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Sorry, forgot to reply to this part.

ACDSee 8 Photo.

.. but I really dislike all the "managers", picasa, nero, hell, I _stopped_ using ACDSee when it became to cluttered (in favor of irfanview ofcourse).

Frankly I just dont see the advantage of having one heavyloading utility for each aspect of your work. Explorer does it's work, if I wanted more power on my workstations I'd be slapping Linux on them where I have amazing powers at my tooltip with some help by perl and bash.

And for the shameless plugging of his own article I can only say: tsk tsk.

The GIMP does it just fine, of course. I don't know if you use Linux, but ImageMagick is a great command line tool which lets you do almost anything on a number of image file formats; it's a Godsend when you need to do batch processing.

    I also used to do simple image editing with ACDSee too (JPEG conversion, resizing, rotating, etc).

I don't think monopoly means what you think it does.

Yep, you missed ACD Canvas, formerly Deneba Canvas. Best commercial vector-drawing program I've seen. http://www.acdsystems.com/

I suppose a number of posts about software titles missing from the list are inevitable, especially since the list could be enormous once one includes the bevy of CAD and 3D apps. While most of these are ill-suited for casual use, there is one missing title that has broad application: Canvas, which is now is owned by ACD Systems.

Canvas is capable of both vector and raster editing. I would say it's most comparable to CorelDRAW!, but it's clearly superior in many regards (such as the optional GIS and Scientific Imaging modules that ACD Systems added). It's available for Win32 and OSX. Canvas X is the current major version. The US$350 price quoted on the site is for the Professional version; the GIS and Scientifc Imaging modules cost an additional $200-300.

I suppose a number of posts about software titles missing from the list are inevitable, especially since the list could be enormous once one includes the bevy of CAD and 3D apps. While most of these are ill-suited for casual use, there is one missing title that has broad application: Canvas, which is now is owned by ACD Systems.

Canvas is capable of both vector and raster editing. I would say it's most comparable to CorelDRAW!, but it's clearly superior in many regards (such as the optional GIS and Scientific Imaging modules that ACD Systems added). It's available for Win32 and OSX. Canvas X is the current major version. The US$350 price quoted on the site is for the Professional version; the GIS and Scientifc Imaging modules cost an additional $200-300.

"Digital cameras can suffer from noise (caused by a number of things including optical & electrical crosstalk, dark signal non uniformity and photosensitivity non uniformity), and lower color resolution, color gamut, and dynamic range than film. Digital cameras have to capture images very quickly, at common and traditional "shutter speeds." The speed with which a digital camera system must work eliminates digital capture methods used in film scanners and some high end digital camera backs (used for still studio photography and scientific applications) to produce high spatial and tonal resolutions. This need for speed in capture results in an inherent trade off or balancing act in digital camera design. For this reason, as compared to film scanner digital capture, digital cameras have less sensor spatial resolution, less color resolution, and less dynamic range."
http://www.ltlimagery.com/film_v_digital.html

"In addition to being a ways from its goal, digital imposes its own unique handicap: it has much more limited dynamic range and far less exposure tolerance at the ends than film does"
http://www.dantestella.com/technical/digital.html

"The main challenges stem from digital captures' reduced exposure tolerance (latitude) compared to negative film, including digital's struggle to maintain highlight detail. In the digital world, a skin tone image can only be underexposed by as far as 5/10 of a stop (one half stop) and still yield a good looking print. That same skin tone can only be over exposed by 3/10 of a stop and still be in tolerance--assuming the subject is not too shiny or specular."
http://www.acdsystems.com/English/Community/Column sArticles/DigitalCamera/camera-2004-07-27.htm

I can't believe nobody's mentioned ACDSee yet.. we ARE comparing Windows image viewing/sharing/manipulation programs right??

I've tried Picasa 2 - it's slower than ACDSee 7 and seems to have a bug with its webpage export feature. I just tried creating a thumbnailed page from their existing templates four times... twice amongst two different folders (~20 jpgs ea) and it halted export about 85% thru with a dialog popping up saying "export cancelled." Dunno whats goin' on with that.. no crash/debug/error logs to help explain either..

If Google wants to step into this arena then we might as well size them up with the current king of the ring, so to speak - ACDSee has been my favourite image viewing app since v3 and it's gotten better with every new release. Yes, some might find it bloated, but that's all about setting it up to do what YOU need it to - since it can do everything from unzipping files to creating HTML pages.

Sure, it's not free and it doesn't have the GMail/Blog integration - but it's got more features than Irfan View and Picasa (maybe even combined). I'll spare you the gigantc features listing, but check out the link for more info.

Sorry if this seems like a rant, I have nothing against Google - just the hordes of Google fanboys on /. who believe anything Google touches is gold.

Cheers.

[I'm in no way affiliated with ACD Systems]

This is already done EXACTLY as the patent describes in ACDsee. Check out their calendar browser.

http://www.acdsystems.com/English/index.htm

The Bat! - An Email client

ZoomPlayer - A video player

FlashFXP - an FTP client.

UltraEdit - A text editor

PuTTY - A Telnet/SSH client

Yahoo Messenger - An IM program

Kazaa Lite - To get even more stuff

BitTorrent - A BT Client

Google Toolbar - A toolbar for IE to use google easily and quickly

ACDSee - An image viewer

Sorry, no Janet Jackson or swimsuit pics in this article.


Read it anyway, neat tech, plenty of details ! (ACDSee is an old favorite of mine)

ACDsee, a well-known and, at one time, free, image viewing and organising app, supports metadata. It puts it in a "descript.ion" text file in each directory. This is an ancient DOS standard. It's still supported by a few Windows apps, notably the Far manager (a shareware clone of Norton Commander for Win) and ReGet, a downloader; both Russian.

In fact I find the "descript.ion" metadata so useful I stick with apps that use it. At my last job, a web news site, I organised out image library using ACDsee and this metadata to add notes. ACDsee also has a nice batch rename.

No need to invent a whole bloody new file system to find your wedding photos.

I have a hard time believing this given that I've lived here all my life. In the three major cities, the immigrant population is so overwhelmingly large, that in many places, it outnumbers Canadian-born people (just take a look at Richmond, BC if you don't believe me). I really don't think employers look at foreigners with distaste out of xenophobia. Instead, it's more of a question of how well you fit in. It comes down to the age-old question of how good your communication abilities are and how well you work with the people around you....

For ages, Canadian immigration had next to zero requirements on the ability to speak either official language. And I think employers are rightfully cautious about hiring immigrants because they don't want someone who's going to stick out like a sore thumb in the workplace.

That said, if you can prove your communication abilities, and by the sounds of it, you're an English-speaker, then you've got a leg up on the majority of immigrants who arrive here.

At the same time, if you're looking for CS work, then be careful, because the Canadian computer industry has never really had an explosion Sillicon-valley style. It's strengths lie behind small startups trying to innovate their way into being successful, minus a few big-name companies like Bombardier, Corel (whether you like them or not), or ATI. Think ACD systems of ACDsee fame, or QNX, though that one's grown a lot over the years....

Much like stores have to plan for losing 2 - 5 % of their inventory to theft ("shrinkage"), so too must software companies accept that someone, somewhere is going to hack your software if anyone likes it. If they have all of the bits and bytes of your system sitting in front of them, and they have no need to communicate with your server, they can always strip it out. Your purpose should be to encourage the maximum number of users to pay for the full version, not to have the minimum amount of piracy.

A freeware version is a good idea, as it will raise your visibility... If someone is so cheap that they would use a pirated version, you might convince them to become a customer by offering freeware, then enticing them with the full thing. Most of the copies of WinZip out there are the freeware version, but there are a heck of a lot more paid copies than if they didn't offer the free one.

A 15 day trial is too short. You are not just trying to show users the full value of your software, you are also trying to get them so used to using it that they are willing to shell out the cash to keep doing what they are doing. Most people have settled on 30 days, but 60 days wouldn't be out of the question.

I'd also charge more for the software, as price creates a perception of value: 25 - 35 dollars should be sufficient. At 15 dollars you are putting yourself in the realm of cheaply made, junky Visual Basic apps.

You've probably heard the following, but as an avid digital photographer I would find your software difficult to use. For one, you don't have an intuitive, on-screen way to navigate through folders. There is a reason every other piece of image software out there has this... it's much easier to manually search your image collection, which is why you have a browser in the first place. No real image collection is a flat folder.

The single-level Thumbnail filmstrip is also a cute analogy, but it makes it difficult to, once again, search your pictures. There should be some way to have multiple filmstrips to facilitate easier searching.

On one hand, whatever algorithms you are using to handle large file databases is solid... ABC took a 10,000 image file folder with only a 5 second pause on this P3 800. And now that you have a solid program, the last bit of polish required is what brings in most of the money.

On the other hand, as you mentioned you are competing with literally thousands of other products, such as ThumbsPlus, SuperJPG, ACDsee, and many others which are all highly professional, tremendously polished, and mature products. Spidering websites is a good first step, but you need to differentiate yourself if you are going to see real success. Are you going to be the online viewer of choice, with auto-import from camera / auto-export to HTML via FTP features? Are you going to push yourself onto OEM machines as a simple, easy-to-use viewer for regular people?

And if you haven't read Steve Pavlina's excellent article on selling shareware, I strongly recommend you do so now.

The large company method (Oracle, Borland, of course MS, etc) is probably out. These people will not buy that software from you. From the point of view of the MBA's who make the decision, anything written in a couple of years by a couple of guy's can be replicated (ok, half as good) by 50 Hindi's working for 1% the price each over 4 years, and given that actual software development is like 2% of the company's cost, the uncertainties of buying someone else's software (look at all the time MS has bought software that turned out to be pirated or under the BSD license), they just won't do it. These MBAs veiw you and and anything associated with you as shit and won't give you the time of day.

Now look at the niche market guy, particularly the one to five person shop. In this catagory you have 4 Developers (discriptive name), ACDsee (probably as big as these class ever gets, a 40 person company), Mondo rescue (hey, it's even open source!), Device Logics (milking the last bit of money out of DRDOS with a 3 person company). Folks, as programmers, that catagory is where the money is. Those programmers keep more of what they produce than anyone else in the industry. Their products are cheap, but ultimately the future is a few biggies like Oracle and Microsoft still conning the pointy-haireds who won't buy from anyone else, and a vast class of independent shops. Society will spend less on software, but paradoxically software programmers will get more money, because the vast and oppressive corporate bureaucracies will be starved out.

Those guys will never buy our man's University written software because they can't afford enough to pay the university lawyer's hourly rate while they look over the docs and sign them.

In short, Sean is right and this software will never make money.

UNLESS . . . our man quits his academic job and re-writes this and starts selling it himself. Which is of course exactly what he should do.

You didn't hear it from me!

It's already in jpeg.

Almost no software supports it, but if you take a picture with a digital camera, all that kind of stuff is stuck into the file somehow.

I believe that ACDSee supports it.

It supports just about any file type you can think of including video and audio as well as compressed archives and even scans unrecognized files.

It's available for PC and Mac but the mac version is more limited and slower than the pc counterpart. There's also a slimed down version of the original image viewer that is fast as lightning.

check it out

http://www.acdsystems.com

These pictures are 4 megs apiece and obviously I need a good chunk of storage when I go shooting in the field, but I rarely delete any pictures. Whenever I get back to my car or hotel room I simply dump everything to my laptop and wipe the memory cards. A Digital Wallet would serve the same purpose.

I label my laptop harddisk photo folders like so: /foto/2001-10-27-b-d1 Meaning this folder contains D1 photos, the second set (b) of pictures dumped on the 27th of October 2001. This directory naming scheme is easy to work with. I use ACDsee to generate a thumbnails contact sheet for each folder.

Once I get back home I dump my laptop foto folder to CD-roms, using ACDsee to make contact sheets of all the photos.

The CD-roms go into Caselogic binders, and each CD is numbered and labeled with the range of dates and locations covered. Copies of the CD-rom folder contact sheets are kept on the laptop harddisk for easy browsing, and permits me to easily find the binder and CD-rom containing the picture I wanted to retrieve.

Presently I have some 30,000 photos in my collection. It would be a heck of a lot more bulky and cumbersome maintaining a comparable library of slides or 35mm negatives.

d/l ACDSee. Rules for viewing files.

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