[CREATE] ORA fullscreen viewers

[Luka Čehovin]

Hi,

>
>> We need to draw the line somewhere. An image viewer should be correct,
>> robust, and fast, not bloatware.
>
> A big part of "robustness" is being able to trust the result.  To my mind,
> it's better for an image viewer not to be able to display a file at all than
> for it to be displayed incorrectly.  If you can't hand an ORA file to
> someone confident in the knowledge that they'll see what you expect them to
> see, then the format won't feel "trustworthy".
>
> Best-effort rendering is fine *if* and *only* if accompanied by a dialog
> saying something along the lines of "This file uses features X,Y and Z,
> which are unsupported by this viewer".
>

I think we should start working on the solution for this problem step
by step. First we need a baseline/reference for storing and loading
ora files that is capable of accessing all the data elements in some
platform independent manner. After that a viewer can be built for a
specific platform using this library and some graphics library that
actually handles rendering. Putting all this functionality in one
library and expecting it to render a single raster for you would be
either a lot of work and a lot of code to maintain or would require
using a lot of external dependencies (in my vision the basic library
should be similar to libpng in terms of external dependencies).

cheers,
-- 
Luka Čehovin
http://luka.tnode.com