I had an interesting exchange of mails with Torsten talking about the direction gpuViewer is headed, and realised that there are two topics I should talk about a little: one is the Mac version and the other is multi-touch screens.
With Mac World 2008 just around the corner, it’s time for predictions too, and here goes mine: next week, Steve Jobs will not present multi-touch as a “one more thing”, it will be all over the place. Phone, laptop and desktop. Multi-touch interfaces are a revolution in the making, one of the scale of what the mouse has been. A few years from now, it will feel cumbersome to be confronted with a machine that doesn’t have it, pretty much like like it is the case today when working without a mouse. Why should this happen now? Not only because Apple has a head start, but because aggressively keeping the lead on this technology is the same strategy as the one aggressively pushing mouse-driven software in the old days.
I’m betting we’ll see a multi-touch cinema display, a multi-touch MacBook and maybe even a multi-touch tablet. And to go with this, a large amount of new SDK bits and pieces plus a massive call to action in the direction of developers.
Ok. It might not happen next week… I have no idea. But it will happen, and it will happen from Apple first: they’re the only who can cause massive adoption, as they control both hardware and software…
That’s one of the reasons why I’m not putting too much effort in the mac version now (the other being time…). gpuViewer is squarely aimed at being able to take maximum advantage of multi-touch when it comes. It will be easier to do this right if starting with a clean slate, with known guidelines and requirements from Apple, with hardware to play with…
This new version adds a long postponed feature: right-click now opens up the shell’s menu which enables you to do things with your files… At last
It also has a newer version of DCRaw and should support new cameras like Nikon D3, Nikon D300 or Canon 40D. I don’t have access to these cameras, so if people could let me know if the files are decoded correctly, I’d be grateful.
I’ve worked quite a bit on the data flow and things should behave better on Vista now (there were a lot of cases where Vista triggered its brutal Timeout Detection and Recovery). If you face a case where either Vista shows a “Driver stopped responding and was restarted” error or keeps resetting the screen until it goes BSOD, let me know in priority the circumstances that led to that. Fixing these is not only urgent, it also is a priority in order to streamline the user interface.
Go to the dowload area and download your version now!
Please, keep the feedback coming!
This release is really about fixing a problem with the installer that was carrying an out of date version of the D3DX runtime and missing the one actually needed.
See the post about v0.0.1.4 for the most recent changes applied.
Go to the dowload area and download your version now!
Keep the feedback coming. I’m particularly interested to know if there are still any startup problems around.
This addresses a few important issues:
- app stuck doing nothing at startup (failing to upload survey)
- recovery after ctrl-alt-del and other DirectX device lost situations
- Vista restarting the display when GPU use takes too long
- stats appearing as a black rectangle (when pressing TAB)
- many memory leaks
- some random bugs
A taste of the future is there, if you press the ‘M’ key…
I hope this addresses most of the issues people have been having so far…
Go to the dowload area and download your version now.
Please keep the feedback going, it is essential.
A new version is available that:
- fixes a crash bug when trying to parse some JPG files beyond their end (this is the cause of many startup crashes)
- fixes a second startup crash bug
- smoother wheel zoom
- wheel-zoom direction made to match the behaviour of apps like virtual earth
- zoom down to full image resolution without needing to switch to “photo view” mode
- reduced lag when reaching day level
- improved double-click zoom logic (improved but not perfect, mind you)
Known issues:
- can’t browse read-only media like DVDs (because index.vg can’t be created)
- on some platforms stats appear as a black rectangle (when pressing the “tab” key). This seems to be the case only on Windows Vista
- images without an embedded thumbnail aren’t imported
- some have reported the app doing nothing at startup, with one core 100% busy
- I have reports of gpuViewer crashing while adding records to the database, but haven’t found the cause yet
Go to the dowload area and download your version now.
And, please, don’t hesitate to give feedback by commenting on the blog or directly sending an email. It’s the only way to improve !
This is excellent news, Steve Jobs announcing an SDK for the IPhone. gpuViewer has been written with multi-touch screens in mind from the design stage, and this is a platform that I am really looking forwards to adding to the supported ones. Of course, the OSX version of gpuViewer is still lagging behind, as I am currently very busy with a contract that may keep me busy for a few more weeks, but there isn’t much more platform specific code to write, and once that’s done, I would expect development to become almost platform agnostic. I hope the iPhone SDK will provide enough access for a port!
When I think about being able to access my whole photo collection remotely via an iPhone, through the gpuViewer interface, I’m very excited!
PS: if anyone can help me get in the starting blocks early, please let me know!
The inquirer has just posted a very nice article about gpuViewer and, as a result, our server is being hit my many visitors. Hopefully, we have enough bandwidth available, but in case anyone experiences difficulties downloading our tech preview, well, I hope you’ll have the patience to retry at a later time.
Please, don’t hesitate to send feedback, even if it feels obvious to you. There is also a bunch of new features coming up so, subscribe to the feed and stay tuned…
PS: Having just relocated from London to Paris, I’m actually not looking at moving to the USofA
During the last three days, I was here in San Francisco, at Intel Developer Forum where the company presents its roadmap for the year to come and unveils some new products. One of the most impressive machines demonstrated was sporting the new high-performance Skulltrail motherboard fitted with two quadCore Penryn processors, and was overclocked to 4GHz. And one of the apps that was used to show it off was gpuViewer as can be seen at the end of the IDF report from DL.TV .
This was a great show and, aside from getting this fantastic exposure, there was also a lot to be learned which should translate into increased performance in gpuViewer down the line.
Tomorrow Intel Developer’s Forum starts for three days of information on what to expect this year. I’ll be splitting my time between showing gpuViewer to as many people as possible and trying to get as much information as possible…
I have posted the version I will be demoing in the download section. The main difference with the previous version is the way the direction keys work. Up and down still control zoom. Left and right now let you go between pictures: right goes to the next item, left to the previous. Practice this a little and then try ctrl-right and ctrl-left : they switch between groups instead of items.
I really need your comments, guys.
Coming up: integration with Microsoft’s Virtual Earth…
Posts RSS