BigPicture Copyright (c) 1994 John Montbriand. All Rights Reserved.
• Between the time BigPicture left my computer and arrived on yours, NO ONE has paid the licensing fee for it; and, if you decide to use BigPicture, YOU should pay the licensing fee.
• Paying the licensing fee gives you the right to maintain one copy of BigPicture on your computer for viewing PICT and GIF files.
• I encourage distribution of BigPicture by anyone by any means, provided no representation is made to the recipients of this program that the licensing fee has been paid for them, or that they don't have to pay a licensing fee.
• Although this program has been through several versions, re-writes, and debugging runs, contains a robust error handling system, and has been tested by many users on many different computers, I cannot guarantee that it is completely safe for you to use; so, if you decide to use this program, you do so entirely at your own risk.
• If you find that the intentions of this license are unclear, or you do not understand this license, then please remove BigPicture and any accompanying documentation from your computer.
• To pay your licensing fee, address an envelope containing both the order form and a money order for $20.00 in Canadian funds (purchased from a bank or a post office) to:
• 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.
Lazy evaluation of images 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: 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.
• 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.
• 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).
• 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.
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--others are kept on your hard disk. As a result, if you try to load many images, you may find BigPicture is using a large part of your free hard disk space--this is not a bug, and don't worry, BigPicture will free up this space when you quit.
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.
If you're viewing a large number of GIF files, you'll find BigPicture will work better if you have lots of free hard disk space. This is because it's able to temporarily save more of the images it reads onto your hard disk in a way that can be read faster than reading the original image files.
There is a background reader function that continually spends all of it's time reading in the images it thinks you're going to look at next. Once the background reader reads in an image, it attempts to save the image in a way that can be retrieved in a fraction of the time it would normally take to read the original image.
I couldn't think of anything else I'd want to see in a viewer, but, if there's something you'd like to see and it's not here, by all means, let me know about it. I can't promise it'll appear in the next release, but if it's cool, interesting, handy, convenient to use, intuitive, and (the big one) can be done in the limited time I have for this project, then, well, you just might see it in the next release.
Remember: Future versions and enhancements will be released depending on shareware response.
BigPicture Copyright (c) 1994 John Montbriand. All Rights Reserved.
• To pay your licensing fee, address an envelope containing both the order form and a money order for $20.00 in Canadian funds (purchased from a bank or a post office) to:
