Revision History

This document summarizes differences between versions of PhoA in reverse chronological order.

PhoA 1.1.2

[Feb 07, 2004]

New interface languages: German (by Dominik Mayer) and Brazilian Portuguese (by Cesar Boschetti). Now PhoA supports 4 languages!
Background decoding thread's priority has been lowered. The result is that the picture already decoded is displayed significantly faster.
A stupid memory leak removed - the background decoding thread didn't terminate when viewing is finished.
Search by picture dimensions bugs fixed. Searching the file mask now checks just the file's name, not its full path.

PhoA 1.1.1b

[Sep 17, 2003]

New options for trees/lists: Incremental search on typing and Incremental search cleanup delay.
In the Picture properties dialog the first control on the page gets focused automatically.
Changes to Picture properties | Metadata: description panel, metatag code is now displayed.
Changes to Picture properties | View: wheel scaling is fixed.
Changes to Picture properties | Keywords: Checked only switch; new keywords are painted navy only when not highlighted.
Changes to Picture properties | Groups: speeded up the first time display.
An attempt made to fix font displaying in both Unicode- and non-Unicode-systems for various codepages/charsets.
Dialogs have been changed. Fixed large system font issues.
EXIF-tags list has been expanded, many tags have got descriptions.
Support for "non-regular" metatags: Unicode (WinXP-tags), Versions etc.
Fixed issue with PhoA denied to open 0.x version photo albums.
Fixed view mode bug: predecoding malfunctioned.
Fixed search bug: date, time and keyword searches were not working properly.
Fixed some memory leaks.
Minor changes.

PhoA 1.1.1a

[Sep 08, 2003]

Photo album file format changed - now it is very expandable and meant not to be changed frequently.
Modifications to folder tree appearance:
- Views toolbar has been removed. Instead of it there is now a dropdown button beside the photo album node invoking views menu.
- Pictures are now can be placed directly to the photo album node, having no group created.
- Number of images is displayed beside the group name.
- Altered Drag'n'Drop functioning: to insert a node as a sibling of another node (above or below), you'll have to drag the node to the free area on the right side of nodes, and then the insertion point is drawn as a line. To make a node a child of another node you drag this node right over the target node, then the target node gets highlighted. There's no more Shift button used (i mean while dragging ;)
- When a node is being dragged the target node expands if you leave mouse over the target for a time. Also when mouse rests near the top or bottom edge (while dragging) the group tree starts to scroll.
- Cosmetic changes (root items are drawn bold, Drag'n'Drop uses blended source folder image etc.)
- Lists are adjustable.
Picture adding and editing have been completely separated. The goal was to remove compromises in the interface. Pictures are always being added with the defaults, you may edit them afterwards.
Changes to the Add pictures dialog:
- The dialog became the wizard. On the first stage you select picture files and/or folder, on the second one you may exactly determine which files are to be added.
- When adding pictures you can filter them by photo album presence, by name or extension, by date/time file modified.
- Picture addition is performed in the separate thread which has improved the response to user actions.
- Addition process is being logged, the log can be saved to a text file.
Fully functional support for JPEG-image metadata EXIF 2.1 - data placed to image files by almost any digicam as well as by modern graphic editors. Metadata can be used for filling some picture properties.
Many changes to Edit pictures dialog. In a nutshell:
- Dialog became multipaged.
- File properties page allows you to view file properties info.
- Metadata page displays all the EXIF data contained in JPEG files.
- View page enables file viewing for any selected file.
- Data page is just a thing that was Edit pictures dialog + new properties.
- Keywords page allows you to modify keyword list by adding, removing and editing single keywords for any number of pictures at once.
- Groups page shows photo album group tree in which you can easily determine groups pictures belong to, or change these belongings.
Program settings were extended aloud.
You may now reorder pictures inside group using Drag'n'Drop (in the thumbnails pane).
Views now support automated sorting the pictures inside each group.
Thumbnail pane always selects the first thumbnail by default.
Undo history dialog has been removed: now you can undo any number of changes by clicking the dropdown button near the Undo toolbar button or with Edit | Undo history submenu.
All other trees displaying picture groups also have been altered - now they all look like the main tree.
The status bar displays the total number of distinct pictures in the photo album.
Local toolbar in the view mode.
Enhanced support for XP themes in toolbars and the thumbnail pane.
Lots of fixes, minor changes and new bugs.

PhoA 1.0.2a

[Jun 02, 2003]

By a lot of complaints against thumbnail quality there's resampling filtering option to eliminate shrinked picture's fuzziness. Possible filters are: Nearest Neighbor, Linear, B-spline (bicubic), Lanczos, Mitchell. As a side effect, owing to some smoothing of the thumbnail, its size (because of JPEG-compression) reduced by 10 thru 25% (eg, when using B-spline interpolation the decrease is 20-25%).
Significantly increased speed of rescaling and scrolling pictures. In the view mode you can also choose any of the resampling filters listed above.
Added option for decoding pictures in background: a separate thread is responsible for decoding the next picture while you are watching current one. This technique minimizes time required to advance to the next picture (but requires more memory).
Added option for caching-behind viewed pictures, which minimizes time to rewind to the previous picture (but also takes more memory).
The support for .gif files was not included. Fixed.
Added support for .msk (Paint Shop Pro mask), .tub (Paint Shop Pro picture tube), .pfr (Paint Shop Pro picture frame) file formats.
View info painting is completely changed. Now information is always positioned over the picture, optionally on a translucent background, and you can visually position information bar.
In multimonitor systems dialog windows were mispositioned. Fixed.

PhoA 1.0.1a

[May 17, 2003]

Huge number of differences resulted in program version and time taken to release it.

Views! Completely new picture arranging algorithm. Now you can classify a heap of pictures into folders with minimum efforts. The only requirement is that pictures' properties are properly filled. Possible grouping conditions are: by picture file path, by date (in various ways), by place, by keywords etc. Groupings may be cascaded, ie may be applied one by one, number of groupings is a matter of sanity. The result of the grouping (folder tree along with their pictures) may be easily put into any photo album group, and after then you can tweak them in usual way.
Photo album file (.phoa) format has been changed. Photo album files since version 1.0.1a contain views' data, and they are incompatible with the earlier PhoA versions. The program also supports saving files in PhoA 0.x format, which is choosed while saving the file (File | Save as...); accordingly, in this case views are not saved.
Sorting now can be performed by any number of criteria; it is organized in the similar way as views' groupings. The list of sorting criteria has been significantly extended.
You can now tweak thumbnail tooltips in Browse mode; you can choose which details are displayed.
Picture info in View mode is now also more adjustable.
Three options on toolbar buttons size (small/middle/large).
Massively extended support for picture file formats. Now almost all possible formats are supported (briefly: Windows bitmap (BMP, RLE, DIB), OS/2 bitmap, TIFF, GFI fax, SGI, Autodesk, Truevision Targa, ZSoft Paintbrush, Word 5.x, Kodak Photo-CD, Portable pixel/gray map, Dr. Halo CUT, CompuServe GIF, SGI Wavefront, Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Portable network graphic PNG; for details refer to the file formats discussion).
New algorithms for keyword processing (keywords containing spaces and/or commas are to be quoted; when selecting them from the list such keywords are quoted automatically; keywords are no longer converted to lowercase in the Select keywords dialog, though keywords are still compared case-insensitively).
A number of minor fixes (including fixed Access Violation in some cases while browsing).

PhoA 0.10 beta

[Jan 09, 2003]

The fully operational undo engine is built into PhoA.
New button "Add all" in the Add picture dialog, allowing unconditional addition of all picture files selected (using defaults).
Clipboard functionality implemented (cut, copy, paste).
Minor fixes (Browse mode; photo album stats).

PhoA 0.03

[Oct 20, 2002]

Completely bilingual version (English & Russian), including Setup program and Help System files.
Implemented Slide Show mode.
Minor changes.

PhoA 0.02b

[Sep 06, 2002]

The first public release.