Just a joke, since both Nao and Arantor are both quite skilled at optimization. :P
I'm obsessed with it! I think Pete pities me
:lol:Uniform thumbnail size is a feature that really improves the "look" of a gallery, or even an embedded "gallery" attached to a post. Their are a lot of ways to do this, but when I found Jcrop, I realized it was a good way to make relevant thumbnails quickly and simply, and a better alternative to overcropping the center of the image to the minor axis to create a thumbnail.
It's more complicated than that.
First of all, when I worked on AeMe, as I said I found out about a library to do cropping, but it was written in Ruby. Of course some of it was JS so I considered converting it to clearly use JS+PHP, it was actually in my to-do-list with a high priority. I also found out about Jcrop a few months after that. Anyway, what happened is that I try to fix bugs before adding major features, and I was at a point where I was considering dropping my work on AeMe to focus on non-SMF stuff, so I naturally never implemented that.
Secondly, and I think it's more important, the main reason I didn't implement that is because I was never sure about the upload process being too long already. I wanted to make it simpler, not more complicated, and adding an extra step like this, while certainly helpful in most situations, is not always going to be desired especially when you're trying to turn AeMe into a "perfect gallery", something that could be used stand-alone...
So, my plans were to use it only when requested -- i.e. keep the main file around, generate thumbnails and previews, and then if the user wanted, they could go to the item page, click a "Edit picture" button or something, and have the choice to (1) rotate the picture (and related thumbnail and preview), (2) resize and/or crop the picture, (3) crop the thumbnail or preview based on the stored picture.
I'm NOT very good at implementing good UI (it always takes me weeks to do that when others could do it in days), so at that point it became a low-priority item, even though it was officially high-priority. It's mainly because of UX (user experience), which I wanted to be 'perfect'.
Now, I'm still considering dropping attachments altogether from Wedge, and using AeMe instead. But first of all I'll need to fix some bugs (and even before that, try to spot them all), then work on a parallel implement of attachments vs uploads, and finally get rid of the attachment system and have someone develop a converter (or do it myself within Wedge...)
It's not an easy task, let me tell you. And it's not helpful that none of us is being paid for it...
I figured that Jcrop code would be more useful as an inspiration than anything else, and by the time you were through rewriting it, it would be 4 lines of code and compress down to 12 bytes! :D
Well, size doesn't matter here, because it's a process guests don't get, so it has no influence over the apparent speed of a forum, and thus I'm not going to spend a lot of time optimizing it, if anything. Jcrop is a good enough solution, I could rewrite it to use 'proper' indentation and spacing according to my (Wedge's) standards, but I'd rather be able to easily update the script, and/or participate in its development. (Since it's available on github, it's something that can be done.)
The other thing I've been thinking Jcrop would be useful for is an intermediate sized "preview" image. A smaller subsection of the full image that could be used for an inline preview within the text of a post.
That is already 'done' in my mind.
As a reminder, AeMe has pictures (limited size but usually large), previews (usually 600x400 or something, for use on item pages) and thumbnails (usually 150x100 or something, for use on album pages). Depending on the type of preview (site homepage or blog), I'd automatically attach the thumbnail (on the left of the text preview) or preview (on top of the text preview, or in a carousel for instance).
Don't believe that just because it isn't in Wedge yet, I haven't thought about it a lot already
;)Just check out
http://nao.noisen.com for an example of how I want Wedge blogs to look like. And ideally I want to simply take the first graphic element in each post, get their thumbnail and offer this as post preview in smaller post lists. (eg site homepage, of which I currently have no example for you, except on sites I'm not related to.)
