Added an article about putting an Iyonix in a new case.

Here’s PrivateEye 2.99 with a selection of small-ish changes:

• Rebuilt from the open source codebase for ARMv7 compatibility.
• PrivateEye is now licensed under a BSD license.
• Improved the blur effect. You can now select box or gaussian blurs with up to a 47 pixel radius.
• ‘Midpoint’ curve effect added.
• FFG (TransFSI, TranTIFF+, etc.) import improved.
• libjpeg updated to version 8c.
• Image cache can go up to 256M.
• Wider range of default scale values.
• and various other bits and pieces.

I've been working on a C library called Containers. This implements various different associative array structures, such as arrays, linked lists, binary search trees, tries and crit-bit trees. It's now hosted on github.

Also, I've made some small-ish tweaks to the site:

• The slides on the ARM training pages now have a background box with rounded corners and shadows where available.
• There's a nice new footer at the bottom of every page on the site.

I’ve noticed in the site’s logs that people were occasionally arriving here after searching for the source code to PrivateEye. I'd not generally made its source available as the people who had previously asked for it had received it, then they went all quiet. I presumed that was a bad sign.

PhotoFiler has previously had its source released but not one bit of feedback came of that. Presumably it’s perfect.

I've uploaded the source code to both PhotoFiler and PrivateEye to riscos.info's subversion server.

• The PhotoFiler source lives here (svn://) or here for the web-based repository viewer.
• The PrivateEye source live here (svn://) or here for the web-based repository viewer.

Now I would like to carry on beavering away on both utilities but, to be honest, the Iyonix doesn't get switched on that much these days. I have grand things planned, with image tagging, tag clouds, thumbnails, searching and magical flying ponies called Geoff. All of that work in in the released source but it's not in anywhere near a useful state.

Enjoy!

• New site design.
• New ARM assembly language section featuring two ARM training courses.

Toolbar 1.21 fixes a crash on RISC OS 6.

After a mere decade's hiatus here's Toolbar 1.20 with a few tweaks.

• The toolbar now opens and closes independently of desktop speed. So if a greedy process is hogging your desktop, the toolbar will now unfurl and retract in the same amount of time.
• You can have multiple toolbars, if you fire off multiple instances (it'll use different choices files and position itself independently).
• The !RunImage is no longer squashed.

Geminus, the Iyonix graphics accelerator, has been re-released as a free download. Its sprite caching provides a substantial speedup for PhotoFiler and its JPEG acceleration greatly benefits PrivateEye.

PrivateEye 2.85 with enhanced transparency and PNG support.

Sprites and PNGs may specify an alpha channel to hold transparency information. PrivateEye can now recognise and display these images using the Tinct module.

Transparent images can be displayed against a checkerboard pattern background.

The effect system now knows about alpha channel data and always preserves it. The curve effect has been upgraded to allow editing of the alpha data.

All these changes are mainly in aid of enhanced PNG support. Now all of the images in PngSuite can be loaded and displayed.

PhotoFiler is now freeware and includes the source code.

PrivateEye 2.75 with JPEG metadata support.

The big new feature in this version is interpretation of JPEG metadata, one example of which is Exif data. The new version of PrivateEye can decode and present this data in a treeview, so you can view (but not edit) the information stored by digital cameras and image processing applications. It also supports Adobe, IPTC-NAA and JFIF COM data.

The other new feature is caching. PrivateEye can allocate an amount of memory in which to preserve recently-loaded images. This saves time when flipping back and forth between files.

I've also made the 'Convert to Sprite' function for JPEGs more accessible, which makes using the histogram and effects system more convenient.

PrivateEye 2.50 had a bug which could stop the effects window working on any OS earlier than RISC OS 4. I was calling Wimp_AutoScroll which didn't exist up until WindowManager 4.00.

Bug fix release 2.51, now available, fixes the problem and also tidies up some vanishing icons in the templates.

PrivateEye 2.50 has effects!

Features:

• Bitmap effects
  New bitmap effects window allows adjustment of brightness, contrast, gamma, tinting, blurring, sharpening, histogram-based adjustments and more.
• Editing awareness
  PrivateEye now knows when you've edited images.
• Histogram
  The histogram window has been freed from the menu structure and can now show you the individual histograms for red, green and blue.
• PhotoCheck
  Brought across from PhotoFiler, this OS patch enables the versions of SpriteExtend in RISC OS 3.6, 3.7 and 4.0x to cope with a greater range of JPEGs.
• Customisable keymap
  You can now redefine or supplement the standard key mappings.

The new PrivateEye 2.00 is ready!

Features:

• Viewer windows gain input focus.
  Many key-activated functions have been added.
• Viewer windows can fill the whole desktop.
  The image is shown centered within the viewer.
• Rotation.
  Sprites and JPEGs can now be transformed with any combination of 90 degree rotations and horizontal flips. JPEG transformations are lossless.
• Progressive JPEGs can now be loaded and displayed.
  JPEGs are now integrity checked when loaded. If they fail the check, they're passed through an internal version of jpegtran.
• New views.
  You can now have multiple views open on the same image.
• Luminance histogram window.
• & more... smooth scrolling, movement through files, Tinct support, autofiletype, FFG support, fit to screen, fit to window, shiny new sprites, all-new PDF manual, ...

• http://delicious.com/dpt – My social bookmarks. Mainly C, graphics programming and bit twiddles.

If you have any suggestions for improving these pages you can email me at dave at davespace dot co dot uk.