What makes a good windows image viewer
When I started work on my windows image viewer I had a couple of goals. I had been using Acdsee and a few other image viewer programs for a while but all programs seemed to be getting bigger and bigger with each release. They had more feature with each released and were all slowly turning into image editing programs. In fact, that is something that seems to happen to many image viewer that start out simple. I can understand this, you often do need to crop images and do other simply things with them but all design decisions have downsides. If you add image editing functions to a simple image viewer it will have consequences, at the very least the user interface will be more complex.
So my three original design goals were:
Focus on creating a fast windows image viewer
Inzomia image viewer still today has no feature to edit images, it still has the focus of an image viewer. You can connect other programs from the viewer program if you want to change images but the image viewer in itself still today has no way to edit images, or to put it another way, no way to mess up photos by mistake.
When the viewer starts there is a lot of code to make sure the image started with the program is displayed as quick as possible. For example before thumbnails are displayed in the playlist, before the windows folder view is initialized and before the browser windows starts loading the viewer start web page.
I have also spend a lot of energy making sure the viewer program is as small as possible. A large exe file will always take more time to load than a small exe file. Even today you can fit the viewer program on a floppy disc. It also has no dependencies on plugins or other dll files, all basic features are in the exe file from start.
Use the zoom functionality from zoom studio
When the zoom studio was released i belive it was alone to have its zoom functionality. Hold the right mouse button and move the mouse forward away from you to zoom in toward where the pointer is and the other way to zoom out again. The advantage of this way of implementing zoom is that you never loose context of where you are in the image.
Use as much screen estate as possible for the image
Inzomia image viewer has a very different user interface. Much of the reason for it is to always be able to use as much screen estate as possible for what you are doing at the moment. I will go into more detail about this later. This is the single point the viewer has got most complaints about, and there is a small learning curve to use it efficiently.
Do you agree on this? Download the image viewer and let me know what you think makes a good windows image viewer.
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