It IS an image. Plucker seems to happily pluck it. Not sure why it wouldnt work. Plucker almost displays the image. It even draws the little back button on the bottom.
It probably crashed because no one anticipated that anyone would be doing it that way :) Might be an easy fix though. Which version are you running?
high_res..which is the stuff you maintain, right?
yah, the trick was to actually use their colormap for the png files. Otherwise pinger wouldn't be able to recognize the files. I used the zboxz/Docs/pngtools/pal8.ppm file.
Wow..I just did some searching on png on palm...Well i got a GPL program that will display png images on a palm. As long as the png uses the colormap from that package..it works great.
http://palmboxer.sourceforge.net
Not only does it display pngs..but it is able to display them on lower res devices. So an 8bit png displayed just fine on my m125(unfortunately I don't have the clie handy to test the actual color). However the program doesn't seem to want to work in the palmos5 simulator. I'm guessing the guy is using some strange api's to invoke the png viewer app from zboxz.
I've seen the same thing with that program. However I was never actually able to get the pinger to work.
Why wouldn't it solve the limitation? I was talking of storing the pngs inside the pdb.
So anyways, now I got a feature request..Could some one please play around with this png code? It would rock so much to be able to display png images in plucker. It even looks like it would be able to display them fullscreen on a highres device. And I love the fact that it can display the images on lower res devices too.
Aparently GIF files work too, but I haven't figured out the trick needed to display them yet.
Well, it wouldn't quite work that way. The idea I was playing around involve actually storing the images inside the .pdb as a png, not as a tbmp. Plus, since png files can be compressed it would help out (though not solve) the 64k limitation on images.
The idea is to tell the parser to convert every image it sees into a png (rather than a tbmp) and import that into the image record)
yes
I'm not sure about this. Is that how pinger renders them? And I really like pinger's ability to display pngs on lower depth devices. This would make distribution of pdb files feasable..just have one pdb file with 1 or 2 nice photos in it and every device would be able to use the same file and get at the content on it.The other cool part about the png stuff is that no conversion would have to be done :)
On the contrary, more conversion would be required. The parser would have to convert the gif/jpg/bmp into a png first, then the viewer would have to convert the png into a tbmp to display the image. The goal of this is to use png as a container to sneak under the 64k limitation on images.
Only the initial load time since you could quite feasibly cache the tbmps. Besides devices are getting faster, not slower so as you move forward the speed is less of an issue.One nasty side effect of this is that it could severly slow down the load-times on plucked sites, plus you'd need to install a libpng.prc library.
Yep.Users with faster devices (ie OS5) probably wouldn't notice a difference, but slower ones could fall back on the existing tbmp method.
In any case. I've got a selfish interest in this. I'm writing a fairly big dynamicly generated website(4000pages..3000ish photos) and ran into the limitations of the java & python pluckers. They just take too long and consume way too many resources while plucking. It is my understanding that I'm abusing the tools, since they were never meant to handly this sort of load. Conversion time is probably rarely a factor for websites since most of them take longer to download anyways.
So I'm writing my own plucker-website generator, that is highly specialized and therefore much much faster(also has no runtime dependencies). However I've run into 1 major roadblock images:
a) I haven't found any tbmp libraries that can handle 8bit
b) different devices need different pdb files. Grayscale just looks silly on color clies and color doesnt even display on grayscale palms.
c) size limitation
So pngs fit my needs very nicely. Unfortunately I don't have much experience programming on the palms or even graphics programming, so I can't implement the features on the palm and either have to use whats there and compensate on the generation side or suggest features and hope someone else likes them.
In any case. I'm am very happy with what plucker can do. It dramaticly changed my perception of browsing through fancy data on handhelds. Furthermore, the high_res version was just a pleasant surprise. Suddenly everying looks as beautiful as it gets on the clie.
Just one feature request, could you enable scrollbar scrolling when running high_res on a lowres device?
Thanks,
Taras
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