Friday, March 19, 2010

New #graphics developments for #MediaWiki

There are two significant developments, one does improve the use of graphics on mobile phones, the other suggests an alternative to the Djatoka software.

I learned from Hampton that improved graphics are now available on the Mobile. A picture fills the screen completely and, it is then up to the user if he wants even higher resolution.


What Daniel Schwen announced is really interesting, let me quote his mail..

Hey,
inspired by the Djakota postig I whipped up a little wrapper around IIP [1] and VIPS [2]. It is basically the same think as Djakota, but as a compiled fast-cgi program (rather than Java).

A couple of examples:
http://toolserver.org/~dschwen/iip/wip.php?f=LC-39_Observation_gantry_pano.jpg
http://toolserver.org/~dschwen/iip/wip.php?f=Chicago.jpg
http://toolserver.org/~dschwen/iip/wip.php?f=Seattle_7.jpg

The examples use a flash viewer, but you can append &flash=no to the urls to get a Javascript viewer.

It should work to replace the names with arbitrary images on commons, but new images will have to be processed into a pyramidal tiled tiff image (with jpg compression) first. That takes time, about a minute. After that the image is cached and the viewer appears immediately. Be warned, there is no visual feedback that anything is happening while the image is processed. So be patient and try a reload after waiting a minute or so.

I'll write a gadget to integrate this into commons (the gadget will only appear on images with a certain minimum size).

Best,
Dschwen

[1] http://iipimage.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.php?title=VIPS

The important thing is that new exciting functionality becomes available. Many of the issues that have been solved with Djatoka may find their way into this approach.. Particularly caching is important maybe even pre-processing; you do not want to have the servers prepare a view at the peak of traffic.


If this is not enough, the discussion on Commons-l is discussing what can be done to give this approach more functionality..
Thanks,
GerardM

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