New cool UI feature

Now Picture to People has a cool output page that is shown when you click the "Generate" button from one of our online design apps. This page is responsive, so it works well in any device and any resolution.

It offers a nice way to show the images and effects you create. It also has a handy way to download each image you have just generated.

This new feature is not compatible with the old implementation using HTTP streams, so if you have used Picture to People recently, you must clean your browser cache.

As a bonus feature, each time this page loads, it shows at bottom several suggestions of very popular online graphic apps. They are used by thousands of people daily, so you could like to try them out too.

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Picture to People platform improvements

Picture to People free graphic software portal is getting some refactoring. It helps to make the site slightly faster and easier to maintain, giving us more time to focus on new graphic effects development.

It also means the cache used in the site can bring some problems. For many pages, without a complete refresh, the mix of old and new code can cause unexpected errors.

If you have used P2P before and you get any strange error when using a P2P online tool, be sure to refresh the page pressing F5 (in Windows) or the similar command for your browser, so any cached data/files will be discarded.

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Interface improvements and new features

Picture to People site has just received several nice improvements:

- bigger and more spaced fonts, making it easier to use in small devices;
- now its width fits best tablet screens in portrait orientation;
- new contextual menu at page bottom, easier to read and find what you want;
- a direct download button for almost all online graphic softwares;
- a search box - now you can easily search all our thousands effects.

Since the site was improved in its core, if you have used it recently, we strongly suggest you clean your browser cache before using it again, or you can get misbehaviors.

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A new interfce is under development

Among dozens of things already planned or under development for Picture to People, there are one of them that I intend to finish next weeks and I'm very exited about.

This is not properly a graphic tool by itself, but it can help P2P to get some of its parts more beautiful and maybe easier to use. I'm creating, completely from scratch, a new template to be used in the project site.

In fact, it's not a "skin replace", since this new design is not compatible with the current one. I don't intend to change the tools I have already released, but I want to create a new interface paradigm to be used with some new tool to be published in future.

The point is: I'm preparing some kind of different online tools to gather older features in a easier way to use. So I'm trying to create a completely new CSS template that could achieve at least these goals:

- look simple and kind of clean;
- look a little more modern and beautiful compared to the current look & feel;
- offer an interface suitable to show many different and direct options to users;
- take advantage of high resolution screens, but keep working fine in low resolution monitors (800x600);
- be easily understood by user (as self-explaining as possible);
- use recent web development techniques to make it more beautiful and pleasant to use;
- share the same appearance in all modern browsers;
- even if it looks ugly in old browsers, at least keep working and usable in aged environments;
- be reasonably easy to maintain.

I'm not worried about back compatibility, so I prefer to imagine this as an interface to different tools that will be in the same site. I hope the users endorse the results of this effort when it's online.

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A very efficient color picker

I developed Picture to People with a very powerful log. Analyzing the log I saw that there were many errors configuring the colors when using the effects. I realized that I have really many dummy users that don't understand what a "color in HTML hexadecimal style" is.

I always tried to make P2P absolutely easy (in fact, the easiest ever), but I forgot about the colors setting. My fault. To solve this problem once for all, I developed my own color picker component in javascript.

I projected it very carefully to have all important colors and to be very direct, efficient and user friendly. You always solve a color problem with two clicks: one to call the color picker (clicking the proper icon beside any color item) and one to set the color you want. When you call the component, it appears just close to your mouse and, when you choose a color, it is just written in the related color field. Below I show you how the color picker window looks like.

I coded the picker to mark any color cell (highlighting its borders in red as you see in the image) as the mouse pass over it. It works perfectly in Firefox and Chrome. This feature doesn't work in IE because it lacks some properties as defined by W3C. Anyway, the overall operation works in all three browsers.

I will always work hard to take professional Computer Graphics the easiest way for all.

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Advanced Interface X Portability

In Windows, the behavior of some widgets depends on one or another DLL version, which changes according to your OS version. Furthermore, some screen "objects" need a lot of programming to make advanced or specific tasks. This situation always invites you to make your screen classes.

It has been a long time since I started to worry about generalizing the screen tools I have to make my interfaces. A big system usually has hundreds of windows. It's not a good idea create one by one using raw pieces of code. When it makes sense, I want to create windows by reading configuration values dynamically. When it's impossible cause I need a custom behavior, there will be powerful screen classes to make the hard job.

But there is no perfection. I use windows specific resources to make my interface classes. In another OS, I can reuse several ideas and logics, but I'm sure there will be a lot of redevelopment. Mainly talking about softwares that need advanced interfaces to draw, drag, select, etc, can be hard to mimic a behavior in several graphical environments using the same source.

I didn’t want to use GTK+, Qt, or anything like that. You know how I like dependencies for this project. This libraries don't have everything I want ... If I had chosen one of them, I would need to extend it. I know I lose portability, but I prefer this way.

At least, the core will not have this kind of problem. In another environment (like X11 for example), the hard job will be only remake the interface layer.