ImageSizer, now.

ImageSizer is now up to version 0.6.1 – not that the version numbers are anything but arbitrary, of course.  You can import images, rotate them, crop them and resize the lot and output them to your machine.  It works, but the code is a little out of date now, my code-signing certificates are out of date, and I really want to try something new.  So…

ImageSizer, future.

Time to create ImageSizer, version 2.  Going for a full re-write on the code side of things means I’m going to try one cool thing – a desktop version and a web-based version.  The reason for the desktop version is obvious, but having a web-based version should make the functionality behind ImageSizer available for people who can’t (or don’t want to) install the desktop application.  Plus, trial version, and that sort of thing.

A newer code-base will also make it easier to build all of the new features into ImageSizer – there’s a few suggestions and ideas that never made it to the first version before development slacked off, so those are first on the to-do list.  Things like the long-awaited Twitter and Flickr uploads, and multiple output sizes.

So, enough chit-chat. ImageSizer 2 development is underway now, and there should be some more updates on the way.

And also…

As my code-signing certificates all went out of date, it makes it a little difficult for the automatic updates to keep everyone up to date.  The application source code is incompatible with the latest version of the Flex SDK, I want to re-architect the application source, and I think that the interface needs a complete re-think to integrate some of the newer application features.

Of course, you can still download ImagesSizer through the AIR Marketplace.

Individual files output

“Hey, that sounds like a good idea.”

ImageSizer initially started as a batch image resizer, and still is, but it seems a little over-restrictive to only be able to export files in a folder or compressed archive.  So now we have an individual files output panel.  Tacked onto the previous encoding output screen is a new option in the top left corner, labelled “Individual file export options” (perhaps that needs rephrasing).  Click that and the view will shift, showing you a list of the files that’ve just been resized, so you can grab individual files, instead of a single folder.

It seems to work well for what I often want ImageSizer to be able to do when I’m using it day-to-day, so that’s what prompted this option!  That, and trying to figure out how to introduce the long-awaited ‘Upload to Twitter’ option.  (Not available yet, but coming very soon!)

Image rotation

Image rotation!  Ok, at the moment it’s a limited 90-degree step rotation, but I’m sure that’s useful for a lot of situations.  Images can easily be rotated using the buttons illustrated in the image above.

A Splash Screen.

It hasn’t been easy developing ImageSizer, and as a result – I’m sad to say – it hasn’t always been smooth sailing.  My tendency to finish coding in the wee hours of the morning and immediately release exciting new things can often be blamed for the introduction of new issues.  ImageSizer has had its fair share of bugs, and those bugs tended to focus on the startup processes of the application, which makes an application Splash Screen sound like a good idea.  At least this way you can see the application is running, even if it hangs a bit while it fetches your settings.

Performance, memory usage, and Alchemy.

Oh yes.  This is the biggie, but it’s one of those things that no-one really notices. It’s the main reason development on ImageSizer might’ve been seen to come to a halt.  I actually ended up spending over two months (well, my evenings for two months) rewriting just about everything – this time actually doing such things as Profiling the application, removing memory leaks and cutting down on the general memory footprint.

Being an image-resizing application, ImageSizer needs to take a certain chunk of memory when it’s working, but the difference between the latest versions and the earlier versions is that it will now not only give the memory back to the system, but will also try and cap the amount of memory it uses, without impeding performance.  ’Course I never took a benchmark at the start, but I assure you, it runs much better now!

Alchemy?

Goodbye ASyncJPEGEncoder, you served us well.  Unfortunately, Alchemy-powered JPEG encoders trump you hands down.  I’m a novice at this stuff still, but I can at least follow tutorials and examples (I love you, Flash developer community!).  So ImageSizer’s JPEG encoding is now done by an Alchemy encoder, which encodes your images anywhere between 4 and 100 times faster than the previous code, achieves a smaller file size on average, and retains the other settings, like the original Metadata.  Once we got that working, there was no contest.

The only thing lacking at the moment is progress messages from the encoder, but I figure we can live with that until I get better at this Alchemy malarky.  Most of the time the delay in encoding is minimal, I just need to make the encoding progress screen a little more pretty.

Anything else?

It’s also been written in PureMVC, so hopefully that structured development approach will help make it easier for me to develop more features in the future.

And of course I’m always looking to make the application more useful, even if we’re not talking about new features.  A few visual elements have been tweaked, and the interface is moving to be more dynamic.  Most noticeable is probably the ouput settings panel on the first page, which has been split a little into a tabbed layout, or the options for the System Tray Icon, the Dock Menu, or the Screenshot detection and naming formats.  Doesn’t sound very exciting, but all of these are either more intelligent in what they display (and thus, more useful) or are more customisable, to suit the users’ requirements.

GetSatisfaction

Oh yes.  I’ve set up a community-powered support page on GetSatistfaction.com/ImageSizer.

ImageSizer version 0.4.12.4 is available on the AIR Marketplace and via the automatic update framework. Much to my dismay ImageSizer version 0.4.12 went out into the wild with some showstopping bugs, and it’s taken a long time for me to devote enough time to hunting them down and fixing them. Version 0.4.12.4 should finally kill off that bug – namely because I’ve managed to work out what it was. (I’ll get to that in a moment.)

If you’ve tried to use ImageSizer and found that it didn’t work then I apologise, and encourage you to download the latest version of ImageSizer from the AIR Marketplace and give it another shot! I’ve improved my pre-release testing process and am in the process of refactoring the internal code – which should both stop bugs like this from occuring again and also improve the extensibility of ImageSizer and make everything faster and a little more robust!

So, what happened?

• Version 0.4.12 changed the installation directory – which meant people who used the Automatic Update framework to upgrade had problems – source files for the application were pointing to invalid directories.  To be honest, this was flawed code that caused this issue as much as anything else.

  Why it was so bad: The errors occured in the startup process of ImageSizer, and threw an Error. The Flash Player (and Adobe AIR) just stops if it encounters an error. End result – the application crashed before it loaded, and therefore did *sweet-f-a*.

• In my haste to fix this issue, I added some code to catch these loading errors.  Which unfortunately means that the Automatic Updates won’t work for minor versions 0.4.12 – 0.4.12.2 (which unfortunately covers quite a few people).
• Version 0.4.12 – 0.4.12.3 have some issues with the configuration files – typos in the source code meant that they would never successfully create an application configuration file to remember users’ settings, and would enter an infinate loop. (Uh oh).

  Why it was so bad: Again, it was another showstopper – at least for the first run process.  The first time the application ran, it tried and failed to load a configuration file.  Unfortunately the rest of the startup process was tied to the configuration file, so again ImageSizer was never able to startup.

Optional custom chrome:

Introduced as a part of our bid to follow ‘application best practice’, you can now enable or disable the custom chrome and window transition effects.  There’s plus sides to both custom and native OS chromes, but the point is that it’s always nice to let you choose!  The native OS chrome has better integration and performance than a custom chrome, but doesn’t always look quite so nice – and can’t have the same funky window window transitions.  It’s also going to be more consistent with the window chrome of other desktop applications, and gives you a noticeable performance boost on lower spec machines.

You can turn the custom chrome on and off in the Application Settings window, under ‘Visual effects’.  By default the custom chrome is turned off – you’ll have to go back into the settings panel to turn it on again.

Clipboard data detection / import:

Wouldn’t it be good if you could just take a screenshot, and output that as an image?  Well, here’s a new feature – any bitmap image data that is put in the OS clipboard can be detected by ImageSizer.  So, pressing the Print Screen button will now open a new little window (shown above) that will allow you to import the clipboard data as a separate image, and then crop it (if you wish) just like a normal image.

Improved Google Analytics tracking:

The AIR Marketplace tells us that (the the time of writing) we’ve had over 2700 downloads of ImageSizer through them, and our server download logs put the figure much higher – but nothing really helps distinguish between downloads, installations and upgrades.  So, we’ve added some improvements to the integrated application tracking.  We can now tell when the application is installed afresh and when it’s upgraded, and also what versions are installed or upgraded.

Not massively exciting I know, but useful for us.  And I’ll be doing a tutorial or posting some information about the techniques used sometime in the future.

Other tweaks and improvements:

Those are the ‘keynotes’ for this new version of ImageSizer.  While this has all been under development we’ve also fixed a few other minor things, namely:

Crop window improvements

Crop information is now editable – you can type new figures into the box to manually change the dimensions of the crop reticle.  Previously this was not editable.  So if you need to easily get your images to an exact size, this is for you!

And how about what’s planned for the future?

Oh, future plans.  We think up new ideas faster than we can get around to them.  Here’s some of the stuff we’re planning to introduce very soon…

• Folder imports – we’re going to introduce a mechanism for importing folders of images, rather than having to select images individually.
• Browse for folder – instead of restricting users to just a drag and drop interface, we’re going to introduce other methods for importing files.
• System Tray / Dock icons – extended features and support for these icons.
• Performance settings – making them more configurable.
• and a few more grandiose plans…

It’s all fixed now, but if you’ve sent feedback or have a burning comment to make then please, send it again. (And sorry for the trouble.)

I’m planning on a few further updates for ImageSizer soon, to make this process a little better…