BigPicture Copyright (c) 1994 John Montbriand. All Rights Reserved. Meaning, only John Montbriand has the right to sell copies thereof.
The copy of BigPicture you are using is a purchasable product. As in any store, you are welcome to brouse for one business day. If, after brousing, you choose to maintain a copy on your computer, then you are purchasing that copy.
The price is $20 in Canadian funds, send your payment and a return address to:
John Montbriand
P.O. Box. 1133
Saskatoon Saskatchewan Canada
S7K 3N2
I will send you a receipt, and much thanx. I am pleased to be doing business with you.
Maintaining a copy of this program and not paying for it is theft. Make no mistake, if you steal from me in this way, you are depriving me of the means by which I survive.
In purchasing this product, you agree to assume full responsibility, for any incident that may occur as a result of its use (This program is not for sale where such purchases are prohibited by law).
All sales are final (Where this is prohibited by law, you may request a refund within 20 days of purchasing a copy of this program provided you present a valid receipt of purchasing your copy, and provided you destroy all copies of this program in your posession).
In purchasing this product, you agree that you are aware of the laws governing purchase and copyright in the area where you are making the purchase. If you are in an area where this program is not for sale, you must destroy all copies of this program in your posession immediately. If you choose to maintain a copy under such circumstances, be aware you are breaking the law by making an illegal purchase.
Archivists and Distributors: maintaining a copy of BigPicture in its distribution format (ascii text encoded binhex file) is not considered a purchase. BigPicture is not for distribution in areas where the laws of copyright do not apply. You may not distribute modified copies of this program.
Hardware Distributors: maintaining a copy of BigPicture on 'yet to be sold' hardware at your own risk is not considered a purchase provided that same hardware is not rented, and provided you either remove it from the hardware when it is sold, or you ensure your customers are aware of its presence. I am pleased to be supporting your industry.
• System 7: drag and drop files, folders, or disks* into BigPicture,
• Double clicking on portfolio files.
* Be careful when dropping folders and disks into BigPicture. The program will attempt to load every single file it finds in the disk or folder--which may take a very long time if the disk contains hundreds of files.
When you open a file in BigPicture it does not check to see if the file can be displayed until you actually try to display it. As a result, you can open many different files, but only the ones containing PICT and GIF data will be displayed as pictures.
This lazy evaluation of files is mainly for performance reasons when hundreds and hundreds of files are being loaded. My goal here was to minimize the time you have to wait between the time when you tell it what files you want to see, and the time when you're looking at those files.
• Controls for working with images are accessable by mouse at the bottom of the window: toggle maximum screen, mark/unmark, rotate right, and rotate left, flip vertical, flip horizontal, zoom out, zoom in, fit to window, 3D, scroll the image around in the window, turn auto shuffling on or off, return view to original state, or forget about an image,
• Clicking on the image number indicator opens the goto window,
• The scroll bar lets you switch between images,
• Clicking on the information bar to the right displays the image's colours,
• Clicking on the image centers the place where you click in the window.
• Several keys on the keyboard duplicate commands you would normally click the mouse to use:
Return key: fit the image in the window
Delete key: forget about the current image.
Arrow keys: for scrolling the image's view
+ key: zoom in
- key: zoom out
Letters and numbers can be assigned as keyboard equivalents for different images. Once a key has been assigned, typing it will automatically scroll to that image.
• Unassigned keys or keys that have no command attached to them serve to cancel entire screen mode or to cancel maximum screen mode.
• File menu: commnds for saving portfolios, opening pictures, switching to the full screen modes, showing the time, activating autoshuffling, and shutting down the program.
• Edit menu: presently, you can only copy images to the clipboard,
• Mark menu: commands for quickly scrolling to images by name using either image names added mark menu, or using the goto window,
• Go menu: commands for shuffling through your images for those who don't like to use the scrollbar.
• Scene menu: provides a subset of the commands available from the button controls for those who prefer to use menus or keyboard equivalents instead of the mouse.
• You can use the letters A-Z and numbers 0-9 as keyboard equivalents for images. Once a letter has been assigned to an image, typing it will automatically scroll that image into view.
1. Open the goto window by choosing Go To… from the Mark menu,
2. Click on the image you would like to assign a key to,
3. Type the key you would like to use for that image,
4. Close the goto window.
-- now typing the letter you assigned will scroll to that image
• The keyboard equivalent for the image is displayed to the left of it's name in the goto window.
• To remove a keyboard equivalent for an image, open the goto window, click on the image's name, and type the space bar (actually, you can use any key that is not a letter or a number).
• It's ok to assign the same key to different images, if you do so, typing the assigned key will cycle through those images.
• Portfolio files remember keyboard equivalents assigned to images.
• The mark menu allows you to mark images so you can quickly scroll to them by choosing their name from the mark menu.
• Portfolio files remember which images were marked.
• After you mark a number of images, you can delete the remainder of the images you have loaded. for example, if you load 100 image files and mark 10 of them as the most interesting, then you can ask bigpicture to forget about the remaining 90 images.
• Images are copied to the clipboard 'as they appear' on the screen.
• Copying an image changes it's colours to the standard 256 colour set. If you would like to copy an image using the original colours, hold down the option key while choosing copy (remember, if you choose this option, not all programs will be able to display the picture correctly).
• scaling an image down and copying it to the clipboard is a convenient way to make a 'thumbnail sketch'.
• You can save your files with local colour maps, global colour maps, or both.
• duplicate Colours are removed and colours are sorted according to the frequency of their appearance in the image when you save a GIF file.
• Optionally, you can save a colour-map file with the GIF file. Colour map files list the colours used in the GIF file and the indices they were assigned to. Colour maps are saved as Macintosh pictures, and can be viewed using BigPicture.
• Optionally, you can save a textual representation of the colour-map. This text file is suitable for Rez input.
• Saving a portfolio file saves references to all of the images you currently have loaded so you can quickly load the same set of images at a later date--it does not save the actual images in portfolio files.
BigPicture saves some other information inside of portfolio files too:
• How each image is scaled, centered, rotated, and flipped.
1. Select the images you would like to use and load them into BigPicture.
2. Assign keyboard equivalents to each image using the goto window. To do this, open the goto window, click on the image name, then type the keyboard equivalent you would like to use for that image.
3. Rotate, flip, center, and scale the images so they look good, and scroll to the first image in your presentation.
4. Choose 'Make Portfolio…' from the File menu and save it.
5. Quit BigPicture (everything's all set)
NOTE: If you will be using a different computer for your presentation, make sure you put BigPicture, the portfolio file you created in step 4, and the images you loaded in step 1, in the same folder, on a disk to use at your presentation. And, just to be safe, take along two backup copies of this disk.
• Do a practice run through your presentation, with your files set up exactly as they will be at the presentation, to make sure you have everything set up correctly,
• Doing your presentation:
1. Open your portfolio by double clicking on it, opening it from the file menu, or dropping it into BigPicture.
2. Choose the "use entire screen" option from the file menu.
3. Type the keyboard equivalents for different images as you go through your presentation to bring those images onto the screen (be careful to type only the keys you assigned to images, as typing an unassigned key will cancel full screen mode).
• After your presentation:
You may want to turn on the Auto Shuffle option (Type command-A). The program turns into a changing backdrop for discussion and questions, and may provide memory ques for questions people thought about during your presentation.
• say you are a sales agent with several hundred scaned images of your products on disk.
• at a meeting with a client you flip through all of the images, marking the ones your client expressed an interest in.
• after the meeting, you choose 'Forget Unmarked Images' from the 'Mark' menu: BigPicture forgets all the images you did not mark--the ones your client wasn't too interested in.
• if you save a portfolio of the remaining images, you will then have a record of the products your client found interesting.
The Auto Shuffle command allows you to randomly shuffle through a set of images. Individual images are not displayed again until all the other images have been seen.
Colour tables for GIF files are automatically sorted according to the frequency of colours appearing in the image, duplicate colours are removed. Why? many GIF files contain 256 colours, but 256 colour macs only display 254 colours (the system always maintains black and white on the screen sometimes replacing two of the images colours). Sorting image colours in this way minimizes this problem by making the colours most likely to be replaced (or approximated by using other colours), the least frequently used colours in the image.
In some cases Dithering can increase the visual quality of displayed images. There is no dithering function built into BigPicture; However, if you have 32 bit quickdraw installed on your system (it's built into system 7), BigPicture will request it's dithering facilities when:
• the image contains more colours than the screen can handle,
• the image is being scaled down to a smaller size,
BigPicture allows you to have many files loaded at once, several hundred infact; however, usually only a few of those images are kept in memory at any given time. Presently, BigPicture will attempt to maintain as many of the images you have most recently displayed in memory.
How BigPicture searches for files referenced in portfolio files:
• Under system 7, BigPicture uses aliases,
• Under system 6 it uses path names,
• If the above to steps fail, it starts taking apart the path name to search for files in the same directory as BigPicture and then in the same directory as your portfolio,
• If you move the image files refered to by a portfolio to a different disk, make sure you put them, or the folder containing them, into either the same folder as BigPicture or the same folder as your portfolio.
• For best results when moving portfolios from one computer to another, once you make a portfolio, (i) don't re-name the image files, (ii) don't re-name folders containing the image files, (iii) keep the image files and your portfolio in the same folder.
