New PhotoDesk upgrade revealed | Drobe.co.uk archives

New PhotoDesk upgrade revealed

Published: 18th Oct 2007, 18:13:54 | Permalink | Printable

Scan direct to PD and fixes for Iyonix users

Bitmap graphics package PhotoDesk has been updated and a new version will go on sale from this Saturday. The software has been improved and tweaked, and a new release is ready to ship at the South East show on October 20.

CJE boss Chris Evans confirmed: "There is a new version of PhotoDesk with various improvements and bugfixes. To get an update, PhotoDesk users should bring their original PhotoDesk CD with them to the show."

It's understood version 3.08 will allow punters to scan artwork directly into PhotoDesk via Twain and, for Iyonix users, selecting areas of an image is now much faster. In previous versions, selecting a portion of a picture with a 'marching ants' line bordering the selection would bring an Iyonix to a crawl. This code has reportedly been completely rewritten. An issue involving PhotoDesk using areas of 'high memory' on Iyonixes fitted with 1GB or more of RAM has also been addressed and fixed.

CJE Micros absorbed the PhotoDesk package in June 2004. After it was made 32bit-safe by David Ruck, development was taken over by DeskDebug author Niklaus Weiss.

Upgrades to the new version of PhotoDesk cost 20 quid. The South East show takes place in Guildford, Surrey, on Saturday October 20 from 10am. CJE Micros, who will be exhibiting at the event, will also be selling Iyonix compatible Sound Blaster PCI cards as well as their usual range of hardware and software products.

Links

CJE Micros website

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Discussion

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Funnily enough earlier today I spent some time slowing my Iyonix down to a crawl processing a panorama made from eight individual camera images at full resolution.

I will be giving CJE a call next week for an upgrade as this alone sounds like a worthwhile improvement. Now where on earth is that Photodesk CD?

blahsnr on 18/10/07 7:54PM
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Photodesk is an essential application for anyone who wants to use a digital camera with RISC OS. Great to see that it is in development again.

What features would users like to see added or improved in Photodesk?

stevek on 19/10/07 6:55AM
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The crawling ants problem would make any cut and paste larger than a couple of pixels take forever, now you can happy c&p your 7mPix camera images. The removal of the high DA means it will always run, no matter what other apps you've got going. Nik has also done a great job of removing dozens of other smaller bugs.

druck on 19/10/07 8:51AM
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It looks like a terific piece of software.

[link]

I wonder if it would be possible to have a play around with it at the show tomorrow ?

martin on 19/10/07 12:32PM
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If only my digital camera and my car hadn't both died within the last week my £20 would be winging its way to CJE now. Maybe my wife will buy it for me for Christmas.

cables on 19/10/07 12:47PM
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Thanks a lot Niklaus Weiss!

For all who do not know, Niklaus Weiss is the Swiss RISC OS user who took over Photodesk and during the recent past fixed quite a few problems and made the app run nicely on an IYONIX pc - and he doesn't even own an IYONIX pc. Helping him as beta tester was interesting and fun.

As far as I understood for Niklaus the initial task was to really understand the inner workings of the code to then be able to tackle with the bugs as well as the issues which arose with 32 bit and more memory. I dare say that now that he got Photodesk be fully 32bit and lots of issues and bugs fixed the next obvious step would be to add new features...

Here's a suggestion: Offer some plug in interface for filters etc. so that others can add features too.

hzn on 20/10/07 8:05AM
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Well done Nik. There are still a lot of Photodesk users out there, Chris Evans ran out of upgrade CDs at the show, which can't be a bad sign.

druck on 24/10/07 8:44AM
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hzn: "Here's a suggestion: Offer some plug in interface for filters etc. so that others can add features too."

This request confuses me a bit because PhotoDesk already has a plug-in interface. Otherwise, how would you explain that PhotoDesk Ltd. sold two CDs with extra plug-ins? Nowadays, I believe that these are supplied as standard (e.g., the Lens effect).

wuerthne on 24/10/07 4:27PM
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There is a very powerful plug-in interface, but its never been sufficiently documented to allow anyone other than the original author write plug-ins for it. This is one of the first things I talked to Nik about when handing it over after the 32bit port, now he has gotten to know the program via all the bug fixing, he is better placed to be able to document the plug-in API. I hope to see a plug-in SDK similar to the one CC produced for Artworks, and we all know what happened when a talented programmer got his hands on that!

druck on 24/10/07 4:46PM
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