2.1 - April, 2005
New Mosaic Effect, Translations, and Bugfixes
Platforms Supported: Linux, FreeBSD, Windows 2000/XP, Mac OS X
Experimental Support for: Windows 95/98/ME

New Features / Feature Enhancements:

- New mosaic manipulation!
- Aspect ratio selection usability improvements (smarter placement with regard to rotating selections, positioning, and support for tall photos)
- Improved B/W and Sepia effects (weights now based on modern display phosphor characteristics)
- Added French translation
- German translation brought up to date

Minor Improvements:

- Rewrote AlbumShaper.pro project file to support changing install location on Unix systems
- Changed "Disable checking for..." checkbox to "Check for photo modifications..." under settings
- Cut down window and dialog title text by removing "Album Shaper: " prefix
- Fixed alert dialogs to handle long message translations
- Various spelling mistakes and other minor visible text improvements
- Fixed fonts in status area and various dialogs
- Cosmetic fixes regarding buttons and layout in Save as dialog
- Added missing red color to some button references in help system

Bug Fixes:

- Fixed a bug where dropping objects from the desktop / file browsers on album / collection image caused Album Shaper to crash
- Fixed a bug where Album Shaper would crash when trying to edit 8 bit grayscale and color images
- Fixed a bug where after removing photos in a collection the edit tab and various buttons below were still enabled
- Fixed a threading bug in the file preview feature that could cause the program to hang
- Fixed the rare 0kb bug! (reverting a photo sometimes caused the photo to be corrupted)
- Disabled user input while loading albums
- Fixed a bug where loading recent albums using the keyboard shortcuts could cause Album Shaper to crash
- Fixed a bugs where using save-as to copy an album from one location to another did not copy over the original form of an image
- Fixed minor bug in Slick theme where carriage returns in photo descriptions caused problems in slide show mode
- Fixed a bug in the Metallic theme where collections that had no cover images could not be reached using the navigation bar
- Fixed various compiler warnings under Linux / FreeBSD

2.0 - March, 2005
Rewritten Editing Interface
Platforms Supported: Linux, FreeBSD, Windows 2000/XP, Mac OS X
Experimental Support for: Windows 95/98/ME

Importing and Organizing:

- Much faster image resizing, enabling you to quickly add photos to your albums
- During add photos/batch operations, the number of remaining items is included in a status message
- Smaller album sizes and better EXIF support

Rewritten Editing Interface:

- Much faster lossless rotating and flipping transformations
- Semi-automatic tilt correction tool
- Automatic color enhancement tool
- Automatic contrast enhancement tool
- Sophisticated red-eye reduction tool
- Histogram interface for changing brightness, contrast, and color and luminosity levels
- Grain editor for blurring and sharpening images
- Sepia, oil painting, and color embossing image manipulations
- Crop, B+W, and invert manipulations rewritten and significantly faster
- Real time previews of image manipulations
- Crop to preset aspect ratios or current display resolution
- DPI indicated with green/red coloring and text when cropping to preset image sizes
- Selected regions can be adjusted by dragging any side, corner, or entire selection around
- Selected regions can be rotated and scaled in place while maintaining their aspect ratio
- Selected regions can be nudged left/right/up/down using arrow keys
- New selection painting system enhances contrast to make selections stand out
- Selection resolutions are displayed, letting you crop to exact sizes
- Photos can be rotated and flipped within editing interface
- Busy indicators and progress bar for all non-instantaneous operations within editing interface
- Double click any photo to edit
- Switch photos while in editing interface
- Photo modifications always reversible

Loading, Saving, and Exporting:

- Quickly load albums using the new Open Recent menu
- Revert to last saved album
- Set desktop wallpaper with the click of a button
- Export small web galleries
- Export images for printing

Bug Fixes:

- Windows 95, 98 and ME now experimentally supported
- Files ending with .HTM are now removed during save
- qmake does not need to be run a second time before doing a make install on Linux/FreeBSD
- Close button on the Album Statistics window now displayed properly
- Support for Norwegian variant of Windows
- Expanding and contracting a photo with an empty description no longer trips album modified bit
- Fixed bug involving progress messages erratically disappearing next to progress bar
- Flip vertical and flip horizontal button images swapped to properly reflect these actions
- Selection bugs in editing interface fixed with complete rewrite of selection system
- Albums can now be loaded/saved to paths that contain spaces
- Command-M now minimizes application to the Dock on Mac OSX
- Plugged various memory leaks
- Fixed horizontal scrollbars showing when expanding photos
- Fixed hang when user expands photo then switches to a different apps
- Fixed minor painting mistakes when editing photo descriptions
- Photos added to collections through drag and drop are now inserted in the correct order.

1.0 - May, 2004
Finally 1.0!
Platforms Supported: Linux, FreeBSD, Windows 2000/XP, Mac OS X

FEATURE IMPROVEMENTS:

- New keybindings added for altering/annotating photos. Left/right keys used to move back and forth between photos in a selected collection. L/R/H/V keys apply rotate 270, 90, flip horizontal and flip vertical batch image action. Enter brings up photo description editing interface. E brings up photo edit interface. Escape exits from the editing interface, and R resets the image from within the editing interface.
- New application icons.

BUG FIXES:

- Removed photos are now actually deleted upon saving.
- Quotes, carrage returns, and line feeds properly handled in text fields. Previously these characters broke slide show mode using either Classic or Slick themes, in addition to other strange side effects that might occur.
- Default collection names translated properly.
- Album Shaper would crash when checking for software updates in the About dialog under Windows if no network connection was present or the updates file was unable to be fetched. Fixed.
- Small memory leaks in statusWidget and About window fixed.

TRANSLATIONS:

- Added German

1.0b1 - April, 2004
User Interface Redesign / Stability Improvements
Platforms Supported: Linux, FreeBSD, Windows 2000/XP, Mac OS X

Album Shaper 1.0b1 sports a completely overhauled user interface. Not only does this design aim to look better, UI changes also focus on making the program more intuitive to interact with. Far fewer mouse movements and clicks are necessary to accomplish the same tasks as before. Stability issues have also been addressed with this release. Extensive testing and debugging has rooted out many bugs that occured in previous versions when performing multiple complicated organizational tasks. User settings have been added, which provides the backbone for other nicities such as remembering application window placement and size and last used directories for loading/saving and adding new photos. A more thourough accounts for all changes follows.

USER INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS:

- Album Shaper icon in top right corner of application removed. Space freed up allowed the selected collection (previously called subalbum) annotation frame moved to top of window. This frees up some space in the selected collection area for more photos to be displayed at once.
- New color scheme introduced loosely based on colors used by Mozilla FireFox. Album and collection annotations backed in blue separate them from collections listing (light blue) and selected collection photo listing (marble texture).
- Album and collection representative images are now set using drag-n-drop or right clicking on photos and use the appropriate context menu entries. This frees up space in the user interface by removing the set buttons. These images can now be unset by mousing over these images and clicking the red X icon that pops up. Representative images slide in and out from left when being set/removed. When being replaced morphing animation makes transition seemless (and fun to watch). When switching from collection to collection this morph animation is also used to produce a less jarring effect.
- Collection icon paiting completely redesigned. Previously large icons had ugly red outlines when selected. Assign collection names would expand infinantly as names became large, eventually taking up massive screen space. Collection icon images have been reduced in size, and text is now constrained to 2 lines. If text does not fit periods indicate this at end of printed text string. Antialiased background selection ovals used using new application color scheme. Mouse-over indicators also introduced to facilitate users accuracy when selecting collection/moving photos from collection to collection. By default albums now have one collection which is automatically selected. New collections are automatically selected when created. New collections are now automatically named.
- Photo preview painting code has been completely redesigned. Previously photos suffered from the same problems collections did. The problem is, photos also desperately needed a much improved interface for adding/editing photo descriptions. Photos now look very similar, with the addition of drop shadows. Selected photos have dark blue background matching colors used throughout the application. Mousing over a photo pops up an I icon on the lower right. Clicking on this buttons causes the photo to animate expand and morph out a text area entry. This area is at least 4 lines of text tall (taller if the image has a taller than wider aspect ratio) for text entry. If more text is desired a scrollbar appears. Pressing escape or clicking off the photo causes it to morph back to its original shape and the text to be set. Displayed text is limited to one line with dots indicates more text which is not displayed exists if text trimming was necessary. Previous obscure F2 keybinding for description setting has been removed.
- Photo area now has marble background.
- When dragging and dropping collections, the dragged collection icon is showed now in it's entirety (text and image) and does not blip off but begins where it started when drag occured.
- When dragging and dropping photos small photo icon placed under mouse instead of arbitrary selected photo. This takes up less space and lets you see better where you are dropping the selected photos. When dropping photos on collection icons, collection icon now pseudo selects in light blue as you hover over it before drop occurs.
- Multi-photo reorganization now supported through drag-n-drop within subalbums. Previously each photo had to be dragged and dropped to new location one at a time.
- Album Shaper now supports drag and drop from the desktop. Drag photos from your desktop, the Finder, Windows Explorer, or Konqueror onto collection layouts to add them to your collections.
- New first run welcome screen introduced.
- Software updates indicated by flashing lightbulb on bottom right corner of screen when available. Click on this icon will bring up About window with listing of improvements in the available update.
- Status messages disappear after two seconds instead of lingering around.
- Menu/tab/button icons added throughout interface.
- The Handbook, About Box, Settings Window, and Album Statistics windows are now all dialogues. This means they have default buttons and escape will close them.
- Changed button text in album statistics window from "Ok" to "Close." Added such a button to the about box and handbook windows for systems which don't have close buttons at the top of windows.
- Album's creation and modification dates are now displayed in the album statistics windows. A future release will allow the user to edit the creation date using a calendar interface if desired.
- Menubar at top of application properly set as widget menu, as a result resizing the window nolonger allows this annotation frame atop to be partially covered up.

FEATURES:

- 50-80 times speed up when saving albums to a differnt location by using much faster copy file method.
- Sped up moving large selections of photos from one subalbum to another by only rearranging remaining photos at very end of removal operation.
- User settings have been introduced. Default themes, default window placement, and disabling alerts are a few of the options which are editable though a configuration dialog which mimicks that provided by Mozilla Firebird.
- About window now has a tabbed interface. In addition to credits which are in the first tab, additional tabs for upcoming improvements in cvs and new features in newer versions of album shaper are displayed, in addition to the changelog.
- Temporary image directories created on an album basis. As a result, multiple copies of Album Shaper can safely be run on the same machine by the same user simultaniously. The default location for temporary directory creation can be set through new settings interface. As a result temporary directories will most likely (and if not can be forced for new albums) exist on the same partition where saving will occur, dramatically speeding up saving modified/new albums.
- Selected photo descriptions can be removed using new command under Tools menu.
- Photos descriptions can be automagically named using their filenames using checkbox under add photo dialog. This method removes the path and filename extensions and converts _'s to spaces, so "C:\Documents and Settings\Some_Interesting_Picture.jpg" would be converted to "Some Interesting Picture".
- Album Shaper now remembers the last directory an album was saved to/loaded from. It also remembers independently the last directory photos were added from.
- Album Shaper now remembers the last theme used when saving an album. By default this theme will be auto selected in the save as interface when saving a new album. The last used theme for a previously saved album is auto selected when saving it to a new location. This behavior can be overrided by autoselected a particular theme for all new albums if desired through the settings interface.
- Animations introduced through the user interface can be disabled through the settings windows. Similarly software update notifications and tooltips can also be disabled if desired.

BUG FIXES:

- All buttons are now set to fixed size. This prevents them from disappearing when a user resizes a window to be very small.
- Fixed code so that if multiple photos are selected edit button is disabled, the best solution fo this problem. :) If for some reason the edi tbutton was not disabled when user attempts to edit multiple photos error dialog now appears.
- Photo description changes that were typed in editing interface got mucked up when user went exited the editing interface. They appeared correct but actually were screwed up immediately after updating the screen. This would be apparent when saving out an album, or reentering the editing interface. Bug fixed.
- Reduced flicker previous experienced when changing subalbum selection.
- Albums containing international symbols caused all sorts of problems with the XSLT processor. Usually this meant a subset or no html files were written out. XML files now written out in unicode UTF-8 so problem should be fixed.
- All text fields in albums (names, descriptions, photo names) etc. can now have quotes in them without having ill effects on javascripts etc written out by themes. Bug was noticed where if any photo has a quote in its description the entire slideshow was unviewable.
- Album Shaper would sometimes hang when saving out albums. This occured when an equal number of subalbums were deleted and created before saving again. This was a rather complicated bug but should no longer occur.
- Subalbum thumbnail paths saved out incorrectly after reorderd. This resulted in the wrong subalbum image being used on a themes coverpage using the Classic and Slick themes. XML file saved out correctly now and themes act properly without any change to theme code.
- Previously if a theme had a single preview image the right button in the save as dialog was enabled. This has been disabled in this case.

THEME WORK:

- Collection entries properly top aligned in Slick theme.
- If first photo in a subalbum did not have a description then all descriptions would not show up using the Slick theme. Theme fixed.
- Slideshow buttons tended to move around a bit in the Slick theme, theme fixed.
- If subalbum does not contain any photos, contact sheet and slideshow pages are not created, and linked to these pages are not written in the coverpage using the Slick theme.

1.0a3 - October 17th, 2003
Themes, Internationalization, Handbook, Alerts, Bug Fixes, Speed Improvements
Platforms Supported: Linux, FreeBSD, Windows 2000/XP, Mac OS X
FEATURES:

- Mac OS X Support!
- Windows installer/uninstaller, windows application icon
- New Slick theme for outputed HTML. Use of CSS, button images, and other minor cleanups.
- New theme-based export support using XSLT! Users may use provided themes, or write their own. Added a new save dialog for browsing available themes and selecting one for saving the album. Original html output provided with Classic theme.
- Actual documentation in the form of a handbook reachable from the help menu.
- Added tooltips to most buttons and some other widgets
- Internationalization support! All buttons will need to be fixed somehow (icon + text which is translated) will probably be the ideal solution. the new about dialog text, as well as the handbook, will also need to be translated somehow, beats me how.
- Added multiple-drag-n-drop within subalbums. You can now select multiple photos and drop them to a new location within the subalbum they are already in.
- Added status widget to layout, incorporated progress bar for longer actions as well as message regarding ongoing action. this provides feedback for length actions that were unclear how long they would end up taking, as well as replacing the save/load dialogs which have now been replaced.
- Added album statistics window with # photos, # subalbums, and approximate size on disk information.
- Added an alert dialog. Now when errors occur instead of random couts going ot the command line (or even worse into oblivion if you started the program by clicking on a menu item or icon) an alert box will pop up alerting you to the problem and hopefully providing you with the information required to remedy it.
- Sped up loading albums SIGNIFICANTLY! This required changing the xml fileformat to include a modification date/time for each photo in each format. by saving this information photos can first have their modification times checked before computing their md5 sums to check if they have changed. computing md5's on small images is fast, computing it on large photos is slow, thus large albums with high res photos loaded very slowly. now modification times are checked first, only if a modification time has changed do I check the md5 before resizing the image. the performance improvment is amazing. :)
- Album Shaper now keeps track of when you last saved your album. If the current album has modifications since the last time it was saved you'll be alerted that these changes will be lost before you create a new album, load a different, or quit the program. Previously an alert only existed when creating a new album, even if no unsaved changes existed.
- Added grayscale tool to image editor, you can now convert a portion of an image, or an entire image to grayscale.
- Added crude exposure adjustment tool to image editor. Linear method used, works on really poor images, but has no effect on images which already span full gammut, even if not balanced.
- Albums now contain a creation date. This date is not changed every time you save your albums, allowing you to remember when you actually created the album in the first place, as well as knowing the last time the album was updated. Albums created with previous versions of Album Shaper did not save out this field so the closest assumption that can be made is to use the last modification date.
- Set all pop-up window titles
- In order to facilitate various features mentioned above Album Shaper now uses a slightly differnt XML format. However, the program is completely backwards compatable. A new XSLT upgrade system is baked in that upgrades your old XML files to the new format when you open them into Album Shaper 1.0a3 for the first time. There is no need to save our your album once you have loaded it up, the XML file is fixed and resaved before the album even appears on the screen. The update scheme can easily be improved to upgrade various older files to ever changing formats in the future, although the intention is to not change the XML format much at all in the future. You will never lose control of your formatting!
- Added an easter egg. :)
- Made ok button the default in the alert and question dialogs, so now you can just hit enter to skip through warning messages. :)

BUG FIXES:

- Fixed crash on load bug, which occurs when some work has been done and a new album (or the very same album) is then attempted to be loaded. This crash would never result in lost work (since you were intentionally loading an album and deserting any work in progress by doing so) but caused an annoying crash.
- Fixed major bug with saving and continuing. If an image was moved since the last time it was saved, then saved again, then edited (or rotated) other files ended up being used instead! Crazyness since the files were just fine on disk and if you quick and restarted the program before editing the file everything worked fine. When images are reordered on save the filenames in the photo object are reset as needed so this and various other similar bugs (blank images or wrong images coming up) should be fixed.
- Fixed major bug in cropping. top left corners were not scaled properly, I'm surprised this problem wasn't noticed before. images were too small previous that were cropped in testing the magnitude of the error didnt' become noticable. fixed now. :)
- Potentially sped up saving large changes by using copy method instead of loading up image object and recompressing to jpg (which makes no sense anyways) for images that have been moved within the album since the last save.
- Fixed all warnings. most had to do with gcc3.* complaining about including headers with .h in them like iostream.h but a few were my fault passing floats instead of ints into qt functions. :)
- Fixed bug when loading photos and their md5 has changed their descriptions were replaced with their filename, aka 2 or 6. Very bad! Still not sure why the md5's changed between making an album in Windows and then loading it up in Linux. Hrmmmmm....
- Various gui cleanups (backend and minor viewable changes with spacing of widgets).
- Fixed image editing interface bug with selection. If images were rotated the selection interface did not work properly until the album was saved and reloaded. The new resolution of the image was exchanged twice. Oops! Fixed.

ETC:

- Cleaned up window placement code
- Added gpl license stuff to top of config.h file, should have already been there.
- Applied a submitted patch to improve image flipping routines and other various tidbits in photo.cpp.
- Use qdate instead of standard c methods for computing current year, month, day, for creation and modification dates when saving.

1.0a2 - June 10th, 2003
Advanced Editing Features and Bug fixes
Platforms Supported: Linux, FreeBSD, Windows 2000/XP

- Replaced areYouSure dialog with spiffy configurable question dialog. The new dialog actually explains what the choice is you are making and what the consequences are, and has nice icons. :) Also added this dialog for exiting the new photo editing interface when changes have been made. If no changes have been made dialog will not pop up.
- Came to understand QObject and how it deletes children for you. Wow! Fixed a ton of destructors (entirely removing many) which should take care of just about all weird crash scenarios. Although the weird crash when loading a album after working on a previous one is still there, have to track that down...
- When creating export folder special characters are removed and replaced where appropriate allowing save to actually complete. If for some reason it doesn't an error is thrown to the console. Clearly the saving/loading interface needs work. I don't want to export tgz or zip files which contain everything because then to view your photos in other programs you would have to unzip them, but having the user click through the export folder and then select the xml file is awkward since they didn't create the xml file specifically. second I'm not sure I like the whole automatically use the album name as the export folder. please send me comments on how YOU would like the entire process to work.
- Fixed xml export such that escaped characters (', ", <, >, &) are caught and escaped properly. Previously such characters were exported as is and as a result Album Shaper was unable to construct a DOM and thus unable to load the Album.
- Fixed bug in which old subalbum representative images would stick around after subalbums are rearranged, resulting in other suablbums getting copies of other subalbums images in the case that they did not have a representative image. Fixed. :)
- HTML generated is now valid table. :)
- Add photos now allows extensions of all lower or uppercase, aka .jpg and .JPG are not allowed, also allow jpeg and JPEG extensions. Is there a better way to specify non case sensitive extensions for the QFileDialog?
- Old junk files/directories are now removed when saving. This consisted of old subalbums leaving their entire directories, thumbnail images, and HTML files around, as well as removed photos and leaving their jpg's around. No more stagnant files. :)
- Fixed bug concerning HTML output. table width is now correct size for top level album HTML, before text was off-centered since image was different size than able cell below with description.
- Fixed bug when album contains empty subalbums. On save null pointer would cause segfault when trying to check first photo description, save will not crash now on empty subalbums.
- Fixed bug when adding subalbums to previously saved albums. New photos that are first rotated before the album is saved don't get removed from their temporary location, in fact their temporary location is the album folder. This results in random jpg's lying around, no more! :)
- Fixed batch effects to adjust view such that each photo is visible when rotation/flip occurs. Gives you a better idea how much work is left.
- Album Shaper can now be run on Unix from any directory. The install targets have now been set to /usr/local/bin and images are placed in /usr/local/share/albumshaper/images/. In the future a default configuration file may be placed in /usr/local/share/albumshaper. The code has been modified in such a way that when run on win32 buttons should load properly. Yeah! =-)
- Added revert button to remove all editing changes. Warning, once editing dialog has been left previous image will be lost if album saved, only method for reverting changes is restarting Album Shaper.
- Added cropping capabilities through new editing interface!
- Added edit button and editing interface, select a photo and click edit to view it in larger form and apply various other manipulations!
- Fixed another major bug with save-as, previously old images were moved to new locations, destroying old albums! Fixed!
- Removed a lot of redundant code which constructed the tmp locations of photos when they need to be saved. If photos have been stored in tmp folder their filenames have been updated to the tmp ones so you can just always get their filenames before further modifications or permanently storing them.
- Fixed major bug with save-as. once album was saved save-as would not work any more, the HTML and xml would be saved but the actual images would not be copied over, nor would their new locations be updated.
- Set images to not be selectable while doing major things like adding, removing, rotating, etc.
- Set iconview to always make newly inserted photos visible. this lets us know how far things are going along as we add a ton of images, instead of just looking at a busy icon and wondering if things have gone awry but it's so slow we can scroll down to see. progress bar still needed.
- Added fast save using fast copy (no recompress) from tmp to permanent locations
- Changed HTML output such that album links to thumbnail versions if Java-script off, slideshow mode if javascript on. also only place link to slideshow mode from thumbnail mode if javascript enabled.
- Changed HTML output to only refer to Album Shaper, not version (so albums don't look dated), and put in hypertext links to the album shaper web site.
- Fixed declaration of for loop variables such that code compiles on VC++6.0
- Changed includes from to since prior is deprecated and won't build on windows.
- Added GNU GPL license to top of all files

1.0a - April 3rd, 2003
Initial public release!
Platforms Supported: Linux

- Coded up initial GUI, xml loading/saving, image rotations, and HTML export