Displayator 2.1 on an iPhone5 showing the new "Big Wave off Kanagawa" sample Displayable (a 46.7 Megapixels image).
Displayator 2.1 has been approved by Apple and is available in the app store. To celebrate, the app is available at 50% off the normal price until it is updated for iOS 7. Get it now on the App Store!
This update finally adds support for tall-screened iPhone and iPod touch. So Displayator can now fully use all the screen real estate of the iPhone 5 and 5th Generation iPod Touch.
However, due to limitations of the iOS SDK, the new minimum supported version of iOS has been changed to iOS 5.1. This means that the original iPhone, the iPhone 3G, the 1st and 2nd generation iPod Touch will not be able to run this update. The App Store app will not update Displayator on these devices, so existing installs will keep working.
Fixed bugs:
New feature:
To celebrate this update, Displayator is available at 50% off the normal price until it is updated for iOS 7. Get it now on the App Store!
]]>I am happy to announce that Displayable Creator 2.0.0 is finally available!
After a long period of development, I am proud to release a faster, prettier and more powerful version of Displayable Creator.
The UI is now simplified,the app accepts multiple images at the same time, and it can process bigger images (tested up to 466 megapixels[1]).
The new main window of Displayable Creator
That’s it for this version. Please let me know if you find bugs, odd behaviors or miss a feature.
Next, I’ll be concentrating on finishing to update Displayator app!
The biggest image I could find as a single file was an eighth of NASA's BlueMarble Next Generation dataset. Displayable Creator was running on a 64bit JVM, with 2 GB of ram reserved. In 32 bits, the JVM can only access up to 1.5GB of ram, so the maximum openable size is in the 350+ megapixels range ↩
In beta2:
In beta1:
Please let me know if you find bugs or weird behaviors or miss a feature.
Please let me know if you find bugs or weird behaviors.
Updated: De-activated, in favor of Displayable Creator 2.0.0 Beta 2.
Displayable Creator 2.0.0 Beta1
I am sorry for the very long hiatus. In September last year I joined a small company in Timor Leste: Catalpa International. There was a lot to learn for the job, and a lot of projects to apply it on. Things started to ease a bit in March (2012) and April, and I did some work on improving the Displayable Creator. In July my wife and I left Timor Leste to come back to Geneva where we arrived in August. Settling in took some time, as well as adjusting to working remotely. This last few week I blocked some time to polish all the changes and finally release a new version.
]]>The biggest new feature is that now the app is now optimized for iPhones and iPads. So if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch and an iPad, the same app works on all devices. As it is a rather big feature, I bumped the version number to 2.0 rather that 1.1. Some other minor improvements are also included:
But, mostly, the app is now “Universal”, so you can view huge pictures on any iPhone, any iPod Touch, and any iPad using the same app.
]]>TL;DR: You too can have 100 megapixels images on your iPhone - offline - ‘Just’ run a Java app on your computer & buy my iPhone app.
So you found this nice image of the world at night, called “Earth Lights” from wikipedia. It is a pretty big image, 16384 * 8192, which is well into the 100 Megapixels class. For some reason, later at the bar, you absolutely want to show to your friends that they too can find the border between North and South Korea. And their two capitals. You don’t want to bring your laptop down, and when you hand over this wonderfully high resolution image to iTunes to put it on your iPhone, the border looks like the image on the left. I can’t quite make out that border, can you ?
The "Earth Lights" image at maximum zoom: | ||
---|---|---|
Click on a screenshot to see it in its original size | ||
In the “Photos” iPhone app | In the Preview Mac application | In the Displayator iPhone app |
You could take a screenshots on your computer, but there would be no fun in that, the border would be rather obvious. The image on the right is a screenshot from the “Photos” app on the iPhone. As you might already know, iTunes will “optimize” any photo you want to transfer on your iDevice(s). As you can see on the left in the table above, a part of the optimization seems to be a big reduction in resolution.
On the other hand, if you create a Displayable, the original resolution is preserved. In the table above, the Preview application and the Displayator app show the same part of the image. As you can see when viewing the screenshots full size, they are at the same resolution. And, as you can see in the video bellow, the scrolling is fast and the zooming is smooth.
So, if you want to create a Displayable, start the free Displayable Creator application. It is a Free and Open Source Java application, thus it runs on Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. Here is the short version of the guide for creating Displayables:
On your computer :
To transfer it to your iPhone or iPod Touch, on your iDevice:
There you are: you have a 100 megapixel-class image on your iPhone.
Here is what the same Displayable looks like on the original iPhone from 2007:
]]>Notes:
- I stumbled upon the link to the Earth Lights image on Edward M Johnson’s blog.
- The image is actually 134.217728 megapixels, but it’s not as catchy as “100 Megapixels”.
The fix was as ‘simple’ as using the google-gson JSON library for a more reliable generation of the feed.
I also increased the memory that it is allowed to request from the system from 1024 to 1524 MB, so it can open bigger images (tested on up to 14101 by 14101 image).
I also registered a twitter account : @Displayator so you can follow it to get the latest updates on Displayator or the Displayable Creator.
Enjoy,
Nicolas.
]]>TL,DR: Displayator (the app) is the 3rd iteration and 2nd incarnation of an idea that I first had back in 2006, when I bought my first pocket computer. After a few years of tweaking, I can finally have almost any public transport map I want in my pocket, including San Francisco, L.A., Manhattan etc… and so can you.
Back in 2006, I bought a Palm T|X. I was fascinated by Google Earth and Google Maps. I was also a big user of the public transports of Geneva (no car). They had a nice big beautiful PDF map of their public transport network. Unfortunately, while viewing PDFs on the Palm was possible, it sucked. So I toyed with the idea of transforming the PDF into tiles and showing those onto the Palm. I was a Java-mostly Developer, and after a fashion, it was possible to run J2ME jars on the Palm (if you managed to find the correct J2ME IBM distribution for Palm).Thus, I started working, in my spare time, on a way to tile images and viewing those tiles on a Java running machine.
At the time I was working at CERN, on control software for the (then under construction) LHC. Some of my colleagues were furnishing the Cern Control Center, and so I was seeing plenty of screens side by side. Each triplet of which were connected to a different Linux or Windows machine, on two different networks. As CERN stopped all the accelerator every year over winter to save money on electricity, the CCC grows empty, and all those nice screens stayed on but stopped being used purposefully. So if you asked nicely and proved that your code was harmless, you could run some test on those machines :-).
So eventually, the original Displayator was born. A way to see huge pictures (like the MIRAVI satellite photos) across many machines. It was composed of three different processes : a Controller, a Tile server, and an Image Viewer. The Tile Server ran headless on a server machine accessible by all the screen machines. So did the controller, but running with a window exported through X11. The Image Viewers ran on the Linux and Windows machine connected to the screens. The configuration to get everything started was rather involved (ssh to this machine, start process on the command line, ssh to that machine, start process on the command lines passing IP address and port of the other machine, repeat…) and the communication to transfer the tiles was buggy. I released four versions but eventually moved on to other personnal projects.
As time went on, the iPhone was released in 2007, and I got my hands on one in 2008. It too could read PDFs, but it too did suck at viewing them. It had its own Maps application, but I was living ‘abroad’ from my mobile phone operator, so even though I had the GPRS data plan, it was not very useful to get maps. Then Apple then released the iPhone OS 2.0 with the app store and the Developper SDK. I bought the license and started learning Objective C to work on a way to see big images on my iPhone. I could re-use some of the code of the original Dispayator, but only for the part that was tiling the images.
Eventually, in October 2009, I had a first version that could see huge images. The storage mechanisme had changed from an humble TAR file to a full blown SQLite database. After two more years of tweaking, the images could be easily transformed by being dropped on a GUI application. The iPhone app connects automatically to the application running on the computer. Now, I can drag and drop an images on the application on my computer, and, a few taps later, I have it on my iPhone. Where I can pinch to zoom and where it scroll faster than on my computer.
I finally can have a map of the Geneva Public Transport1 on my iPhone that doesn’t take ages to load. As I frequently travel abroad, I don’t need to pay anymore for the dedicated app for each city’s public transport (or switch app store). In my pocket, I now have the Bordeaux public transport map1. The Singapore Public transport map. I can even have the plans of places I might visit one day: all the San Francisco Public transit maps. And all of Los Angeles public transports maps. And the Manhattan Bus Map. All of them in my pocket.
And, as the app is now available on the app store, so can you!
]]>1: Annoyingly, I could not find a Java PDF reader that would open any random public transport map and output a nice PNG. There’s always some file that breaks PDFBox or PDFRenderer. So I resort to saving the PDFs as images in the Preview Mac OS X application. You can do the same in Linux using ImageMagick, but I don’t know of any good solution under Windows. Also, some PDF files are password protected (notably, those for Paris).