I have been working on a prototype for an Image Viewer that allows you to perform image based searches against search engines such as Bing, Google as well as Flickr. I hope to gradually add others including SmugMug, DeviantArt and more. You will need Silverlight 4 to view this application so if you haven’t upgraded yet you can do so via this link.
To view this Silverlight application go to: http://www.GalacticImg.com
I would be very interested in getting people’s feedback. What do you think of the UI, easy of use, etc? Is this a useful app for you and if so what features would you like to see added? You can respond here in the forum or click the “Contact Us” button located on the bottom-left of the application.
Below is a screenshot of the application.
Searching
In the search bar, enter the keywords(s) you want to search on and click the arrow to the right of the search bar to perform your search. You can change which engine you want to search against by clicking on the drop down magnifying class button located to the left of the search bar.
Scrolling & Zooming
You can zoom in and out by clicking on the Zoom +/- buttons located on the bottom of screen. You can also use the mouse wheel button to zoom in and out.
Clicking and dragging the blue ball seen below will allow you to scroll the panel left or right. Clicking the left/right white arrow buttons will accomplish the same thing.
Thank you,
–Mike
Not bad for a prototype, and I like the look. The behavior could use some work though. Here’s a quick list of issues I noticed and some suggestions:
- can’t enter Japanese text using IME into search or contact textboxes, same on FF and IE8, but copying and pasting text from elsewhere works ok. (no such problem in the SL4 Toolkit sample)
- make arrow keys on keyboard do the same thing as left/right buttons
- either ditch the blue ball or make it scroll more smoothly, preferably at a speed proportionate to the ball’s distance from its center position
- clicking ‘zoom out’ too much caused all the thumbs to disappear
- can’t maintain integer # of thumbs visible in Preview view after dragging vertical splitter and then clicking left/right buttons (this is much worse than it may sound, as you end up not being able to see entire thumbs for pictures on the left/right sides without constantly adjusting the splitter)
- clicking a thumb in Thumbnails view should show an enlarged image in the center, which you can then click on to dismiss
- should be possible to advance in Slideshow view using keyboard (i.e. space bar, enter, left/right arrow keys for forward/back, etc)
- thumbs in Slideshow view never advance..?
- thumbs in Slideshow view fade in and out too slowly
- should be possible to open an image and/or its web page in a new tab or window outside of SL
- allow zooming in/out on preview image using mouse wheel
- browser’s back button should not be usable when first starting the app in a fresh tab / browser session (clicking it results in an error)
Awesome feedback, much appreciated. I’ll work on these and post back to here when the fixes are ready.
I am pretty new to silverlight/WPF – though very experienced with overall .Net framework.
I have always tried to learn new things by creating or following creation of a whole application. Would it be possible for you to address problem beginners face and walk us through your experience/pain/problems, code samples – perhaps more if you can share.
Peter B
Hi peter, I would be more than happy to help. I will be putting up daily tips.
In addition, can you reply here with a list of topics you want covered?
Thanks,
–Mike
thanks, I would love if you can share some best practices ideas as well. In many places people show tidbits of code or xaml but seeing a big picture of finding best practices of developing silverlight application is missing.
I’ll see what I can do, thanks for the idea.