It's a Linux Mint 13 (itself based on Ubuntu Precise, the current long-term support version) 32-bit with the Mate window manager. No customizations to the theme, apart from using backports from the current version of Mate (didn't have any ill effect on Siren 3.13, btw is there a way to download a previous version?).

The thing with the forum was that I originally wrote the post with double quotes around "Column group toolbar" , previewed the post and all seemed fine, but when clicking on Submit the resulting post was cut off at the first double quote.

Edit: it did the same thing just now... Seems to be limited to the preview-then-submit case, when posting directly the bug doesn't manifest itself.

Looks like the new version reclaims just a small part of the space freed by deselecting the 'Column group toolbar' option...
http://s11.postimg.org/ggh7a6zof/siren_tb_1.png

http://s11.postimg.org/jolon8ly7/siren_tb_2.png

Also, found out that this forum doesn't like the double quote when posting topics (but while previewing all seems fine, oddly).

3

(9 replies, posted in Bugs and problems)

Sent you the INI by mail, but probably it isn't necessary to analyze it because in producing a fresh one I've gathered some more specifics.
Seems this problem only happens when the user reorders the columns. Apparently when taking note of the new ordering, Siren also writes some default size for all columns in the INI, and thereafter that size isn't changed any more.

4

(9 replies, posted in Bugs and problems)

Sure, here you are:

I am on a directory with images :
http://s4d3.turboimagehost.com/t1/11104097_1_-_Column_default_width.png
I decide that the columns for image dimensions are too wide and waste space, so I resize them down:
http://s4d3.turboimagehost.com/t1/11104098_2_-_Same_directory__columns_resized.png
then I go to another directory where there aren't any images; Siren dutifully hides the columns for the Image category:
http://s4d3.turboimagehost.com/t1/11104099_3_-_Other_dir__category_not_present.png
I go to a directory containing pictures, the columns for the Image category reappear, only that they've lost the narrower width that I set in step 2:
http://s4d3.turboimagehost.com/t1/11104100_4_-_Yet_another_dir__category_present.png

Hope this helps.
Regards...

5

(9 replies, posted in Bugs and problems)

Yes, I've been able to reproduce them on another WinXP machine. They only occur on certain conditions.

The column width is reset when you change to a directory that doesn't contain files of that category. The columns are first hidden, and when you go back to a directory with images/music files/etc they are displayed again, but at their default width.

The double-click thing happens only on the file checkbox. In every other position of the row double-clicking on a unselected file selects and launches it, whereas on the checkbox it doesn't move the selection so it launches a different file from the one from the one on which the user clicked.
Sorry for my inability to explain in words, probably I'm using the wrong terminology. Example, let's say I have a file selected but unchecked (in this case, Hokusai.jpg) :
http://s4d4.turboimagehost.com/t1/11100191_BeforeClick.png
if I double-click on the checkbox of the file Bliss.jpg, Siren launches Hokusai and then checks Bliss: http://s4d4.turboimagehost.com/t1/11100192_AfterClick.jpg
BTW in Linux Siren launches Bliss instead.

Sad to hear about the unresolvable issues. I don't know it it helps, but aMule (www.amule.org) is another cross-platform program based on wxWidgets and the selection works okay in Linux. Perhaps you can reuse some of its code, if it uses the same component as Siren...

6

(9 replies, posted in Bugs and problems)

Yes, all the Windows directories you listed are on a local drive. But I've seen that Siren at startup enumerates a bunch of other directories on the drives in My Computer and the network resources in Network Neighborhood. In the weekend I'll be able to do some more tests on a old installation at home, and if I'm able to reproduce the problem I'll rerun Process Monitor and dump the trace file or grab a screenshot to send you.   

For the odd selection behavior on Linux, let's say I have 5 files
1
2
3
4
5
and I want to select from 2 to 4 using only the keyboard (I just hate laptops' touchpads).
I'd move the cursor on 2, press shift and move the selection down to 4 using the cursor keys while keeping shift depressed.
If by mistake I go further down to 5,
1
2
3
4
5

I'd expect that pressing the cursor key up (while still keeping the shift pressed) would shrink the selection, and in Siren on Windows indeed it does. Instead on Linux the file 5 remains selected; you have to discard the selection and restart from scratch.

Hi, I've got a little time this morning to test the latest build on a machine at the workplace. The latest interface modifications work a charm, many thanks for those. However I've noticed a few quirks.
On Windows (XP):

  • Every time you change directory, the column width is reset so that the entire heading fits. I've noticed this when browsing folders with photos, so I've only seen this behavior for the columns in the "Image" category, but probably it happens with other categories too.

  • A fast double click executes the file currently selected, not the one on which the click occurred. Seems Siren hasn't got enough time to move the selection...

  • At startup, Siren stalls for ~6 seconds. After tracing Siren's activity (with Sysinternals Process Monitor), it turns out it does a fair bit of prefetching, and the stall occurs when it's checking for a link in Network Neighborhood whose remote machine is offline.
    I haven't yet had time to check if it does the same for a network drive when the server is inaccessible, but it's worth investigating IMO because the same six seconds penalty is possibly multiplied by each offline resource. Sadly for the next few days I'll be offsite, I'll only be able to conduct further tests on Monday.

On Linux (Mint 9):

  • The behavior when selecting with the cursor keys isn't the one expected. If you overshoot the end of your target range, reversing (while still keeping shift depressed) doesn't deselect the extra items.

Thanks again, and sorry if I'm being a bother.

Yes, the toolbar hiding could be useful.
Also, sorry that I forgot to mention that I usually don't show the category column toolbar and that's the reason why I have a lot of free space on the first row.

The screens on which I use Siren are usually quite small (netbook size, 1024x600). On version 2.x I could rearrange the toolbars in a more compact layout to save space, but no longer in the 3.x tree, probably due to its cross-platform nature and the use of wxWidgets.


However, since the current toolbar layout leaves a lot of empty space in the first row, and the expressions are seldom very long*, I think it might be worthwhile moving the expression box in the first row on the right of the buttons.
Perhaps this could be decided by the user with a "Use compact toolbar layout" checkbox in the Display preferences (or maybe in General, since it would probably entail an application restart just like changing language).


*and in the remote case they are, one can always scroll horizontally in the expression box...

10

(2 replies, posted in Bugs and problems)

Tested build 825 on Linux Mint 9 (a Ubuntu LTS derivative).

So far few issues; one is the dates in the columns having a format that's too long for my taste (example "Aug 2011 02:06:28 AM CEST"); does it get the format from some LC_ variable that I can tweak? Although I'd actually prefer some display setting in Preferences... 

While composing this post, I've found a bug: if you change the default order of the columns, the context menu entries "Insert pointed value into expression" and "Copy pointed value to clipboard" don't use the current column, but the one from the default ordering. Don't know if this also happens in Windows, I've never used before these two features...

11

(1 replies, posted in Evolution requests)

First, thanks for this wonderful program. A couple of things could make it even better, though (well, at least for me wink )

     Instead of the nearest neighbor resizing algorithm that you seem to be using now, a biquadratic/bicubic/Lanczos resize would yield a much better preview, especially at smaller sizes. Those algorithms are well documented and already implemented in many open source projects like comic book readers, of which there's at least one coded in every programing language (personally I use CDisplayEx), so code examples abound.
Probably it would be a little too computing-intensive to do the resizing in realtime as it is now, so maybe you could keep the fast existing code for the while-resizing-the-preview part, wait X milliseconds for the pane to settle down to the desired size and only then apply the better quality algorithm. The same approach could be used when scrolling through the images of a directory if you want to keep resource usage low, even though any PC made in the last 4-5 years should be more than fast enough to handle it.

     Support for PNG images preview would be very welcome, too. Probably the less costly solution would be to link to a existing DLL (libpng for example, but don't know about license either; maybe to use it you'll have to make the source code available on your site...). Since the Image & Fax viewer renders PNG images fine, probably from Windows XP onwards there's already some system library that decodes them.

12

(1 replies, posted in Evolution requests)

First, allow me to thank you for a wonderful program! It's one of the utilities that saves me the most time.

A feature that I'd find most welcome would be the ability to compute offsets to numbers in the file name. 
Let me explain my problem: I have large collections of images (scans of books) with numbers in the filename;
some pages are missing, leading to gaps in the sequence, and I would like to retain those gaps when renaming.
What I would like to end with is the following situation (the underscores are there to avoid renaming confilcts):

      old             new
   Page001      Page_003
   Page002      Page_004
   Page003      Page_005
   Page006    Page_008
   Page007      Page_009
   Page008      Page_010

At the moment  I'm using the option %n, tweaking the starting number in the program options at each
new gap, but it quickly becomes tedious and is prone to errors if one gets distracted. When there are too many
gaps, my last resort is to do it from the command line (using the GnuWin32 base tools), with the syntax:

  for /L %P in (1,1,9) do @echo %P | xargs expr 2 + | xargs -i cmd /c ren "Page%P.jpg" "Page_{}.jpg"

There are two problems with this approach, the main being that I can't seem to make it compute negative offsets;
the other one (a minor annoyance that is) is that I have to run the command once for the tens, once for the
hundreds, another time for the thousands...

If there was an option in Siren like %N1(±2), it would solve the problem in an elegant manner.

Note: in case you decide to implement my suggestion, you may want to start renaming from the bottom with
positive offsets and the reverse with negative ones, to avoid conflicts.

Sorry to intrude on your time, an again thanks for the great program.
--Aleph0