History of PictureGo!

The development of PictureGo! started in 1999. After I had bought my first digital camera, I wrote a program to watch my pictures in a slide show. Being an enthusiastic programmer, I continued to develop the program and version 8.2 is the thirtyninth release, so far....

Version 3.3 - August 2005

Yet another new version, PictureGo! 3.3. In April I wrote that this version had already entered the beta stadium.

At the time this was true, but a lot has happened since. Actually, since then, PictureGo! went through major surgery; the software regarding controlling the slide show has been completely rewritten. And with reason; you might have noticed that a running slide show would use a 100% of the cpu resources even if it was paused. I had been aware of this for some time but I kept putting off solving it. For two reasons: 1) it is more interesting to develop new functionality and 2) it is kind of scary to replace a part of the program that on itself is working fine. Now it has been done and I am glad so, even it is took me a couple of weeks of programming.

Another major change (and almost as invisible), lies in the displaying of pictures in a slide show in full screen mode. With pictures growing in size, the time frame in between loading pictures during which a black screen would be shown grew accordingly. In this new version, the picture displayed will be shown until the next picture's loading has been completed.

Also the Copy Show/Make automatic starting CD-ROM has been completely rewritten. These three changes, which might seem small, hold at least 50% of the programming and testing effort of version 3.3.

But, there is also some new, and very interesting functionality. For instance: the mailing feature for mailing individual pictures, folders or even complete MyShow files. Not to mention the 'downsizing picture size on the fly' feature that comes with it.

Select files for mail


Then there is the enhanced Crop and Enlarge feature which now offers maximum flexibility in selecting an area and storing the result from within PictureGo! Of course there is more and all in all, it makes PictureGo! 3.3 a big version, and considering the important changes more or less under the hood, a version with quite a quality impulse.

Reduce picture size


Auke Nijholt, the Netherlands , August 2005