Eye of Gnome 0.1 is released

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico redhat com>]

Hello, visual-oriented beings,

I have just released the first public version, 0.1, of the Eye of Gnome.  
This is to become the default GNOME image viewing and cataloging
program.

Why the "Eye of Gnome"?  Think of the list of ingredients in a witch's
brew.  This magic ingredient will lead to perfect vision.

* Availability:

	ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/eog/eog-0.1.tar.gz

* Features in this release:

	- Opening multiple images at once in different windows.

	- Fast zooming and scrolling, while keeping memory usage
          constant.

	- Opening multiple images from the command line.

* Requirements:

	gnome-libs-1.0.40
	gdk-pixbuf-0.1

A problem with image viewers based on Imlib is that they cannot scale
and render portions of images on demand; they must create complete
pixmaps on the X servers, sending memory usage through the roof. 

In contrast, EOG uses the gdk-pixbuf library for loading images and
the GNOME Canvas and GdkRGB for rendering.  It can zoom and scroll
images very quickly while keeping memory usage constant (your X server
won't grow to gigantic sizes if you zoom images).  It can load huge
images and display them properly.

I would like people to test this initial release and find bugs.  It
appears to be fairly stable and functional, and would work very well
as your default image viewer (you can configure this using the GNOME
Control Center and the MIME-types capplet).

At this point I am writing the next-generation icon list widget to be
used for a thumbnail display in the Eye of Gnome and in the new GNOME
file manager.  After that will come the cataloging and image
collection features for EOG.

Have fun, and watch lots of nice images,

  Federico