New beta of PhotoMesa available!
By
Mike Tomkins
(Monday, November 12, 2001 - 01:58 EST)
Java image browser should now be even better suited to multi-platform CD photo albums...
We told you back on August 2nd about PhotoMesa, a Java image browser created by the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, and shortly thereafter had the pleasure of talking to the University's Professor Ben Bederson about the program. He picked up on our mention that the program looked well suited to the task of viewing images on home-made album CDs, since the Java runtime is available for numerous different computer platforms. He also noted our suggestion that if the location of the cache files could be specified by the user, the program would be even better suited to this task. We were pleased to see, then, that the latest beta of PhotoMesa implements this suggestion - meaning that thumbnails for images on CD can now also be cached, making for a faster and more pleasant experience with home-made album CDs.
The latest beta can be downloaded from the HCIL website now, and comments, questions or bug reports are welcomed by email to Bongwon Suh, a graduate student who has taken over PhotoMesa or Prof. Bederson. Note that there is already one known bug in the current beta - deleting a file by right-clicking on it and selecting the delete option doesn't work in "hand" mode, although it does in "select" mode. The program is definitely worth trying out, though, and once the final 1.3 version comes out, could make a great way to share images with friends using a variety of computer platforms without their needing to find an image viewer themselves!
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