Vista  -  Image storage system

by Nathan Micholey


Vista is a program for storing bitmap graphics in a Filer-style window which instead of displaying filetype icons, displays miniature versions of the stored images. It behaves in a similar way to the normal Filer and allows you to store additional information on each image as well as each directory. The images are stored in JPEG format and the miniatures are stored as squashed sprite files, so the storage requirements are very low.

Vista comes supplied with no images. You should make a copy of it before you use it, so that the original is always an empty directory which can be copied again to make a new image directory. To create a new directory, you must therefore copy Vista to the desired place on your hard disc (although it will work on floppy discs, the storage requirements for large image directories make it somewhat impractical). You can then run Vista by double-clicking on its icon on your hard disc. The Vista icon will now appear on the icon bar.

The Filer must have seen ChangeFSI before Vista can run properly. You may find with versions of ChangeFSI earlier than 0.95 that ChangeFSI has to be run, then quit before Vista will work. If this is the case it would be a good idea to try and get a newer version of ChangeFSI.

Vista's icon bar menu provides the normal Info and Quit options, as well as a Choices option which allows you to set up the way in which the images are stored. The Quality slider bar will adjust the quality of the JPEG compression. By default this is set at 75% which gives a good compromise between JPEG file size and image quality. There is little point in setting it higher, though setting it lower will use less storage space when this is at a premium.

The Optimise entropy switch will force the JPEG compression to create slightly smaller files by compressing the entropy tables; this takes longer to compress, but decompression is hardly affected.

The Browser images section of the choices dialogue box allows you to choose which of three image sizes that you would like to use in the viewer windows. The white rectangle to the right of this area shows exactly how big the images will be.

When all the settings are to your liking, click on Save to make them permanent.

Clicking Select on the Vista icon displays the root directory of your image collection. You can drag sprite and JPEG files into this window (or indeed any filetype recognised by ChangeFSI - e.g. TIFF), which will then be copied into the image directory. An Info window will then appear allowing you to rename the file and enter additional information to store with it if desired.

Clicking Menu over a Vista viewer window will display a Filer-like menu allowing you to select or clear all the images, open the parent of the directory or create a new directory.

The Image submenu contains an Info submenu allowing you to rename the image and read and alter the text saved with it. There is a Copy option which leads to a save box which allows you to save out individual images and entire directories, renaming them at the same time. The Delete option allows you to delete images and directories, and the View option will open windows showing all the selected images at full size as well as opening all the selected directories.

Double-clicking on a directory in a Vista Filer window will open the directory, while double-clicking on an image will display that image at full size. When an image is displayed at full size, it is dithered to the same number of colours as in the current screen mode, resulting in the best possible image, so a 16 colour sprite will be created in 16 colour modes and a 32,000 colour sprite will be displayed in 32K colour modes. This sprite can be saved out by clicking Menu over the image and following the Save submenu. There is also a Scale submenu which allows you to set the image scaling as a percentage.

Selections in a Vista viewer window can be saved out to a normal Filer window by dragging. The entire directory structure will be copied out when there are directories in the selection.

It is possible to have several copies of Vista on a hard disc so that separate image directories can be maintained.

Vista can be quit by selecting Quit from its icon bar menu.


 Copyright RISC User, 1994
