Over the past few years, the top 2 complaints about ristretto have been ‘it leaks memory!‘ and ‘it crashes in this <obscure> way when I press this button‘.
And you know… these people were right. During the past 6 months, my main focus was fixing these problems. After a lot of code-simplification and refactoring, I finally managed to fix all the reported crashes and memory-leaks. (Yes, I know this took a while…)
In my opinion, this made ristretto 0.1.0 the most stable release so far.
But there are still quite some improvements to be made by removing nuisances in the user-experience. Some of these have already been addressed in 0.1.0, including:
- Support for using arrow-keys to navigate through the images
- Additional accelerator for the ‘f’ key for switching to full-screen-mode
- Additional accelerator for the ‘q’ key for quitting ristretto
- Modify scroll-zoom so the mouse-cursor stays above the same region of the image when zooming in or out
- Re-introduce the file-properties dialog.
There are still some things that can be improved with regards to usability, I will work closely with the Xfce Design SIG to identify and improve problems with the ristretto UI. One of the things I will finally start on improving is the sorting-algorithm used for sorting the images on their filenames (Bug #6866), so the images are sorted in a similar order as they are in Thunar.
The main focus during the 0.1.x release-cycles is getting existing functionality to work better, so expect a faster release-schedule featuring smaller changes for the coming months.
is there is any hope that ristretto will finally get an ability to do image transformations? The only need im keeping gimp on my pc is for scalling/cropping/rotating photos.
Thanks
Link | October 10th, 2011 at 15:22
Short answer; ‘no, that is hopeless — for now’:
Image transformations will not be supported natively, since ristretto is – and will be – an image-viewer.
The slightly longer answer:
While ristretto is primarily developed for viewing images, and I do not want ristretto to fool around with the contents of images – other apps like gimp are a lot better in that then ristretto ever can be. I recognize your request as something more people want. – To perform basic modifications to images without the need to start a complex external application.
One possibility to extend ristretto’s functionality in this direction is through some kind of plugin mechanism (adding menu-items), or custom-actions (like thunar’s, but then tailored for images) that can be used to call ImageMagick’s convert tool. I have not thought about this a lot so at this moment I don’t have a good plan on how to get this implemented.
If you have some ideas on how you would see this, I am open to suggestions. – We can discuss this on Bugzilla :-)
Link | October 10th, 2011 at 18:10
I’ve found ristretto to be perfectly stable and frugal regarding memory.
I’m surprised one of the top two complaints isn’t the weird cropping behaviour, though: the way panning sometimes brings you to a false edge of a pic, despite there being more pic.
The redundant toolbar at the bottom of the window and lack of a scrollbar on the thumbnail carousel are also annoying, if more minor issues.
Link | October 11th, 2011 at 02:21
Congratulations Stephan, this release is a huge improvement! Keep up with the good work!
Link | October 11th, 2011 at 06:16
Woohoo! Development!
Link | October 11th, 2011 at 17:48