From: gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu (Garance A. Drosehn)
Subject: New version of pCD (Photo CD Reader) available
Keywords: Photo_CD Photos pCD.app
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 08:47:36 GMT

Just before Christmas, Dick Phillips (rlp@lanl.gov) released a program
called pCD for reading Photo CD's on the NeXT.  Just after New Year's,
I finally got the NeXT CD-ROM reader which I've been waiting for since
it was ordered in August.

I had a few vacation days coming to me, so I used them to work on pCD.
While this has been an excellent project for me to work on (I certainly
know a lot more about NeXT programming than I did on Dec 25th), I have
to get back to my real job for awhile.

I do believe my changes are significant enough that anyone interested in
the program would be better off with this version.  Thus, even though I
have a lot of ideas for things to change in the program, I'm making this
version available via anonymous FTP.  I haven't tried to put it on 
sonata or cs.orst.edu due to usenet articles which seem to imply that
they are out of disk space.  The fact that I thought I'd be home and
asleep over 4 hours ago probably has something to do with it, too.

Anyway, it is available via anonymous FTP from:
       host:  eclipse.its.rpi.edu       [ IP= 128.113.24.91 ]
  directory:  NeXT
      files:  pCD0.2.README
              pCD0.2.compressed

I have a number of ideas for further improvements, and I'd be interested
in any other ideas that people have.  I make zero promises that I'll ever
*do* any of those things, but I'm interested in knowing about them... :-)

---
Garance Alistair Drosehn     =     gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu
ITS Systems Programmer            (handles NeXT-type mail)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;           Troy NY    USA

---
excerpt from pCD0.2.README

I'm calling Dick Phillips' version "0.1".  I have made quite a few changes
to it and am calling this version 0.2.  More options are implemented, some
bugs are fixed, and the code is structured differently in many parts.  I'm
hoping that everything about the result is pretty obvious, as I haven't
written any help for it yet...

The one feature that isn't obvious is that you can get a "face-tiff-sized"
selection rectangle by holding down the option key before click-dragging
in an image window.  This feature may move to a different key combination
in future versions, as I'm not sure it's correct from the standpoint of
NeXT User Interface Guidelines.

This now supports opening all the image sizes, although the preference
panel does not allow you to select the largest size.  You can try that
size if you want, but it requires HUGE amounts of VM.  The first time I
opened an image at the largest size, my swapfile grew to over 70meg by
the time the picture was open.  That left me with all of about 180K
if disk space free on my hard disk (yes, *K*, not meg).  This was much
too close for comfort, so I disabled the option.

Source code is included, as is a compiled version of the resulting
program.  This program will only work on NeXTSTEP Release 3.0 or better.
I hope people find this interim release useful, even though there are
many many things that I'd like to do to improve this some more.  I doubt
I'll have time to do any of those things anytime soon though, so I 
decided I'd make this version available as it is.

		- Garance / Jan 12th, 1993