gBrowser Help: Version History
Note: Check out the to-do list on the web site for the most recent information.
To do
- IPTC info viewing/editing? I'm not sure how difficult this would be, and since I'd likely never use it myself I probably won't try it unless I get many responses in favor of it.
- Ditto the above with EXIF.
- Automatic resizing of filename editing fields as needed.
- Make an option for giving image files thumbnail icons.
- Add ability to make contact sheets.
- More toolbar items (feel free to tell me if you want something specific!).
- Add "Open with", "Move to", and "Move to Trash" options within the slideshows and Image Viewer.
- Click and drag to move an image around in the slideshows and Image Viewer.
- Batch renaming of files.
- Improve the ability to filter certain types of files out of the preview pane/file list.
- Change/improve the preferences to make things more clear and understandable.
- Add a setup wizard or something to help first-time users.
- Plug-in support.
1.5 beta 20 (September 23, 2002)
New Features:
- You can now command-click and drag to scroll in image windows, the Image Viewer, slideshows, and the preview pane (though in the preview pane you must hold the option key as well unless you are clicking in "empty" space).
- Low quality on-the-fly thumbnail generation is now threaded, so the app should feel much more responsive now if you're using this mode (particularly with large files).
- Added an option (in the file list setup section of the prefs) to display the number of folders and total files in a directory next to its name in the file list. Be forwarned this might slow down the initial display of the file list, especially if you have folders containing very large numbers of files.
- Added an option (in the file list appearance section of the prefs) to control the spacing of the lines in the file list.
- Added an option (in the preview pane appearence section) to control the color of the thumbnail shadow.
- Added an option (in the preview pane information section; yes, not the best place... a prefs revamp is coming soon) to control whether or not to edit file names when the name is clicked on (you can set it to edit file names only when you press enter when the file is selected; some people have requested this after accidentally starting filename edits too often).
- Added the same option for the file list in the file list setup section.
- In when using manual thumbnail generation or the resource fork stripper, the progress bar is now an animated indeterminate progress bar while gBrowser searches for image files (instead of sitting there blank and useless, as they did before).
- You can now have more than one instance of the thumbnail generator and resource fork stripper.
- The resource fork stripper should now be a good deal faster (not that that was a problem before) and will give you an estimated time until completion (but it is so fast that unless you're stripping thousands of files you won't have time to see that!).
- Both the thumbnail generator and resource fork stripper now have a "review files" button that you can use to review/edit which files will be affected.
- Both the thumbnail generator and resource fork stripper can now be closed by pressing the escape key.
- The "random" option for the slideshow has been changed a bit; it is now just a regular sort option instead of a separate option. Also, you can now navigate back and forth through the random slides.
- Optimized and improved quite a few other sections of code.
Bugs Fixed:
- When turning off automatic thumbnail generation, the status bar gets updated immediately instead of continuing to say "Generating thumbnail for XXX" until something else caused a change.
- Added formatters and warning sheets to the text fields in the preferences panes (in case invalid values are entered), because it appears that at some point the ones that used to be there were deleted form the nib files. When, why, and how that happened I have no idea!
- I think the nasty crasher caused by automatic thumbnail generation has been fixed (finally!). In case anyone cares, the crashes were caused because something was mucking with memory it shouldn't have been accessing. All was well (on my system anyway) once I changed the way I initialized the CFMutableArrayRef I was using to queue the files to be generated (using [[NSMutableArray alloc] init...] instead of CFArrayCreateMutable()). Why this made any difference I still have NO idea, but since it seems to have fixed it I'm not going to complain ;-).
Known bugs:
- Selecting folders in the toolbar may act oddly or incorrectly sometimes.
- I am now running OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and should gBrowser seems to work fine on that version of the OS. However, this means I'm doing little testing in 10.1, and while there shouldn't be any problems I'm not making any promises there.
1.5 beta 19 (September 16, 2002)
New Features:
- The image viewer and the slideshow now use high quality image scaling, but not while the image is being resized (it shifts temporarily to low quality for speed purposes, then redraws with high quality after, much like the Jaguar version of Apple's Preview app).
- Modified certain bits of code to use FSFindFolder() to find certain folders (ie. the prefs folder and the pictures folder) instead of assuming they will always be at a certain path (this will have no effect right now, but in the future if Apple ever moves things around gBrowser should still function properly).
- Image information (such as dimensions, resolution, etc.) for aliases to images is now displayed when appropriate instead of "N/A".
Bugs Fixed:
- Double-clicking a single folder in the preview pane should properly select it in the file list and preview its contents in the preview pane again.
- Fixed a bug that would cause gBrowser to crash while quitting if you quit when a slideshow was in progress.
- The file list sort and preview pane sort popups in the preferences now work properly for all options.
- Fixed some memory leaks and miscellaneous little crashers caused by an incorrect assumption I made about NSTimers (due to improper documentation, actually... thanks again Apple).
- The reverse file list sort and reverse preview pane sort options now work correctly (and save correctly).
- Fixed a problem where files wouldn't load or update in the file list if they were chidren of an aliased folder.
- Rewrote the thumbnail generation code (what is this, the third time? ;-) so hopefully any remaining bugs have been fixed.
- When the generic icons option is turned off in the file list, the icons no longer appear upside down some of the time.
Known bugs:
- Selecting folders in the toolbar may act oddly or incorrectly sometimes.
- I am now running OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and should gBrowser seems to work fine on that version of the OS. However, this means I'm doing little testing in 10.1, and while there shouldn't be any problems I'm not making any promises there.
1.5 beta 18 (September 7, 2002)
New Features:
- Changes you make to your slideshow settings through the slideshow controller while a slideshow is in progress are now by default saved as your permanent settings when you close the slideshow, though you can turn this off in the slideshow prefs.
- The document preferences windows now update their titles when the document's name changes.
- As in the OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) Finder, when you drag files over folders in the preview pane, they will change to an "open folder" icon (but sorry, no spring-loaded folders here ;-).
- The computer icon has been updated to the new-iMac look, to match the icon used in Jaguar.
- When editing file names in the file list, the default selection now excludes the file extension (this feature was added to the preview pane a couple releases ago).
Bugs Fixed:
- Fixed a stupid accidental memory release that was causing crashing when background loading was turned off.
- The "eject" contextual menu command now gets validated properly in the preview pane (before, it would show up in the contextual menu when it should but it would be greyed out).
- Cocoa's NSPort apparently loses interthread messages if there is too much load on the computer, which sometimes resulted in some files never appearing in the preview pane when background loading was on. I worked around this, so that shouldn't happen anymore.
- Some code has been cleaned up and/or rewritten, hopefully squashing a few bugs in the process.
- Various bugs in the slideshow have been fixed: the show/hide controller menu item now works right, the file name displayed on the controller now updates properly, the play/pause button is set properly if you have the automatic-advance setting on in your document preferences, the slideshow window now floats properly above everything in OS X 10.2 (status menus were showing up above it), the filename position setting works properly now, and the filename appears correctly for the first image, and more.
Known bugs:
- Selecting folders in the toolbar may act oddly or incorrectly sometimes.
- I am now running OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and should gBrowser seems to work fine on that version of the OS. However, this means I'm doing little testing in 10.1, and while there shouldn't be any problems I'm not making any promises there.
1.5 beta 17 (September 3, 2002)
New Features:
- There is now an option for threaded background loading of files from disk - this is on by default, but you can turn it off in the app prefs (under the "launch" section), though the change won't take effect until the next time you launch gBrowser. This will probably (hopefully!) improve your feel of how responsive the app is, especially if you have folders with many hundreds (or more) files. Be ware this is the first time I've tried this, and it won't be perfect...
- When selecting a single image file in the file list and viewing it in the preview pane, your Image Viewer preferences are now used to specify the initial display of the image (and a related bug introduced in beta 16 has been fixed).
- When using the arrow keys on the keyboard to navigate through items in the preview pane, it will no longer wrap around from beginning to end and vice versa. You can hold the control key while pressing the arrows to wrap around if necessary.
- Made changes to the preferences anywhere file paths are displayed (ie. the file list base folder pref) to support the new localization of folder names in OS X 10.2 (Jaguar). Unfortunately this means I had to remove the ability to type in paths by hand, because while in 10.2 some folders (such as the Library and Documents folders) appear to have localized names to the user, to the system itself their names are still the English versions, and this will cause confusion and errors if someone were to try typing the name they see in the Finder for one of these folders (thanks Apple).
- Made a few changes that should improve performance in some areas.
Bugs Fixed:
- Files added to a folder that was initially empty and is currently being displayed in the preview pane no longer have odd, incorrect display sizes.
- The bug that was causing random crashes in beta 16 has been fixed as far as I can tell, but since I had trouble reproducing that bug, I can't be completely sure. Please tell me if it crops up again.
- A bug introduced in beta 16 that messed up the resolving of alias files is fixed.
- Localizable.strings file has been properly UTF-8 encoded so that there shouldn't be any complaints about it logged to the console in OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) when gBrowser launches.
- Some changes have been made so the height of the rows in the file list is calculated properly in Jaguar.
Known bugs:
- Selecting folders in the toolbar may act oddly or incorrectly sometimes.
- I am now running OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and should gBrowser seems to work fine on that version of the OS. However, this means I'm doing little testing in 10.1, and while there shouldn't be any problems I'm not making any promises there.
1.5 beta 16 (August 19, 2002)
New Features:
- Rewrote the slideshow and Image Viewer code, and the image window code; this fixed some bugs and hopefully will make things work better in general. The scrolling hot keys now work in image windows.
- Improved the thumbnail background-loading code (now it's faster) and made that the only option (so I guess I shouldn't say "option" ;-). This allowed me to simplify code in many areas and hopefully the loading of thumbnails and related things (automatic thumbnail generation, etc) will be less buggy and a bit faster.
- French localization has been removed, because it was getting a bit behind. Hopefully soon when features get more stabilized new alternate-language support can be added again.
- Added separate horizontal and vertical spacing options for the preview pane, as well as an "align thumbnails to bottom" option (this aligns the bottom of thumbnails that are not as tall as the preview size to the top of the info text).
- The image view can now be opened even if there are no image files selected in the preview pane.
- Pressing the escape key while editing a file name will cancel the editing.
- When editing a filename of an image, the default text selection won't include the extension.
Bugs Fixed:
- If you make a new folder in the file list when the parent folder is not expanded, the parent folder will expand.
- The "clear" button in the default document prefs works now.
- Some more minor bug fixes I can't quite remember anymore.
Known bugs:
- None. As a side note, this version has not been tested in OS X 10.2 (Jaguar).
1.5 beta 15 (June 19, 2002)
New Features:
- Rewrote much of the preview pane code to be more flexible and hopefully a bit faster. As with anything newly rewritten, there are probably a few hidden kinks left to iron out, though all tests seem to indicate it works fine. Along with this rewrite came some other changes that will hopfully improve the user experience.
- The content of preview boxes can no longer be cached for drawing; for the most part it just ate up huge amounts of RAM for relatively small gain, and it even slowed some operations down. If anyone really notices the lack, please tell me and I'll put the option back, but I doubt anyone will have cause for complaint :-).
- Basic printing support for the preview pane (when previewing the contents of a folder); however, it's quite crappy at the moment. Sometime soon I will probably add the contact sheets maker, and printing support will be implemented better in that. Note that there is a stupid bug/oversight in Cocoa that means there is no way to get the printable area of the paper being printed on; likely the margins I chose will be within the printable area of the majority of newer printers, but no gaurantees. Note also that how many rows/columns will fit on a page is based on the thumbnail display size you have chosen, and has nothing to do with what you see displayed in the preview pane itself (as the print panel comes up, if your preview pane is large enough you will see it in the background resize to the size of the paper; you can use this as a test to pick an appropriate thumbnail size). Thumbnail shadows cannot be printed.
Bugs Fixed:
- Reading saved thumbnails off read-only disks now works (ie. if you've burned a CD of images for which gBrowser has created thumbnails, you can now view them from the CD).
- When pressing the change-font buttons in the prefs when some other item in the window is key (like a text field you may have just been typing in) it will approptriately lose first reponder status, so now changing fonts should actually work all the time.
- The revert-pane buttons in the prefs show up properly again.
- Other minor prefs fixes.
Known bugs:
1.5 beta 14 (June 6, 2002)
New Features:
- An error is now displayed in slideshows and the Image Viewer if an image cannot be displayed, instead of just displaying a blank screen.
- The toolbar's preview size slider now has a menu representation if you're using it text-only, and has a popup button if the icon is visible.
- Added some new "file filter" preferences. This is currently really, really basic. In fact, all you can do at the moment is say whether or not the file list displays files and folders or folders only. But that should be of use to some people at least.
- The beginnings of plugin capability. Nothing truly functional yet, though, so don't get too excited ;-). This means much of gBrowser has been modified since the last release, so there may be some new bugs (hopefully not, but you've been forwarned!).
- Under-the-hood overhaul of the preferences to conform to the new plugin scheme (you probably won't notice much difference). Because of this, much of the French translation of the preferences needs to be redone, so I've left it out of this release for the most part. Sorry.
- Improved/added some options to the manual thumbnail generator. Press the expand button to reveal the new features. Among other things you can specify if thumbnails only be generated for images that don't have a thumbnail of the proper size already, and whether or not the file's resource fork should be stripped at the same time the thumbnail is generated (of course, a new resource fork for the file is created immediately since the new thumbnail is saved to the resource fork, but you can be sure there is no data in the resource fork besides the thumbnail).
Bugs Fixed:
- I think I have fixed the strange bug that was causing some people to be unable to open images (a couple people reported getting corrupt image errors for every image). Unfortunately, since I was unable to reproduce the bug myself, I can't be sure if it was fixed. If anyone who has experienced the bug could give me an update, I'd appreciate it :-).
- Disabled renaming of symbolic links, because of the same Cocoa/Carbon bug that causes trouble with moving them to the trash.
- Fixed a problem with duplicate items in the menus prefs.
- High quality create-and-load-on-the-fly now creates previews for files that need it which aren't currently visible in the preview pane.
- The back/forward history menus in the toolbar work properly again.
- Low quality create-and-load-on-the-fly doesn't cause bad drawing bugs anymore when it runs into a corrupt image.
- When option-double-clicking (or whatever) to open a folder from the preview pane in a new document, all the parent document's preferences are now properly inherited (there were problems with the file list visibility, the toolbar, sorting, and some other stuff before). Also, the file list root path will remain the same in the new window, if possible. The new window will be offset a bit from the original window's position.
Known bugs:
1.5 beta 13 (May 23, 2002)
New Features:
- Improved the file list and preview pane reverse sort buttons (in their respective vertical scroll bars). Also added a sort-by menu to the scroll bar area. Because of these new menus, the toolbar's sort menus have been removed from the toolbar's default setup (they are still available if you want them, of course).
- Slideshows can now be started using the current file list selection.
- Improved the appearance of the back/forward toolbar buttons, and added a slideshow toolbar button.
- The slideshow preferences have been rearranged a bit. This was done to make room for some new preferences for displaying a file's name in the slideshow. The Image Viewer will get similar treatment soon.
- The slideshow controls have been improved/rearranged a bit. A "fade" option has been added to it, as well as the option to collapse it down to just the play/pause/next/previous buttons.
Bugs Fixed:
- Fixed a bug that caused a crash if gBrowser was quit with more than one image window open (since this happened on quitting you may not have noticed it).
- Slideshows now close first, before anything else, when you quit. This keeps them from getting in your way if the document window wants to display a save sheet.
- Double-clicking the root-level "Computer" folder in the file list now properly opens a "[User]'s Computer" Finder window.
- Leaving gBrowser running and unhidden should no longer keep hard drives from spinning down.
- gBrowser no longer always displays the I-beam cursor in the preview pane after displaying a text file.
- Select all and deselect all now work when no items are selected in the preview pane.
- The slideshow controller will always hide properly when you click it's close button now.
- Some small optimization/fixes to menus and window behavior.
Known bugs:
1.5 beta 12 (May 17, 2002)
New Features:
- File list sort toolbar item.
- In the preview pane, pressing command-up arrow will change the preview pane to the parent of the current folder, and pressind command-down arrow when you have one folder selected in the preview pane will change it to that folder. Holding the option key in addition to comand-up or -down will open the contents of the folder in a new document that inherits the preferences from your current document.
- Option-double-clicking a folder in the preview pane will now also open it in a new document.
- The code that handles selection of items in the preview pane has been rewritten; this fixed a couple bugs and now it follows more closely the behavior of the Finder.
- Made the file renaming code a lot more efficient. Probably won't cause any noticable change, but there it is anyway.
- Rewrote some of the preview pane's drawing code. Now, preview box spacing cannot be a negative value. It used to be allowed down to -4 so that users using the "no border" option could have tight spacing of their previews, but now gBrowser takes the width of the border into account. If your preview box spacing was negative, it will be set to zero (likely where you want it anyway). This fixes some little display bugs and problems with the hit-test code when the spacing had a negative value.
- Rewrote some of the preview pane's hit-test code. Now you must click inside the bounds of a preview box to select it (previously, clicking in the empty space between preview boxes would select one or the other on either side). Now empty space between preview boxes is treated just the same as empty space elsewhere in the preview pane.
Bugs Fixed:
- Fixed a problem that sometimes caused freezes or just no display when trying to view a folder containing an alias in the preview pane.
- The scroll bar in the preview pane updates itself correctly now when switching from one folder to another.
- The save-selection submenu no longer shows up in the preview pane's contextual menu if you have no items selected.
- Fixed a bug where the filename editing field in the file list might stick around permanently sometimes.
- gBrowser no longer crashes if you click the upper edge of the filename editing field.
- Improved a few other formerly bad behaviors of the filename editing field.
- Some more small bug fixes.
Known bugs:
- Sometimes the slideshow controls will hide when they shouldn't if you have autohiding turned on.
1.5 beta 11 (May 14, 2002)
New Features:
- Updated French localization (still a few things behind though).
- Some more minor optimizations.
- While the document preferences window is frontmost, you can now still use the document's menu commands (such as "Save").
- Improvement to the look of the preferences window (And the "Don't cache contents" checkbox in the preview pane appearences prefs has been changed to "Cache contents"; your prefs are remembered properly, but if it was checked before it will of course be unchecked now, and vice versa).
- "Make Desktop Picture" now offeres a few options: crop, tile, and scale. Please note that scale does not work for all images.
Bugs Fixed:
- The menus in the slideshow controller should not appear underneath the controller window anymore, as they sometimes did before.
- The preview pane now updates the number of files in a folder properly every time it changes.
- The "Make desktop picture" options now work properly in the file list.
- Fixed a problem calculating and sorting by data fork size.
- Fixed some bugs with respect to tracking files, especially symbolic links inside folders that are moved/renamed.
- Filename editing fields in the file list are now sized to their max possible width instead of to the size of the current filename.
Known bugs:
- Sometimes the slideshow controls will hide when they shouldn't if you have autohiding turned on.
1.5 beta 10 (May 9, 2002)
New Features:
- You can save/restore selections you make in the preview pane (until you preview a different folder). I don't know how useful this might be, but I need it from time to time so hopefully others will have a use for it too.
Bugs Fixed:
- Fixed some crashers and some things that caused weird stuff to happen.
Known bugs:
- Sometimes the slideshow controls will hide when they shouldn't if you have autohiding turned on.
1.5 beta 9 (May 6, 2002)
New Features:
Bugs Fixed:
- Fixed a crash some people were experiencing when a document would load.
- Folders that are expanded in the file list when the document is closed are remembered properly again the next time it is opened (I think this bug started in beta 8). Also improved document opening time a bit in cases where there are many folders initially expanded in the file list.
- Improvement of the accuracy of file size calculations, and fixed a small sort-by-file-size issue.
- Fixed some memory leaks.
- Fixed an issue that would occationally cause crashes if you'd opened and closed a document and then opened another one.
- The Image Viewer and slideshow background colors are now correctly saved.
Known bugs:
- Sometimes the slideshow controls will hide when they shouldn't if you have autohiding turned on.
1.5 beta 8 (May 4, 2002)
New Features:
- You now have the option to have the image viewer remember its last size and position (when not in fullscreen mode, obviously), as well as the option to have it open automatically when your document loads.
- You can now undo/redo appearance color changes.
- More low-level optimizations.
Bugs Fixed:
- High quality "create and load on-the-fly" now works. It was caused by a stupid mistake I made while rewriting the preview generation code for beta 7...
Known bugs:
- Sometimes the slideshow controls will hide when they shouldn't if you have autohiding turned on.
- If you try to move a symbolic link to the trash, the original will be moved instead, due to an OS X bug (or overly helpful feature if you want to call it that ;-). Real aliases work fine though. As a result, gBrowser will no longer allow you to try to move symbolic links to the trash.
1.5 beta 7 (May 2, 2002)
New Features:
- Rewritten preview generation/preview loading code; hopefully it'll work better, be less buggy, and in some instances be faster.
Bugs Fixed:
- When you make a new folder in the preview pane, it should be properly scrolled into view (this didn't always work before).
- Fixed a couple display problems in the preview pane.
- One of the more recent features added to gBrowser caused the "create and load on the fly" option to not work properly all the time. This has been fixed.
- Fixed a silly mistake in the status bar when one file out of a bunch was selected.
- A bug where the file name editing field would sometimes show up in the wrong spot was caused by the "don't cache preview box contents" option, and has now been fixed.
- A bug where some people couldn't drag and drop into folders within the preview pane was caused by the exact same thing, so that has also been fixed.
- More little fixes.
Known bugs:
- Sometimes the slideshow controls will hide when they shouldn't if you have autohiding turned on.
- If you try to move a symbolic link to the trash, the original will be moved instead, due to an OS X bug (or overly helpful feature if you want to call it that ;-). Real aliases work fine though. As a result, gBrowser will no longer allow you to try to move symbolic links to the trash.
1.5 beta 6 (April 28, 2002)
New Features:
- New "screen saver editor" (look under the "Other" submenu of the "Tools" menu). This allows you to create screen savers that you can use under the screen savers system preference. They are standard image screen savers (like the default "Forest" and "Cosmos") that just loop through the images and display them one at a time. Note you can either copy files (or folders, the screen saver will display images in subfolders) into the screen savers or make an alias of them. If you plan on only using the screensavers for yourself, use aliases, since this will not really take up much disk space. If you want to send the screen savers to others, you have to copy the files in. The use of aliases allows some neat tricks; for example, you can make a new screen saver containing an alias to your "Pictures" folder, and that screen saver will display all the images in your Pictures folder, including any you might add in the future.
- New "Random Slideshow" option. Someone owes me their firstborn ;-).
Bugs Fixed:
- Fixed a little bug in the Image Viewer, where the image display size settings wouldn't take affect for the first image displayed (for real this time!).
- The items in the outline view of the preferences windows now all start out properly expanded.
- If you right-click on a file in the preview pane while editing the filename of another file in it, gBrowser will no longer incorrectly rename the right-clicked file.
- The filename editing field should always show up in the correct spot now, instead of sometimes below where it should.
- When aliases are moved to the trash they now get properly removed from the file list.
- Once again, hopefuly I've fixed the screen problems with the slideshows and Image Viewer (crossing fingers).
- Various other fixes.
Known bugs:
- Sometimes the slideshow controls will hide when they shouldn't if you have autohiding turned on.
- If you try to move a symbolic link to the trash, the original will be moved instead, due to an OS X bug (or overly helpful feature if you want to call it that ;-). Real aliases work fine though. As a result, gBrowser will no longer allow you to try to move symbolic links to the trash.
1.5 beta 5 (April 24, 2002)
New Features:
- A preliminary French localization thanks to Stéphane Moureau of www.StocksRaiderS.com (if anyone wants to translate gBrowser into other languages, please contact me! I can't offer you anything other than lots of thanks and a free registration though ;-).
- New "clear" buttons for the set-default-file pref and the open-in-other-image pref (you can also remove your selection by deleting everything in the text field and hitting enter). All "set" buttons have now been renamed to "choose" as well.
- When dragging and dropping a large number of folders to the move-to preferences (or applications to the open-with prefs) the items dropped will now be added in alphabetical order.
- When stripping resource forks, previews of files that are stripped are now updated in the preview pane.
Bugs Fixed:
- #$**(@^! screen problems hopefully fixed (yes yes, I keep saying that... no promises this time but I hope this'll be the end ;-).
- If you are manually generating previews, automatic preview generation is temporarily disabled so hopefully no mixups occur (please watch out though, if you have automatic preview generation on while generating previews manually. The Carbon resource manager doesn't take well to stuff like this :-\).
- Fixed a little bug in the Image Viewer, where the image display size settings wouldn't take affect for the first image displayed.
- Fixed a bug where trying to start a slideshow with an empty folder or folders might cause a crash.
- The text shadow color well in the preview pane appearances prefs now becomes enabled as it should. However, when it gets disabled it may not become greyed out. This is a Cocoa bug.
- Show/hide slideshow controls has been added to the Images submenu of the main menu (and some stuff has been reorganized, as I'm sure you'll notice).
- gBrowser now handles quitting properly when the default prefs window is open and there are unsaved changes.
- Fixed redraw bug that happened sometimes if you removed ore than one row's worth of files from the preview pane.
- Fixed bug in "Other..." file list icon size menu item.
- Images in image windows now rotate in the correct direction.
- The "Open with default 'open with' application" option works properly now.
- Worked around funny Cocoa bug where you could enter zero into text fields even when their minimum allowed value was greater than that.
- Fixed more memory leaks (and consequently italicizing of alias names has been reenabled).
- Major under-the-hood overhaul that will hopefully improve speed.
- Many other fixes and changes.
Known bugs:
- Sometimes the slideshow controls will hide when they shouldn't if you have autohiding turned on.
- If you try to move a symbolic link to the trash, the original will be moved instead, due to an OS X bug (or overly helpful feature if you want to call it that ;-). Real aliases work fine though. As a result, gBrowser will no longer allow you to try to move symbolic links to the trash.
1.5 beta 4 (April 12, 2002)
New Features:
- gBrowser creates real aliases instead of symbolic links (there is a new menu item in the Tools menu called "Make Symbolic Link" should you ever have a need for a symbolic link instead of an alias).
Bugs Fixed:
- gBrowser properly knows what version it is this time, so it won't keep telling you there's an update out when there isn't. Sorry about that!
- The Image Viewer and slideshow screen options should now actually work. Sorry about that, but I only have one monitor so there's no way for me to test it out myself (that is, unless someone wants to send me another monitor and video card! ;-).
- Modified some file tracking code to be aware of symbolic links (necessary due to bug explained below).
Known bugs:
- Sometimes the slideshow controls will hide when they shouldn't if you have autohiding turned on.
- If you try to move a symbolic link to the trash, the original will be moved instead, due to an OS X bug (or overly helpful feature if you want to call it that ;-). Real aliases work fine though. As a result, gBrowser will no longer allow you to try to move symbolic links to the trash.
1.5 beta 3 (April 11, 2002)
New Features:
- gBrowser now loads any unloaded thumbnails from disk in the background while the app is idle; this should reduce some of the time it takes to initially scroll the preview pane after previewing a new folder.
- The preview generator and resource fork stripper now both display an estimated remaining time.
- "Show/Hide Controls" in the slideshow contextual menu now just says "Show Controls" or "Hide Controls" as appropriate.
- Pressing escape or command-. will close the Image Viewer.
- The preview pane gives better feedback when it is being dropped on from an external source.
- Dragging files within the preview pane while holding option or control will make aliases or duplicate the files as expected.
- A few more optimizations.
Bugs Fixed:
- The file list can no longer be the key view when it is minimized.
Known bugs:
- Sometimes the slideshow controls will hide when they shouldn't if you have autohiding turned on.
- If you try to move a symbolic link to the trash, you will move the original file instead (real aliases work fine though).
1.5 beta 2 (April 9, 2002)
New Features:
- Various under the hood optimizations.
- Pressing command-J in the preview pane will start a new slideshow with the contents of the current folder Command-option-J will start a new slideshow with the contents of the current folder and any subfolders (recursively). I wanted to use command-space and command-option-space, but there appears to be a bug in Cocoa that causes "space" not to work as a menu key equivalent (or it's just not supposed to be done). I'm trying to work it out.
- New "Don't cache contents" option in the Preview Pane Appearances preferences. Up until now, gBrowser has drawn each individual preview box to an image cached in memory, and from then on used the cached image during redrawing. This speeds up things like scrolling and resizing, but it makes gBrowser very RAM-hungry, especially if you were browsing a folder with many images it. If you don't have lots of RAM, or have a fast enough computer that you don't really notice the difference, you may want to try the "Don't cache contents" option.
Bugs Fixed:
- The font name and font size descriptions in the Preview Pane Appearance preferences now update properly.
- The screen prefs for the slideshow actually work ;-).
- A few more memory leaks fixed.
- There seems to be a memory leak in Cocoa (in [NSAttributedString applyFontTraits:range:]) so I've disabled italicizing of alias filenames.
Known bugs:
- Sometimes the slideshow controls will hide when they shouldn't if you have autohiding turned on.
1.5 beta 1 (April 8, 2002)
New Features:
- Drastically improved preferences windows.
- New "Move To" submenu in the contextual menus and main menu to which you can add and remove folders.
- New "Open With" submenu in the contextual menus and main menu to which you can add and remove applications.
- Improved slideshow: You can have it advance automatically based on a time limit you set, you can order the images in the slideshow in many different ways, you can set the slideshow background color, you can set how the slideshow initially displays an image, you can start a new slideshow with images you currently have open, you can choose the screen the slideshow will display on, and there is a controls panel that gives you access to the many slideshow options while in slideshow mode.
- The image viewer is also improved: You can set its background color, you can set how it initially displays an image, you can set which screen you prefer it open on, and you can set whether or not it should open in full-screen mode.
- Hot keys for zooming images, rotating images, etc. are now user-defineable.
- You can now set the width for the optional thumbnail outlines in the preview pane.
- Anywhere you can sort items, you can now sort them in reverse order as well.
- The file list icon size can now be anywhere between 8x8 and 128x128 pixels.
- The file list can now display alternating (striped) background colors.
- You can specify the quality at which to save image thumbnails, so you can set it lower (the default is 95) if you think they take up too much space and don't mind losing a little quality. Experiment!
- You can now specify how much you would like thumbnails to be sharpened *when they are generated* (the usual on-the-fly sharpening option is still there). This will allow you to use higher compression settings without seeing as much ugly noise caused when the on-the-fly sharpening sharpens JPEG compression artifacts. Also if you don't think you will ever feel the need to change the amount of sharpening you want, you can do away with on-the-fly sharpening altogether by sharpening the thumbnails to you liking when they are generated. This will speed up loading of thumbnails.
- You can set whether or not you wish the file list to automatically expand folders when you are dragging and dropping onto it.
- You can now engage in dragging and dropping of selected items in the preview pane even when the window is in the background, and the window will stay in the background.
- Much greater use of aliases instead of absolute paths, so stuff shouldn't break after being moved anymore. I wish there was better support in Cocoa for this stuff.
- New option for high quality thumbnail scaling; you can turn this on if you often view your previews at sizes smaller than that which you've generated them at. However, it may be a little slower.
- Greater use of sheets.
- Added a "low quality" option when loading previews on the fly. This gives a great speed improvment with a relatively small reduction in thumbnail quality, so if you load previews on the fly you probably want this on (still, on the fly preview loading is only recommended for images 120k or smaller, depending on your patience of course).
- More ways to sort the file list.
- You are now reminded to register once in a while (not too often, don't worry ;-).
- Holding option while double clicking an image in the preview pane will open it in the Image Viewer.
- Improved sorting by filename. gBrowser now acts more intelligently (like the Finder) with respect to filenames with numbers in them.
- Mouse clicks in the slideshow no longer advance it to the next image (it seemed to cause too many accidents). However, the scroll wheel still works to move to next and previous images.
- The space bar now pauses and unpauses the automatic slideshow, instead of advancing to the next image (but option-space will, as will the enter key, tab key, forward arrow key, or the scroll wheel on the mouse).
- New document icon (you may have to restart the Finder or your computer after putting gBrowser in your Applications folder for this to take effect).
- Many other miscellaneous improvements.
Bugs Fixed:
- Back/Forward buttons function better.
- Fixed a bug with the thumbnail outline color not being correct sometimes.
- The status bar is now updated properly when to move files to/from the preview pane.
- Documents are now properly updated to "edited" status when you change a color in the preferences.
- Fixed a crash that happened if you opened the Image Viewer, closed it, and opened it again.
- gBrowser now tells you when it cannot open an image because it is corrupted, instead of just not opening it and leaving you guessing.
- Fixed many memory leaks.
Known bugs:
- Sometimes the slideshow controls will hide when they shouldn't if you have autohiding turned on.
1.1 beta 20 (March 11, 2002)
New Features:
- New "back" and "forward" toolbar items that keep track of the files/folders you select in the file list and allow you to navigate back and forward again (like a web browser).
- Files/folders placed in the toolbar are now kept track of through aliases, so moving them on disk should not cause them to stop working in the toolbar.
- Supports PNG images.
Bugs Fixed:
- Image windows now know what file they represent (so it'll show the icon in the title bar and allow you to use the command-click popup menu).
Known bugs:
1.1 beta 19 (March 9, 2002)
New Features:
- New "eject" option for removable media.
- More improvements to contextual menus.
- New "Open Default File" menu option in the File menu.
- The default file is now kept track of with an alias, so moving it won't cause gBrowser to not be able to find it.
Bugs Fixed:
- Fixed a very bizarre bug where the "Computer" icon would slowly fade away the more you clicked it.
- Fixed a bug in file list display with really large icons.
- Other minor improvements.
Known bugs:
1.1 beta 18 (March 8, 2002)
New Features:
- Better, more Finderlike functionality in the file list when navigating through different volumes.
- (Related to the above) New "Computer" toolbar item.
- The browser window now displays the name of the folder you are browsing in its title.
Bugs Fixed:
- When opening multiple images "Fit to screen" they will all stay completely on screen.
- Improved file renaming (and worked around potential nasty bug by using Carbon instead of Cocoa).
Known bugs:
1.1 beta 17 (March 6, 2002)
New Features:
- "Path" popup for toolbar.
Bugs Fixed:
- Stupid mistake that caused some contextual menu items to be greyed out fixed.
Known bugs:
1.1 beta 16 (March 6, 2002)
New Features:
- More contextual menu (and main menu) improvements.
Bugs Fixed:
- Making new folders inside an empty folder now correctly updates both the preview pane and the file list.
- The background color of the preview pane is now correctly drawn when there are no previews in it.
- Double clicking an alias folder in the preview pane now selects it in the file list as it should.
- Other small fixes.
Known bugs:
1.1 beta 15 (March 6, 2002)
New Features:
- Many Image Viewer improvements. Particularly, it will now go full-screen on whatever screen the Image Viewer window is on, so you can move it to different monitors if you like. Also, it more intelligently chooses a screen to initially start out on (if you have your gBrowser document window on a screen other than your main screen, the Image Viewer will open up on the main screen).
- While the Image Viewer window has focus, you can still navigate the preview pane thumbnails with the arrow keys.
- The scroll wheel can now be used to change to next/prev image in the slideshow.
- New toolbar item: "generate preview".
Bugs Fixed:
Known bugs:
- Making new folders in an empty folder might cause weird stuff to happen (the new folders won't show up but are created, or gBrowser enters the eternally-spinning-rainbow-disc mode).
1.1 beta 14 (March 5, 2002)
New Features:
- Added an option for gBrowser to check for updates at startup.
- Up and down keys now work to navigate up and down the file list (and left and right keys will expand and collapse folders even without the command key pressed).
- New "Image Viewer" feature: opening the Image Viewer window (from the "Images" menu) will bring up a window that will display whatever image you have currently selected in the preview pane. You can switch between using a window and full screen (the Image Viewer attempts to locate itself on a screen other than your main screen if you have multiple displays - which is how it is recommended you use it - but I only have one monitor myself so I have not been able to test this out).
- Smarter contextual menus.
Bugs Fixed:
Known bugs:
1.1 beta 13 (March 3, 2002)
New Features:
Bugs Fixed:
- Fixed occasional unnecessary reload of the preview pane when dragging and dropping form preview pane to file list.
- Fixed a bug that would cause gBrowser to crash if you deleted a file that was selected in the file list.
- The expansion/collapsion (is that a word?) of the file list is properly restored after you reopen a file.
- Another couple bugs in the image windows (one where there would sometimes be a white line to the right of an image, and another where fit-to-screen images would still have scrollbars) were fixed.
- Other small improvements.
Known bugs:
1.1 beta 12 (March 2, 2002)
New Features:
- gBrowser now saves thumbnails and strips resource forks without modifying the modification date of the image.
Bugs Fixed:
- Deselect-all and select-all now update the status bar properly.
- "New Folder" and "Delete" toolbar items now have tooltips.
- Page up, page down, home, and end keys now function in the preview pane and file list.
- Fixed some problems with "fit to window" and "fit to screen" in the image windows and the slide show.
Known bugs:
1.1 beta 11 (March 1, 2002)
New Features:
- Added/modified some of the options for navigating the file list.
- New minimize file list button underneath the file list.
- Dragging a folder onto the gBrowser icon now opens a new gBrowser window with that folder as the base folder of the file list.
- You can also now drag images onto the gBrowser icon.
- You can select items in the file list by typing their filename.
Bugs Fixed:
- Fixed bug in the image windows where a rotated image might not fit to screen or fit to window properly.
- gBrowser now automatically saves the base file list folder setting, so it won't hassle you to save so much.
Known bugs:
1.1 beta 10 (February 28, 2002)
New Features:
Bugs Fixed:
- Before, if you clicked a folder you'd put in the toolbar, and that folder was already the base folder for the file list (but wasn't the one currently selected), the folder would not be selected. This has been fixed.
- The image window code has been rewritten. Hopefully all the old problems were fixed and no new ones were created :-).
Known bugs:
1.1 beta 9 (February 27, 2002)
New Features:
- You can drag and drop files to the toolbar. This required some clever hacking, and there is no gaurantee it'll work in future versions of OS X (of course, I will try to fix it if it breaks).
- The "w" and "s" keys can be used while viewing an image to do either "fit to window" or "fit to screen" respectively.
- The "Sort Previews" toolbar item now has a menu representation, so you can use it in "text only" mode.
Bugs Fixed:
- Better behavior in the preview pane when previewing a single image.
- Fixed stupid error when sorting files in the preview pane by kind.
Known bugs:
- On some systems, when you open images they may be displayed off-center or not displayed at all.
1.1 beta 8 (February 26, 2002)
New Features:
- Big improvement in moving files to the trash (thanks to a recent Cocoa-dev post).
- Slight speed increase when switching gBrowser to/from foreground/background, and when initially opening a gBrowser window.
Bugs Fixed:
- Selecting files in the preview pane should no longer make their previews turn black as it did on a few systems before.
Known bugs:
1.1 beta 7 (February 20, 2002)
New Features:
- Added a good number of new features to the slideshow and image windows: In both you can now rotate images (through the contextual menu or with the "[" and "]" keys on the keyboard and the "0" and "." keys on the number pad), and zoom images with the keyboard using the "+" and "-" keys (holding shift or option while doing this will give you different zoom increments). In the slideshow only, you can also move images around the window using the number keys on the number pad (or the u, i, o, j, l, n, m, and comma keys, and once again holding the shift and option keys will give you different movement increments). Shift-5 (or shift-k) will recenter the image.
- Added a toolbar item for changing preview sizes and a toolbar item for sorting the preview pane.
Bugs Fixed:
Known bugs:
- Apparently on some systems, when you select images in the preview pane they turn completely black. This shouldn't be happening and I'm trying to figure it out...
1.1 beta 6 (February 19, 2002)
New Features:
- New icon! (Thanks to Martin Haecker!)
- Update help files to reflect new features.
- Some other minor improvements.
Bugs Fixed:
- The "Threaded loading" option is now greyed out as well when you choose "on the fly" preview generation (threaded loading is always on if you choose this option).
Known bugs:
1.1 beta 5 (February 18, 2002)
New Features:
- Added an option to strip images' resource forks (to remove gBrowser and GraphicBrowser previews, among other things).
- Added an option to generate previews on-the-fly each time instead of generating them once and storing them in the image's resource fork. This is good for people who want to browse through many small images and don't want to increase their file size by storing a preview (recommended only for images under 100k or so, or the speed may become unpleasant).
Bugs Fixed:
- Bug that might very rarely cause a crash with threaded preview loading fixed.
Known bugs:
1.1 beta 4 (February 17, 2002)
New Features:
- Improvements to the slideshow option (improved contextual menu, more key commands: you can now use the escape key to close the slideshow window and the space bar to go to the next image, among others).
Bugs Fixed:
- On systems where there is for some reason no desktop preferences file, gBrowser will create it when you set the desktop picture.
Known bugs:
1.1 beta 3 (February 16, 2002)
New Features:
Bugs Fixed:
- Bug where some toolbar items (such as the "customize" one) would display with an icon even in text-only mode after a window gets opened was fixed.
- The Image menu no longer disappears if no windows are open.
- Threaded preview loading no longer confuses gBrowser into thinking it needs to generate new previews if you have automatic preview generation on.
- Miscellaneous other bug fixes.
Known bugs:
1.1 beta 2 (February 15, 2002)
New Features:
- Generic icons option for the file list.
Bugs Fixed:
- Bug with adding items to the toolbar not working after they have been removed fixed.
- Bug with menu updates while the browser preferences window was open fixed.
- Miscellaneous other little improvements.
Known bugs:
- If you leave the "customize" toolbar item in the toolbar and set the toolbar to text only, the next time you open gBrowser all the items will stil lbe text-only except for the "customize" item; it shows it's icon (defeating the space-saving putpose of text-only!). This seems to be a bug in Cocoa, but I'm checking to make sure. In the mean time, you can leave that item out of the toolbar (out can use the menu item in the "Tools" menu or in the toolbar's contextual menu instead).
1.1 beta 1 (February 15, 2002)
New Features:
- A toolbar! Soon you will be able to add toolbar items for actions such as "Move to Trash" and "Generate Preview"... Currently, you can add folders to it (through the contextual menu in the preview pane or the file list). Clicking on them in the toolbar will cause the base path of the file list to change and will display that folder in the preview pane.
Bugs Fixed:
- Worked around Cocoa bug that caused an errant error message while copying files sometimes.
- gBrowser will no longer crash if you close a window while previews are loading with threaded loading enabled.
- Miscellaneous other little improvements.
Known bugs:
1.0 beta 8 (February 12, 2002)
New Features:
Bugs Fixed:
- Images for failed drag and drops within the preview pane now slide back.
- Improvement in the applescript used for moving files to the trash.
- Move to Trash enabled in file list, and Move to Trash key equivalent changed from command-forward delete to command-backspace (ie. the "regular" delete key).
- Miscellaneous other little improvements.
Known bugs:
1.0 beta 7 (February 11, 2002)
New Features:
Bugs Fixed:
- Those crashes when opening a folder in the preview pane have finally been fixed. For real this time!
- Setting a desktop picture works better (ie. it actually does work ;-) on some systems that had trouble before.
Known bugs:
1.0 beta 6 (February 11, 2002)
New Features:
- New contextual menu item in the preview pane that allows you to set an image as your desktop background (10.1 only).
- You can now move files to the trash.
Bugs Fixed:
- Occasional crashes when opening a folder from the preview pane fixed. Users of previous versions of gBrowser should trash their default preferences file (sorry!).
- The number of items in a folder used to be found through Carbon, but that counted invisible files beginning with a period (like the ".DS_Store" file) so it wasn't very accurate. This has been fixed.
Known bugs:
1.0 beta 5 (February 10, 2002)
New Features:
- Opening a single folder from the preview pane causes its contents to be displayed in the preview pane; for multiple selections the folders are opened in the Finder as usual.
Bugs Fixed:
- Threaded loading of previews option is now saved (oops!).
- Display bug with threaded loading of previews fixed.
Known bugs:
1.0 beta 4 (February 10, 2002)
New Features:
Bugs Fixed:
- Display bug after resorting the preview pane fixed.
- Worked around bug in the Cocoa NSFileManager for getting the display names of alias files.
- Fixed weird display bug that would occur if your first click on a file in the preview pane was a right-click.
Known bugs:
1.0 beta 3 (February 9, 2002)
New Features:
- You can now deselect-all in the preview pane by clicking in empty space
- More dragging speed improvements
Bugs Fixed:
- Disabled generation of previews for Photoshop files, as some files with many layers would cause unbearable slowness or even crashes.
- Funny bug where you could initate a drag on remaining selected items while deselecting an item fixed.
- Bug in file list icon size menu (in the menu bar, not the popup menu in the preferences window) fixed.
- Files with umlauts in the filename (and perhaps other special characters) would not show up, would show up incorrectly, or would not be copyable.
Known bugs:
1.0 beta 2 (February 8, 2002)
New Features:
- Generates previews for Photoshop files (kinda slow)
- A bit of a speed improvement in scrolling the preview pane (I hope!)
- Greatly improved dragging in preview pane
Bugs Fixed:
- Creating a new folder caused weirdness
- Dragging files to the file list from the preview pane sometimes caused the file list selection to change
- Setting the default file would work, but wouldn't update the display in the default preferences window
Known bugs:
- Files with umlauts in the filename (and perhaps other special characters) may not show up.
1.0 beta 1 (January 28, 2002)
New Features:
Bugs Fixed:
- None (if only this meant there were no bugs!)