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Posted by Ariya on Feb 1, '08 4:09 AM for everyone
Blur is an interesting effect, mainly because it lets us enjoy the main object yet the out-of-focus parts add something to the realism. Like in the default KDE 4.0's splash screen:
For PictureFlow, I decided to add the support for optional blur effect for the reflection, as shown in the following comparison:
It is even more enjoyable when you run the demo program and see those book covers sliding, as if they are ice skating. Shader guru can quickly point out the fakeness of the blur. Rather than blurring the "floor" after the reflection is painted there, I choose to blur the reflection for each image beforehand. Fake but fast and fun enough. As for the algorithm, it is the famous blazing-fast exponential blur from Jani Huhtanen, used among others in KDE 4's Plasma.
Another improvement is that the background color can be customized, not limited to black. In fact, black is particularly suitable to do fast reflection illusion cause blending a specific color with black can be approximated by multiplying its RGB components with a decreasing factor. But since I saw that Cover Flow for iPod nano is with white background, I thought I just let you use your favorite color for PictureFlow.
In addition, I refactored the code so that it is more maintainable. For simplicity, the horribly long look-up sine/cosine table has been reduced with the help of simple interpolation. Even better, PictureFlow now supports Qt 4 (Win32, Linux, Mac, Qtopia, Windows Mobile), Qt 3 (tested on Linux only), and Qt 2 (for Qt/Embedded platform) with a single code base. Maybe even Symbian in the future :-)
Posted by Ariya on Jan 23, '08 5:45 PM for everyone
Just over these two weeks, over 5 thousands came to my humble blog from XDA-developer's forum. It turned out that Chad "thundershadow14", based on the HTC Touch port, set to create a PictureFlow-based image viewer and release it as Windows Mobile executables. And seems that people like it, there are already 290 posts in that thread as I write this. It was reported to work on a wide range of HTC smartphones, among others Touch, Trinity, Herald, Hermes, Kaiser, Atlas, Prophet, Himalaya, Wizard, as well as other Windows Mobile devices like Treo 750, LG KS20, Asus P535, Axim X51v, and a bunch others. So if you have an HTC gadget (preferably with WM6), give it a shot. Looks like it quickly becomes one of the first popular Qt/WinCE-based application, this is considering that (as of now) the final official Qt/WinCE is not even released yet!
From these two exciting developments, and since the response is overwhelming (I can't still believe people *do* really bother to mess around with such a weekend project), I want to be a bit more serious and plan to create a specialized image viewer with that lovely CoverFlow effect, designed with mobile device in mind (and targeting Qt/WinCE and Qtopia). From what I read in the forum, people are not happy with the loading time and memory consumption. Of course, this is definitely the case since the example I include with PictureFlow source code is not optimized for speed or memory footprint. It is a typical example program, meant to show how to use PictureFlow only, not as a basis of a real-world application. Thus, a really usable viewer must be implemented differently.
So, folks, stay tuned. Of course you can send me a smartphone, something like HTC Kaiser, if you want. I'll be glad to take it :-)
Posted by Ariya on Jan 13, '08 6:42 PM for everyone
In the third generation of iPod nano, Apple has included the famous Cover Flow feature. But what if your iPod belongs to the generation before this? Well, AFAIK Cover Flow is not available. Either Apple would like the owners to upgrade or the hardware is simply not powerful enough. Pick your battle.
The solution: use Rockbox. It is a firmware replacement not only for Apple iPods but for a wide range of other popular music players. Since some time ago, it sports the PictureFlow plugin (still in continous development) which has the same idea as Cover Flow. This plugin is based on my PictureFlow Qt widget, something that I have mentioned before. The obligatory screenshot (courtesy of Jonas):
