understand that the combo boxes can have arbitrary values typed in.
There is still some work to be done with the web page creation. I plan on working on it some more, but I know these are the issues that were being reported the most after the latest release.
Thumbscrew 1.0b9 (Fixed link. Thanks, Marco)
“Goddamn bugs” — Nick the Van Driver, Men in Black
So, I now know there are plenty of bugs to go around in the latest Thumbscrew beta I put out. I’ll get to each and every one of them, but I was caught with my pants down. I had been testing with a fully fleshed out set of preferences and so didn’t catch the problems that were occurring for the people who were starting up Thumbscrew for the first time (the spinning beach ball of death when trying to open the Preferences).
Well, that was a shallow bug, and fixed easily, but that uncovered others. Suffice it to say there’s still a bit of work to be done before I send out 1.0b8, and it’ll be a while since this isn’t my day job. Amber promises I’ll have plenty of time to work on it this weekend. I hope you can bear with me for a few more days…
Amazing! My little app was mentioned on the Call for Help with Leo Laporte show. An exerpt from the transcript:
Leo: Have you ever — I’m just gonna take a walk over here. (Mellow instrumental)
Leo: Have you ever wandered around on the computer, on the studio floor, and said, “I’m gonna take a little —” Have you ever wanted your online photos to look unique? “Look unique?” This is —
Mikey: Look different!
Leo: Mike has a free file to make all your photos online look just… a little different, kind of askew.
Mikey: Askew almost. (Laughing)
Leo: What is this program?
Mikey: It’s called “Thumbscrew.”
Leo: Oh, I love Thumbscrew!
Mikey: It is a great program.
Leo: I use Thumbscrew.
Mikey: And it allows you to —
Mikey: What it does is it takes the image that you have, a photograph or even a drawing or whatever you have in your computer, and you can turn it — it’ll make it slide side to side.
Leo: And you can put a frame on it.
Mikey: Put a frame around it, coloured background.
Leo: This is, by the way, a free file for Mac only unfortunately.
Mikey: Exactly, yeah.
Leo: So don’t get your hopes up, Windows people. I’m sure there’s something like it —
Mikey: There should be something like that, because this is a fantastic program, so —
Leo: I use it all the time.
Mikey: Yeah. so i’ll just show you how it works right here. you take a photo — this is a photo I took the other night.
Mikey: And I’m just gonna drop it into the Thumbscrew window, and it’s gonna take a second.
Leo: And it does its thing.
Mikey: It does its thing. (Both make funny sounds)
Mikey: And it pops up, you can see here, a little one. It’s called “thumb.” It’s renamed.
Leo: It’s a thumbnail.
Mikey: It’s a thumbnail of it. And I’ll open it up here.
Mikey: It just needs a second to load up here, but what it does is I’ve made it so it matches the colour scheme of my blog. So this is actually an upside-down picture, so it’s not really a good example, but I’ll do another one here of —
Leo: You can set how much it rotates it by, and I’ve actually — I always set it to the minimum, because I don’t want it to rotate —
Mikey: Yeah, I have it like, I think, at 35 degrees or something like that, just so it gives it a little bit of something different. Here’s a better example of —
Leo: Yeah, see that? Isn’t that cool?
Mikey: Of Leo, myself and Amber.
Leo: We were shooting pool the other night.
Mikey: Yeah.
Leo: No, we weren’t. (Laughing)
Mikey: And so this matches perfectly with, for instance, my blog background or your online photo album background.
Leo: So you can choose a picture —
Mikey: So I just have my —
Leo: Show us how you’ve used it.
Mikey: I’ll show you. I’ll just scroll down.
Leo: I do the same thing. In fact, when I did the last Geek Cruise, I did a whole photo album with thumbscrew, and it really looked nice.
Mikey: Exactly. So here’s an example of how it fits perfectly into my blog because it matches the background exactly. The colour’s the same, the border, and it looks like it’s — I’ve had people e-mail me and say, “What is this program?”
Leo: “How do you do this?”
Mikey: And it’s really simple, and it takes like 10 seconds.
Leo: Thumbscrew. You can do a whole batch of them.
Mikey: And you can do batches, exactly.
Leo: Just drag a whole bunch of files on there.
Mikey: Yeah, yeah.
Leo: Thumbscrew — I use it, and so does Mikey. Mikey likes it.
Mikey: (Chuckling) (Mellow guitar music)
(Thanks to Jack for the heads up)
I did a lot of work on Thumbscrew here at PyCon, and it’s really paying off. I’ve got the two subprocesses churning stuff out now, posting notifications, which the main program uses to update the display and progress indicator. I had to rip out quite a lot of code to get down to a simple reimplementation, so the Preferences stuff is all broken right now. This is actually okay with me, since I’ll be using an NSUserDefaultsController to map the preferences into the UI, rather than hand-wiring all the outlets and actions. So it was going to need to be rewritten, anyway.
Now, when you accidentally drop your whole iPhoto Library onto Thumbscrew, you can stop it at any point. Hurray, coming soon to a desktop near you.
Apologies, all around. Some of the people who downloaded either of the last two betas were newcomers, some were upgrading. I’m sure all got left with a bad taste in the mouth. Not something I’d like to be remembered for.
I had been testing new releases against the preferences I use on a day to day basis, and didn’t design some of the new features to be clever enough to handle the first-time user.
This release should work with existing preferences and new preferences on Tiger and Panther (I’ve run through various scenarios on my PowerBook and iMac with new and old prefs). I’m looking at PreFab Software’s UI Browser software as a functional testing tool. With a little work, I think it has great potential for helping me avoid this kind of embarrassing situation in the future.
I suspect once I get this to a relatively stable point (hopefully this is it), I’ll probably make far less frequent public releases. I’ll keep updating the mailing list, though, and try to have a bit more constrained development flux.
Wow, that didn’t take long. When adding in the new code to allow pasting, I left a call in that was added in the Tiger APIs. Turns out it was unnecessary (at least as far as this version’s pasting is concerned).
I’ve removed that bit and verified that this new version runs (and works with pasting) on both Panther and Tiger.
I had been planning on releasing the next version of Thumbscrew as a $10 shareware app, leaving all the 0.1.1 features unlocked and available for free. But before I could do this, I needed the release from my employer that says I retain rights to what I do after-hours.
I received and signed the agreement, so I retain IP rights to the software. However, one stipulation is that I not commercialize my private time creations while I’m currently employed, so I can’t release Thumbscrew as shareware.
Bad news for me. Good news for you. I’m going to continue releasing it as freeware. I won’t distribute the source anymore, but everyone [*] can use Thumbscrew’s new features.
The only feature improvement since the last announcement is that I’m using Zope 3’s Page Templates for the output of the web page, meaning you can completely stylize the output. The two templates included will offer reStructuredText or HTML output.
I’ve got a few last bits of tidying up to do before releasing it this weekend.
Everyone running Mac OS X 10.3 and above. Sorry, Jaguarians.
Some time between Panther and Tiger, the Python CoreGraphics bindings became more picky about Unicode strings. Where the PyObjC bridge wants Unicode Every Where Every Time, CoreGraphics apparently does not.
I’ve uploaded the next beta. Feedback always appreciated. Thumbscrew 1.0b4
This newest beta of Thumbscrew 1.0 offers a few new features (I know, I know, you’re not supposed to add new features during a beta…):
A rudimentary “base path” preference. It compares the directories of the thumbnail and resized original directories and provides any of their common ancestors as a base path. I say rudimentary, since it’s not quite there, but enough to get feedback on.
An optional suffix for the resized originals.
Thumbscrew can now accept pasted images, URLs, and filenames. Still rough around the edges (some default now to “Untitled”, for example, and it’s not using Command-V, it’s Command-Option-V), but we’ll get there.
It also fixes a now long-standing bug. Several of you had reported that changes to preferences weren’t being preserved or at least represented on subsequent runs. This is now fixed, so if you change prefs between batches, they’re reflected properly.
I’ve rebuilt Thumbscrew on my iMac running Panther, and verified that it runs and works on both platforms. Thumbscrew 1.0b5
