What is Quick Pic?
Quick Pic is a handy image viewer capable of remembering collections of images for later viewing. Each custom gallery can be made up of images from any location or folder on the hard drive. Quick Pic stores information about the directory path of the images and retrieves these images when the galley to which they belong is selected. The tool was inspired by artists to be used as a quick way to store reference images. Since reference images are typically very random collections of images, Quick Pic stores them for convenient and fast retrieval. Quick Pic only remembers the location of the images so the images can be grouped without copying or moving files from their organized folders on the hard drive.
The Quick Pic interface was designed to be modern and beautiful. The application has an elegant transparent design giving it a clean and subtle appearance on the desktop.
Using Quick Pic
Quick Pic is easy to use and learn!
The program initially opens with two options: load and new. Load will display a list of titles of all the galleries saved from previous sessions in Quick Pic allowing the user to select and view a gallery. When the gallery loads, it's easy to step through the images using the previous and next buttons. The images will be displayed in the large panel and any corresponding notes will be displayed in the side panel. The New button will start the process of creating a new custom gallery. Creating a new gallery is easy and the program walks the user through the steps with helpful notes and instructions appearing in the side panel. The first step is to key in a title for the new gallery and press ENTER. The second step is to drag image icons from their place on the hard drive onto the main window in Quick Pic. Also, any comments about the image can be typed in the side panel and the comments will be remembered by the program. Clicking SAVE will store the gallery in memory. Remember to click SAVE only when all the desired pictures for the gallery have been dragged onto the application window. That's all there is to it! Future versions of Quick Pic will enable an EDIT option for changing images in saved galleries so stay tuned!How does Quick Pic Work?
Quick Pic makes use of a new platform from Adobe known as AIR. Quick Pic is written in Actionscript 3.0 and makes use of new packages that support the AIR runtime environment. Some of the features of the new classes include saving and retrieving files from the hard drive; putting files to a clipboard; listening for drag and drop events; and controlling the size of the application window on the desktop.
Quick Pic saves information about images into an XML file that is stored in the My Documents directory. This XML file is retrieved on later runs of the program to recall a gallery saved from a previous session. The Actionscript code uses XML classes to extract the required information to display the image and corresponding notes about the image. Creating a new gallery involves listening for a drag Event over the main window and a drop Event when the file is dropped on the window. The new information is appended to the XML file and the old file in the My Documents directory is over-written. Quick Pic is well thought out and considers all the possible sources of error and protects against them. The program will check for missing or moved image files. There is also testing for no XML file: if the XML file was deleted or the program is running on the computer for the first time then a starter XML file is created in the My Documents directory. Other error considerations include checking for duplicate title names and checking for image extensions (.jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif) of the files to be stored in the galleries.What features are unique to AIR?
Quick Pic makes use of the following AIR - AS3 classes: Clipboard, NativeApplication, NativeDragEvent, InvokeEvent, File, FileStream, Screen, NativeWindow & StageScaleMode. The File and FileStream classes are used to save and retrieve files from a particular location on the hard drive. The NativeWindow and StageScaleMode allows the application to use the computer monitor's full screen. The event classes are used for the functionality of dragging and dropping image files onto the main window. Quick Pic is truly unique to AIR by implementing the above classes.