Updates, Fixes and Features for the next Alpha

We're working through some last issues before the next alpha release, which will be a 'code' release to the store.  The plan for February is bugfixing, implementing feedback, and getting it to a final release. That being said, we've had feedback coming in constantly, and we've had some bugs we've chosen to squash while we're deep in the Exif code.  Below are some highlights of what's in.....

Unicode support for the web page

This has been pointed out previously and I missed it, and for that I'm sorry. I got a gentle reminder that the web UI was in ASCII, which means that any special charaters showed up as a question mark.  For those living...well...anywhere outside of the US, and even many in the US, that's ugly, annoying and horrible.  I'm sorry it's been so long before fixing it, but fixing it we did. This allows for Cyrillic, Kanji, Hiragana, Umlats, Arabic, accent symbols and a host of other things to properly be displayed.  Here's some pictures showing it in the Playlist view as well as showing the file view and the new Overlay system all having full character support:

EXIF Improvements -> GPS Coordinates can now be shown as cities

One of the first asks when we opened up the public bug site was if we could show the location a picture is taken in.  The challenge there is we really wanted to do this offline, and we pulled it off.  We've got the location code dialed in pretty well, though I do see us enabling a choice to use an online service in the future.  As far as I know we're the only system that is using an offline lookup.  This means that if you have a frame without any internet, but the pictures have geotags in them...we can show you the city that they were taken in.  For some of them, it goes a step further and does the actual precinct or 'area' name.  For instance we saw pictures that were taken in Las Vegas come back with Paradise, which is the unincorporated part of Las Vegas (crazy story about it here: What is the difference between Las Vegas and Paradise, Nevada? | neighborhoods.com | neighborhoods.com).  It still misses...I have one picture that was taken in Japan and lists the prefecture 5 miles away from the river it was taken at. For the most part though, it's working, but we'll need feedback to know if it's 'good enough'.  We have one dial we can turn to make it more accurate, but it comes at a cost of file size/performance.  We'll turn it if we need to, or at least make it an option in a future update.  I'll attatch the photos to this post so you can see those demos.  The GPS coordinates are added to show they're available still as well, but the 'location' is a custom tag we made to tell the system to translate it to a city.

Image stretch, rotation, and improvements to the Overlay UI

The overlay UI is constantly getting tweaked to be easier to use.  Thanks to member feedback, I've moved some of the options up such as alignment which makes the flow easier. I've also added help tool tips, organized some of the UI better, and added features to help with placements of items.

Images now have the ability to stretch or rotate. This should help scale an image to the overlay in case the source image isn't exactly the right size.  I'm uploading 'overlaydemo' to show what the current UI looks like. We still have some tweaks in mind to make it easier to use, but for now this is better.

One last improvement to the exif data is the created date and the last modified date can now be formatted however you'd like, similar to the date time entries.  It uses the same dropdown, so if you want to switch to 24 hour you can. In a future update we'll make the date/time fully customizable for formatting as well.

There's other bug fixes that we're doing as we find things, but most of the work now is to make the adhoc wifi switch when we want.  The current methods we see all involve reboots which we're trying to avoid if possible. Once we have that solved we'll push all this to Alpha, and then again work next month to get it solid.

The work on the auotomation portion is paused till we get this out.  It's made great progress so it won't be such a huge undertaking, but this release is bigger than I expected, has valuable features and improvements, and we need to get it stable before moving forward.  

Thanks a ton, hoping to be back here in a few days with the release announcement!  Until then, we're all in the Discord!

Joe

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