LiView - Lydie's image Viewer

Version 1.2 (August 1998) for BeOS R3

by Philippe Thomas.

I. INTRODUCTION

LiView is an image viewer of a special kind since it displays a palette containing little representation of bigger pictures (thumbnails), aligned in a grid. By this mean, you've got all pictures on screen and you can easily choose which one to display.

It is possible to organize the thumbnails as you like on the palette, and to save it. You can have as many opened palettes as available memory.

When a big picture is displayed, LiView offers a zoom mode, where the entire picture is zoomed to fit the current window size. It's fine when you want to see everything of a very big picture.

II. USAGE

The use of LiView is simple and intuitive.

LiView can be launched from the Browser or from the Shell. In both cases, it tries to open palettes and pictures given in parameter. In the case of a directory, LiView will browse this directory recursively and open every palettes or pictures found.

A) The palette

To create a thumbnail, you just drag a picture file in a box onto the palette. If the box wasn't empty, the new picture replaces the old one.

To change the position of a thumbnail, you simply drag it on another box while keeping the Shift key pressed. You can move thumnails across palettes with this method too. To remove a picture, use the contextual menu on the thumbnail (right mouse button or Control + left mouse button).

Use the contextual menu on a thumbnail to display the picture or to obtain information about it. Of course, there is a shortcut to display a picture : just try to click on it !

Tab and Shift-Tab allow to navigate through thumbnails. The Enter or Space key displays the active picture.

Every palette have the following menu :

File
- New : creates a new palette :
  You can give the name of the palette, the number and the size of thumbnails, and the following options :
  - Save thumbnails with the palette : adds the thumbnails into the save file so they don't need to be generated from source on the next opening. That improves seriously the loading time of a palette ;
  - Display pictures in zoom-mode ;
  - Display file name on thumbnails.
  The 'Save as default' button saves the current values as default values, used when LiView is launched with an empty palette.
- Open : opens a previously saved palette.
- Save / Save as : saves the palette.
- Config : configures the palette. This is the same config window as with the New option.
- Close : closes the palette window.
- Quit : quits LiView.
Pictures
- Display all : displays all pictures of the palette.
- Close all : closes all opened pictures.
- Remove all : empties the palette from all it's thumbnails.

B) The picture

When a picture is displayed, you can resize the window : the scroll- bars allow to scroll inside the picture. You can also move the picture by moving the mouse while clicking on it.

The contextual menu (right mouse button or Control + left mouse button) allows to display the palette (useful when it's hidden below many windows), to save the picture in another format or to enter the zoom mode.

In zoom mode, when the window is resized, all the picture is resized to fit the new size. The scroll-bars are disabled. Moreover, you can zoom in by clicking on the picture. You can zoom out by Shift or Control clicking on the picture.

The zoom button in the window's title bar places the window optimally on the screen. In zoom mode, it resizes the window so the picture ratio is kept.

The Escape key closes the window.

III. CONTACTING THE AUTHOR

If you want to report bugs or ask for new features, you can contact me at the following address : tphilippe@sdv.fr

or via my Web page : http://w3dess-info.u-strasbg.fr/~thomasp/projets_be.html

IV. THANKS

I want to thank :

Lydie, my wife, for giving me the idea of LiView with all of her Jim Kerr and Bruce Willis pictures ;
Pierre Brua, for the beautiful icons, for the x86 port and some great ideas ;
Pascal Caillaud, for his suggestions ;
Simon Clarke, for all those cool handlers, and for some testing and ideas ;
Edmund Vermeulen, for the progressive picture decoding and output format window code, and for some testing ;
Rainer Riedl, for some beta testing ;
Jon Watte, for making the Datatype library and the Translation Kit ;
Thorsten Seitz, for the Thumbnail library ;
Brian Tietz, for the Santa's gift bag ;
everyone who helped ...