Add the ability to edit as many images as you want.

[Rdthe80sman]

Well, Looks like we meet again Mr. McFadden! So my question says it all because much like the last qustion I posted on for one of your projects, Im asking if its possible to get it to do more to help me with an Apple II related game project thats been kicking me in the side for a few months now. Because for this project I need to edit A LOT of Hi res graphics images!

[fadden]

The current GUI is limited to having 8 images open simultaneously simply because of screen real estate for the screen picker on the right. Modern web browsers can certainly handle many more, but the UI becomes hard to manage.

The current setup requires dragging a set of images in, working on them, and then closing them with the "Close" button to make room for more. What does your desired work flow look like?

[Rdthe80sman]

Well its about time I give an explanaition. Basically, to cut a long story short, Ive been trying to use Apple II emulators to create basically rudimentary animation for a game on PC. The trouble is editing my footage into something that is suitable for my project. So far my method has been take the footage I shot with my phone, adding a sketch filter on it with a video editing app called ShortCut, using VLC's Scene Filter tool to convert my video into PNG's, load up the Apple II emulation in MAME with a Computereyes digitizer, digitize each image in one by one and save them onto a .2MG image, load the files into 816 Paint for editing and colorization, use an Apple II Slide Show presentation program called Slide Shop to convert each frame into a slide image, and then play it back in Applewin at faster speed and record it.

To put it lightly, This has been kicking me in my groin for the past few months, and I basically want to make some more progress on this before I give up or lose my sanity completely!

[fadden]

It sounds like HGR Tool would be a replacement for 816 Paint in that chain. If you did the PNG-to-HGR conversion with a tool like Buckshot or the original bmp2dhr, you wouldn't need to use an emulator until you wanted to play a slide show.

The enhanced version of HGR Tool has a PNG import feature, but I'm not sure how that compares.

[Rdthe80sman]

Well I have used Buckshot (and indeed a slightly moddified version I attempted to make myself I called CiderFrame) but the problem with all of this is that i still have to work on each image one at a time. What I really want is some kind of tool that I can import all the images and work on them all at once. Think about it almost like layers in Photoshop, being able to load as much as 200 frames, you click on one, edit and add the color patterns, click on the next and repeat.

[fadden]

Browsers are pretty constrained when it comes to file I/O, to prevent malware. So you'd need to drag & drop the full set into the window and then use something like a previous/next carousel UI to walk through them. I don't know if the API makes guarantees on file order, so they might not come up in a particular sequence (although that could be addressed by sorting by filename after loading).

Another approach would be to have a shell script drive the editor, i.e. you have a script that iterates through all PNGs and launches the editor on each file as it works, but I'm not sure how feasible that is.

Another approach is to see if @badvision has ideas and is bored. :-)

[Rdthe80sman]

Well considering he already made an enhanced version of HGRTool that can export files in the Apple II HiRes format, i think that would be smart! But still you have a point, even if either the three of us could get my proposed idea executed, having this as a browser tool just wouldent be too feasible.

That why I also ponder about somehow convering it into a stand alone program. You know, just stick it into Visual Studio, hit debug and there you go, you have a basic working program! Of course it would be a bit more complex than that.

Still, I think I will approach @badvision and see what he says.

[badvision]

Hey there! So for animation support you'd need something more like a timeline/horizontal slider. I guess a vertical stack on the right would also work but it could be clunky.

For a dozen frames, the current UI makes sense.

For dozens of frames, something like the MacOS taskbar shrink/grow might work best without being too constraining, or just make it vertically scrollable either with a scroll bar (probably ugly) or up/down arrows to scroll through it.

For hundreds of frames (not sure how you'd load that into the //, but I don't want to yuck your yum if that's what you want) then a traditional horizontal timeline kind of bar makes sense, but that's a bigger UI overhaul.

As for importing, etc. It's all possible but this starts to raise a bigger problem about statefulness and stability. Do you want all this relying on a browser window to stay open? It would make more sense to be a standalone app. Fortunately you can convert a webpage like this to a desktop app using Elektron and similar frameworks. This also opens the possibility of file i/o and so on.

You can have javascript prepare export data types, basically have it produce mime64 data urls and let the browser deal with those for download, etc. I think that will let you prepare even dsk images if you were so motivated to go that route.