Image Full Screen and Blinking

[fsantore]

Hello-  I would suggest that the ability to full screen the main image panel would be very useful.  As a new user, I see I can get almost there via multiple steps:  Mac full screen to remove the OS menubar, zoom the image, remove side panel, remove inspector, etc, and then reverse the approach to return the prior state. A much more desirable approach would be to have a View menubar selection and corresponding shortcut/icon to totally remove 'everything' except the image filling the monitor.  And of course another push of the icon would revert the state of the screen to the panes and artifacts as before.

As a second request, blinking would be more useful if one could 1) set the automatic blink speed, and 2) when manually blinking using the left/right arrows they operate circularly (ie, when at the last image, the right arrow now moves to the first, and vice versa when at the first image/left arrow).

A full screened image that is being blinked would require a decision on how to handle blink control.  I would not be a fan of diluting the concept by controls visible on the otherwise image only monitor.  Perhaps just activating spacebar automatic start/stop capability, left/right manual image movement, and if auto blink rate is added, up/down arrow will change the blink rate.

Thank you for considering, and  I was very pleased to have found you excellent contribution to our world.

        -Frank Santore

[Sander Berents]

Hi Frank,

These are wonderful ideas! And they align well with some of my own. What if we combine them?

- Have a button in the toolbar that opens the image in a separate window without title bar.
- On single monitor systems this window would cover the whole main screen, while on dual monitor systems it would cover the whole second screen.
- That single full screen image would then use the blink keyboard equivalents you describe, and pressing the Esc key would close it.
- In addition, if you click this toolbar button, the library window will switch to browser-only mode (and switch back to the previous mode if you close the single image window). On single monitor systems you would normally not notice this, but on a dual monitor system, if you were looking at your library window in browser/editor mode and click that button, you would switch to browser-only, with you image on your second monitor.
- Obviously a few preferences would need to be added for this. Some users may want to display the title bar, or minimal cursor information, or want to be able to select the monitor it should display on.

Your second request, for the circular backward/forward behavior and adjustable blink speed, that is something that is relatively easy to implement, so you can expect that in the next update.

Thank you for this great feedback!

[fsantore]

Hi Sander-

      Great.  I hadn't thought about the multi-monitor case.  I do use two monitors for the data collection in the observatory, but typically for the post-processing I'm on a couch with a MacBook Pro.  This  feature will prompt me to be a little more rigorous.  I like the idea of a switch to browser mode as well.  Sounds like you've got a solid handle on how these thoughts might be implemented, and I'm grateful you jumped in so quickly to consider them.  I'm still in the early stages of learning all the elegance of Observatory, and very much enjoying the voyage. 

      Thank you again and hope all is well in the Code Obsession world.

                   -Frank

[Sander Berents]

Hi Frank,

Observatory 1.5 has been released. It contains the changes for your second request

• Circularly operating backward/forward behavior
• Adjustable blink speed

Enjoy!

[fsantore]

Sander-  I was delighted to see the 1.5 (34) update today.  I'm not quite up to speed on the operation however.  The only way I've been able to undim the blink controls is to stack/align a set of images, select the 'Focus On Stack' control button, then hit the ellipses (3 dots).  At that point I can initiate a blink, or step through the stack.  However I don't see the new wrap-around functionality nor blink speed control. Where am I going wrong?  -Frank

[Sander Berents]

Hi Frank,

You only need to stack them if you also want to register the images (align). Without stacking, you can select the images you wish to blink in for example browser/editor mode, and click the play button. The < and > buttons that normally are used for manually stepping through a selection (and which now wrap around), function as speed controls during blinking.

After having images selected in the browser, you can also switch to Editor-only mode for blinking. See the new Help ▸ Observatory Help ▸ Common Tasks for more information about blinking.

[fsantore]

Sander-  I see I was expecting the 'forward/back' buttons referenced in the release notes to be the physical arrow keys.  I do see the functionality now, but am getting erratic results.  Examples are sometimes not seeing the blinking, when blinking occurs cannot stop the blinking (requiring exiting the program), attempting to exit editor-only mode fails, and other quandaries.   I'll need more time to better explore and describe these failures on my system as it may be memory or camera/image size specifics.  I'll get back to you first opportunity.  -Frank

[Sander Berents]

I have not encountered the erratic behavior you describe. Bare in mind that to keep the application responsive, Observatory does all its image loading in a background task. You can see if that is the case from the toolbar "Stop Tasks" button. So when you select images and immediately start the blink animation, Observatory may still be loading the images from disk, and the blinking initially may be somewhat choppy.

[Sander Berents]

Observatory 2 has dual monitor support and can display and blink the images full screen, optionally on a second monitor. Adjusting the blink rate was already implemented in 1.5.