Work on DBPix version 3.0 is making great progress. Here’s a taster of some of the main features planned for 3.0:
- Display Interpolation
- Programmatic access to Metadata (EXIF, IPTC)
- Menu Customization
- TIFF Support
- JPEG2000 Support
Display Interpolation
This feature allows optimized viewing at any zoom level, by resampling/interpolating the visible portion of the image to the display resolution. This can give much better image appearance, avoiding the scaling artifacts produced by fast scaling algorithms. The interpolation is performed in the background so that the machine remains responsive (you can still scroll through records in an Access Form, for example).
Programmatic access to Metadata (EXIF, IPTC)
Probably one of the most requested features in version 2.0 is to be able to read metadata values such as EXIF tags or IPTC data from code, e.g. to store the ‘Date Taken’ or camera exposure settings in a database field. DBPix 3.0 will allow reading EXIF & IPTC tags in this way. The data will be available both as text, or as ‘typed’ data, eg Variant-Date. The Jury is still out on whether we will support writing to tags (i.e. adding or modifying metadata).
Menu Customization
DBPix 2.0 allows the developer to choose between 3 menu settings - ‘None’, ‘View’ and ‘Full’. 3.0 adds the ability to totally customize the menus. You can delete, rename, or re-organize the built-in menu commands, and even add your own commands (which will call external code via an event). This includes building submenus. You can use menu customization to limit the user’s choices to only allow certain functionality, or to integrate your own functionality/code into menu items, or to translate the menus into unsupported languages.
TIFF Support
Another fairly frequently requested feature, probably due to the disappearance of TIFF support from several versions of Office.
JPEG2000 Support
For lossless photo compression.
