I spent a lot of Saturday and Sunday trying to sort out how to do the configuration in an easier manner than the original writer and was having a lot of difficulties sorting it out. I finally found something called Nini that is working just fine.

So, I still have to tie changes in the UI back to the configuration file and then forklift the code from the original project into this one. I started a new project because a) I wanted a slightly different name, and b) it was easy to keep the original, working code separate from my changes.

I ran across a couple of open source Windows installers so, hopefully, by the end of the week I’ll have this ready to distribute.

When I finally got that straight in my head, I decided to integrate the two programs in to one. I think the original thought was that the actual resizer was meant to be a command line sort of thing and there wasn’t a need for a user interface. Since it always opened up some sort of a dialog to tell you what it had done or to ask a question or two, I decided that making it a graphical program from the start would be OK.

So, I fired up the interface editor and came up with this:

The one thing that’s not correct yet is the Max Size element. Obviously we don’t want fractional sizes. I think that’s a setting in the widget, but I’m not quite there yet. That is the next step, tieing the new interface to the existing code.

One thing that might not be evident from that screenshot is that the bottom element is a status bar, in which the user will see the images fly by as the resizer works.

Thoughts? Does it look OK?  GUI design is definitely not my strong point, so I won’t be offended by people that want to make it more usable.

Stay tuned.

I’ve recently gotten involved with a group called <a href=”http://eons.com” target=”_blank”>Eons</a>, a website that’s targeted toward the over 50 folks. I’m involved in the Better Photography group, and the subject came up about someone’s image being “borrowed” by a different person without permission.

So, I went off the to web to look for some sort of utility that would be able to resize and watermark images. I found a resizer program (named, appropriately enough, Resizer) and an article on creating both image and text watermarks. The Resizer program was up for adoption as the person who wrote it was no longer interested in maintaining it. He had written it for a specific purpose and the program was no longer needed.

I contacted him about adopting it and after the appropriate conversations, he passed it on to me. I added three features to it (reduced DPI, image watermarking, text watermarking) and it’s now working. I don’t have it available for download quite yet as it’s currently set up as two separate programs – one to edit the config, one to resize images. In the process of fixing the config I came to the conclusion that I needed to integrate the two programs as I don’t want to plot pixels to place items on the dialog by using pixel counts.

One other thing that prevents me from putting up at the moment is that it’s a .NET program (and yes, it runs on both Windows and Linux) but I don’t have a good install for it yet. I have a link or two to investigate for an install program, but I’ve not quite gotten that far.

All that being said, if you have .NET installed on your Windows or Linux box and don’t mind a little hand-editing of the config file, then drop me a line and I’ll zip up the two programs for you to try out.