Tinta: Picasa Inspired Thumbnail Viewer

Tinta: Whole Computer Thumbnail Viewer, Picasa Inspired.

 I used to use Picasa for photographs.  It was a nice, simple interface that showed me all my pictures on my drives. Since Picasa is retired and I was not able to find a replacement that had the same feature set, I decided to write Tinta that has some features in commons.

You specify what drives to scan. Tinta then scans those drives looking for images.  Any directory where an image is located is displayed in the directory tree on the left.  The thumbnails for all drives in on the right.

Get Tinta 0.02 here

This is a very early preview with a limited feature set, but the file scanning is stable enough to release and get feedback.

Right now there are only a few features:

Scanning:

    Tinta scans a wide variety of image formats.  If your format is not displaying, please comment below. 

Directory tree:

    Selecting from the directory tree scrolls the thumbnail browser to that directory.

    Right-click to get a context menu

        - Add to exclude this:  Do not display images from this directory.

    

Thumbnail viewer:

    Double-clicking on a thumbnail brings up the editor

    Double-clicking the directory open that directory.

     Right-click to get a context menu

        - locate on disk

        - delete selected file(s).  This is not undoable.

Editor:

    Not an editor yet, just a viewer.  Icon for next/prev and right key/left key.

Notes:

Tinta ignores small images do icons are not displayed.

My time to devote to this is limited until the end of this year, but then I will have time to devote to Tinta. I will be able to fix crash bugs, though.  In the meantime, please report bugs, add comments and feature requests here.  

Credits: (not complete yet)

    Qt 5. 

    FreeImage

    

-Doug Rogers

Gear Bakery 3.0. A Port of Dr. Rainer Hessmer's Involute Spur Gear Builder

I ported Dr. Rainer Hessmer's excellent Involute Spur Gear Builder to C++/Windows 64.

I modified the DXF export to be more friendly to Autodesk's Inventor.

Gear Bakery generates regular gears, internal gears, and rack and pinions.

Export to DXF or directly to Inventor.

Get version 3.05: Get it here

If you use this tool, please post about it here.  I would love to know what you are doing with it.  Pictures are always welcome, too.

Version 3 provides an updated GUI as well as improved zoom and panning. A lot of code was changed, so please let me know if there are any regressions.






After importing into Inventor, the gears should look like this:



You can then extrude as needed.

This project uses code from:

1. J. Fernández, L. Cánovas and B. Pelegrín,  DECOPOL-Codes for decomposing a polygon into convex subpolygons, European Journal of Operational Research 102 (1997) 242-243 (doi:10.1016/S0377-2217(97)00225-7).
2. J. Fernández, L. Cánovas and B. Pelegrín,  Algorithms for the decomposition of a polygon into convex polygons, European Journal of Operational Research 121 (2000) 330-342 (doi:10.1016/S0377-2217(99)00033-8)
3. J. Fernández, B. Tóth, L. Cánovas and B. Pelegrín, A practical algorithm for decomposing polygonal domains into convex polygons by diagonals, Top 16 (2008) 367-387 (doi: 10.1007/s11750-008-0055-2).

How to Derive the Near and Far Clip Plane Distances From the Projection Matrix

Here is a method to derive the near and far clip plane distances from the projection matrix. Assuming the the projection matrix is created with two entries that are calculated as:

// n = near clip plane distance

// f  = far clip plane distance

C = matrix[2][2] = (-f - n) / ( f - n);

for a column major matrix

D = matrix[2][3] = (-2 f n ) / ( f - n)

The near and far clip planes are calculated:

float n = D / (C - 1.0);

float f = D / (C + 1.0);

FBX Viewer 3.00 posted

I posted the source to my FBX viewer.   It has been significantly reworked to isolate the renderer from the FBX importing step.

http://code.google.com/p/fbxviewer/


It supports Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012.

x86 and x64 bit builds.

FBX SDK v 2014.0 beta 2

Uses FreeImage to load texture files.

Uses DirectX 9.0 for rendering, however, since the graphics API is abstracted, other version of DirectX or OpenGL could be used.

-Doug