I am going to whine today both here and on Solipsistic Meandering – but I hear you say “so what else is new?” :p But the whines are different – you can read what I whine about on SM over there but here my whine is about the fact that I am drowning in e-mail <g> There’s just too many things going on and there is all the support e-mail to respond to as well as try to do some coding. In addition to the support e-mails on the mailing list (to which nobody seems to respond except for a very few people :p) there are also the personal e-mails I receive from people. Jen believes that I should utilize the forums more to provide support and I agree with her but the problem is the same on the forums – not many people respond and it ends up being me who responds. I know that the current forums aren’t very usable and I am thinking of shifting them over to something which is at least searchable and which also has some other functionality which might help attract people and also let them find what they want quickly. Of course, this would mean I would have to dump the current forums and so lose all the archived answers there but since not many people seem to look at it, that might not be a big deal :p Or, I could link to the old forums from the new ones – wherever I set them up …
But enough of whining 🙂 I redid Nailer yesterday since I realized that the UI was a bit too crowded the way I did the first iteration, plus, I wanted to provide a bit more functionality than the first iteration provided for. So the new UI is very clean since it’s just a list of images and a preview pane underneath with some buttons above the image list to provide the functionality. When you want to create the thumbnails, you click the Process button and are provided with a wizard which walks you step by step through the rest of the process. It gives you several options for the thumbnails – you can specify an exact size, have the aspect ratio of the thumbnails remain unchanged or create thumbnails in proportion to the size of the original image. You can also create thumbnails in an image format other than the format used by the original image.
The next step in the wizard asks you if you want to upload the images via FTP or if you want to copy it locally. If it’s a local copy, you can simply have the thumbnails copied to a folder or additionally, you could also have the originals copied to the same folder or a different folder. If FTPing, the next step gives you the options to specify for your FTP server and again you can copy all the images to one location or copy the thumbnails and the originals to two different locations. I think this provides a lot more functionality than the first iteration. I still have to test it out and hopefully we’ll do that when we create thumbnails for some of the images Jen has and then I will try to get some documentation done and Nailer will go up for download 🙂 Incidentally, somebody asked if Nailer was command-line driven – unfortunately, it’s not 🙁 There are just too many options for me to try and accommodate them all via a command-line interface. It can be done, but I can’t be bothered unless there is a big demand for it from the users – I prefer the GUI :p
yay, nailer works, and as soon as I get some decent stuff up you can come and see Fahim’s prog in action!!