scohen.org » jUploadr

jUploadr 0.8

scohen — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 05:10:53 +0000

I released jUploadr 0.8 today. It’s really getting solid, and there are improvements over 0.7 across the board. I added a ton of features, fixed all the open bugs, and improved the usability.
It’s a spectacularly solid release, and eclipses the official uploader’s feature set. I finally got to see the official flickr uploader in action and was quite underwhelmed. jUploadr allows you much more flexibility in setting tags and descriptions, as well as allowing you to add photos to existing sets.

Anyway, go grab it while it’s hot.

Write once run nowhere

scohen — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 15:02:27 +0000

With all the new activity with jUploadr I decided to go ahead and implement image rotation. When I looked at the SWT javadocs, I was pleased to see that they added a Transform object for 3.1. Now rotating objects will be as simple as
Transform tx = new Transform(event.display); tx.rotate(90); gc.setTransform(tx); // draw the image tx.dispose();
…and it was. The transforms really simplify image manipulation, and I thank the SWT guys (and girls) for implementing this.

The problem arises when you actually go to deploy this code. You see, in Linux, the transforms rely on having the Cairo graphics engine, which is only included on the most bleeding edge systems. Thankfully, it worked on my system, having upgraded to the Cairo capable Fedora Core 4 only a week before. Had I tried this prior to the upgrade, jUploadr would have crashed. Similarly, the transforms require GDI+ on windows. As far as I know, GDI+ is only included by default on WindowsXP and Server 2003.

So, I was faced with a dilemma, either I use the SWT transforms and drastically reduce the number of people that could use jUploadr, or write my own transforms and maintain compatibility. For me, it’s not really a good choice, so I went ahead and wrote my own rotation code.

I don’t know why the SWT people bound their transforms to such cutting edge graphics libraries, but that decision severely limits their use. It’s kind of baffling as well that they don’t have some sort of fallback mechanism. I’m really disappointed that instead of gracefully degrading (perhaps sacrificing speed or image quality) they just blow up if the library isn’t there. As I demonstrated, the transforms can be implemented rather easily in Java, so there’s really no excuse for this.

However, I am happy that their API allowed for me to implement the transformations on my own, and in the end, this means that jUploadr users will just get another useful feature, even if I had to work a little harder to give it to them.

jUploadr 0.7

scohen — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 04:18:53 +0000

I released jUploadr 0.7 today. It supports the new authentication API so Yahoo! users can log in with their yahoo name. It also doesn’t store your password locally, or transfer it over the internet (thanks new authentication API!).
I also fixed a bunch of usability issues that were brought to my attention, as well as a couple of the open bugs.

In addition, I’m pleased to say that jUploadr got its first donation this week. I thank you, anonymous donor. Here’s to many more uploads.

More good news

scohen — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 03:05:02 +0000

More good news for Macintosh jUploadr users (both of you!). For a lark, I filed a bug for the long-standing transparency issues regarding image overlays. To my surprise, this bug was fixed in about three days, so now jUploadr on the Mac looks just as good as it does on Windows and Linux.

I’ve been very impressed with the response I’ve received from the SWT team. They’ve knocked out several bugs in very little time, and enabled me to ship an application that works well on three very different platforms. Granted, Swing would allow me to do the same thing, but SWT allows cross platform GUIs with the native widget toolkits and native speed.

I’ll put together a release for Mac when a nightly SWT release is made available and I have a couple days to test it.

Good news

scohen — Fri, 27 May 2005 03:58:09 +0000

jUploadr users on Mac, rejoice. It looks like the bug that prevented it from accepting drag and drop requests has been fixed, and will be out shortly.

I didn’t fix it myself, but you can see what happened on this thread. Thanks to everyone that figured out what was wrong, and especially to Veronica Irvine for fixing it.

Yay!

jUploadr 0.6

scohen — Wed, 18 May 2005 05:25:28 +0000

I released jUploadr 0.6 tonight. It only has one new feature, but it’s important. Before, when you’d drop a bunch of photos on the UI, jUploadr would lock up while it re-scaled all of the pictures. Now, thanks to threaded image scaling, it displays a temporary image and maintains its responsiveness.
I also fixed a couple of bugs. The first only affected users on slow latent connections, and the second was an oversight regarding the new config UI that broke proxy support (it didn’t break it per se, but it couldn’t be turned on via the UI. giving the -proxy command line argument would still make proxy work).

Unfortunately, jUploadr totally broke under Tiger. I’ve filed a bug with the SWT team, and it looks like another user found the problem, but I’ve not heard back from them, so I don’t know if and when a fix will come.

So far, I’ve had really good responses to the program, and I hope that everyone enjoys this release.

jUploadr 0.5

scohen — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 06:30:42 +0000

I released jUploadr 0.5 today, and I have to say that I’m pretty happy with it. Thanks to John Hume it has a configuration UI. I also changed the layout managers so you can actually resize the application and have the thumbnails fill it.

There are a bunch of new usability features and a couple of bandwidth-limiting and monitoring tricks which should help out people with free accounts.
Additionally, this is the first release that’s available for OS X. I’m still not happy that some of the transparent effects aren’t working, but the ones that would hamper usability are easily turned off. Even with the diminished eye-candy, it’s still light years ahead of the Mac flickr uploader –it has a progress bar that works.

So, go grab 0.5 while it’s hot

jUploadr 0.4

scohen — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 05:53:11 +0000

I released jUploadr 0.4 tonight after testing it out for a couple days. I’ve continued to further refine the interface as well as adding some requested features. The most important feature for this release is the ability to set attributes on multiple files, which should save a bunch of time for those people who upload a group of related files.

Admittedly, this release is basically about multiple editing, but I made many code improvements under the hood as well, including handling popup menus in a consistent manner and the first attempts at multi-threading image scaling.

In other news, I got a chance to see the mac version of the flickr uploadr, and jUploader is much nicer. The mac version didn’t show a progress bar when uploading, and you could only set privacy settings and tags. Not being able to edit the title is very annoying. Now if only I could get some spiffy graphics for jUploadr…

What are you waiting for? go get jUploadr!

jUploadr 0.3.5

scohen — Sat, 22 Jan 2005 05:19:03 +0000

I released jUploadr 0.3.5,
The highlights include :

Compiles and runs under java 1.5
Improved error handling
Image decorations
Authentication caching

I also made different versions for different architectures, so if you’re on windows, or have a 64 bit AMD, you can download a version tailored to your system.
Go get it

jUploadr 0.3

scohen — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 06:24:25 +0000

I got some help from John Hume who was so kind as to add threading to the uploader. He also reports it works on windows, though I don’t have the dlls yet.
I added a progress bar, pre-emptive authorization and a couple performance tweaks.

I think this is probably the first truly usable version jUploadr. Before the threading of uploads, it would just sit and hang, which really sucks. Now you can still edit while you’re uploading, and you get a neat little progress bar too.
Give it a shot