PNGview: a PNG viewer for the Prizm [nevermind]

gbl08ma · Posted: 25 Apr 2012 02:44:44 pm Post subject:

Yes, I know it's an overreaction, and I'm sad I have to react this way. But I've just figured out it's a matter of writing some lines of code and BAM!, you can get accused of ending with the freedom of other Prizm developers to run code on these calcs freely and starting a new cycle in terms of the way Casio reacts to custom development. And I don't want to ever be accused like that. In fact, should custom add-in development get illegal some day, I want to be as clean as possible.

Better develop for some platform for which there are thousands or millions of independent people developing for, and is widely accepted that there are independent developers, than for a platform that you bring to school every day and to exams and for which there are at most one hundred independent developers. By other words, I've just realized how this s*** is serious.

My thought as of now is: "let's just use the calculator for algebra, statistics, graphs and eActivity, that's what it was meant for".
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DJ_O · Posted: 25 Apr 2012 03:18:34 pm Post subject:

The best trick is to do the image viewer anyway and convert everyone's images yourself per request, filtering out requests to convert cheating/adult stuff, like I suggested on Omnimaga. Of course that would be a lot of work if it got popular and the tool would need to be passed over to another trusted community member if you were to stop visiting Cemetech completely, but that would be the only safe way to do it I think, while still allowing it to come to use for multiple calc devs.
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AHelper · Posted: 25 Apr 2012 03:19:23 pm Post subject:

"that's what is was meant for"

Um, I don't want to stir up anything, but the Prizm does understand .bmp files. I assume that Casio has plans on using them, unless the CG20 uses them.
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gbl08ma · Posted: 25 Apr 2012 03:22:22 pm Post subject:

"to do the image viewer anyway and convert everyone's images yourself per request"

Everyone can convert any image to a PNG file. I think that's part of the concern around this add-in - anything could be displayed on the calc's screen. Again, you can do the same hardcoding an image in an add-in, but then you need to have some development skills.

"the Prizm does understand .bmp files"

The Prizm writes BMP files with the screen capture tool, but doesn't read them for displaying on-calc AFAIK.
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AHelper · Posted: 25 Apr 2012 03:23:45 pm Post subject:

If you send a bump file, it recognizes it as a valid file and labels as a bmp file. It doesn't open it, but it is recognized and mentioned in the user manual
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gbl08ma · Posted: 25 Apr 2012 03:26:15 pm Post subject:

That's because the system writes BMP files so they shouldn't be "unknown". But again, I don't think they are going to do anything with BMP files - in the end, they should already have done so, since the Prizm is out for more than a year and there have been various OS updates and add-in releases.
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seana11 · Posted: 25 Apr 2012 03:43:39 pm Post subject:

gbl08ma · Posted: 25 Apr 2012 04:14:31 pm Post subject:

That's right. What I said wasn't to be interpreted literally - I was being sarcastic.

Apart from that, I've convinced myself of one thing: Casio does not want an image viewer, not even on the CG20. The "evidence" I found was: if they didn't mind to have people view any image on the Prizm, they would either have included an image viewer with the OS, develop one as an add-in, or make the converter to g3p free to everyone (and not just schools).

So basically, the images you view on your Prizm are meant to be approved by your teachers. If an image viewer was developed by us, it could easily get Casio upset on us (specially if it worked on the CG10).

But there's another important consequence of this: I don't think Casio likes video players on the Prizm either. In the end, a video is a bunch of images being displayed after each other. From this point of view, CGplayer is as bad or worse than a image viewer.

Anyway, I think I'm going to stay out of Prizm development for some time, until more developers join and make "risky" add-ins, and/or Casio clarifies their position on custom add-in development for the Prizm.
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merthsoft · File Archiver Joined: 09 May 2010 Posts: 2735

They also don't have a Minesweeper add-in officially released, and probably aren't terribly keen on games for their calc, but that didn't stop me. It's just a matter of time before this add-in gets created. Besides, and Jonimus has said before, they can't crack down on the add-in development without making it so their own stuff doesn't work.
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gbl08ma · Posted: 25 Apr 2012 04:27:01 pm Post subject:

But it's easy for them to release all their add-ins with all the necessary modifications to run in a locked-down system (private add-in keys, encrypted code, etc.), but it won't be easy for us to bypass the lock. Look at what happens with the TI calcs...
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seana11 · Posted: 25 Apr 2012 04:28:06 pm Post subject:

merthsoft · File Archiver Joined: 09 May 2010 Posts: 2735

DJ_O · Posted: 25 Apr 2012 10:05:57 pm Post subject:

gbl08ma · Posted: 26 Apr 2012 11:13:30 am Post subject:

Games, games, games... they only serve to drive me away from what's important (study) and if I wanted to play games, I would have bought a portable game console. Games are not exactly the kind of add-ins I find useful on the Prizm. Things like 3D graphing, image and text viewing, communication/linking tools, yes there are useful.

So if one develops a PNG viewer that accepts 120x90 as maximum resolution, there will be no problem? Since that's poor quality already (well, we can add blurring and force black&white if that's still too high-quality...)
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KermMartian · Posted: 26 Apr 2012 03:53:05 pm Post subject:

flyingfisch · Posted: 26 Apr 2012 05:05:23 pm Post subject:

PierrotLL · Posted: 26 Apr 2012 08:37:44 pm Post subject:

Seriously guys ? All this debate for a simple image viewer ?? o_o

First, an image-viewer does not hurt anyone. I don't know why Casio chose to include g3p support only in Europe.
Next, Casio has never cared about the addins we make (I'm pretty sure they don't even know we made grayscales with their calcs).
And I've already made a BMP viewer with grayscales on fx9860.

Conclusion, you have all my support to make this PNG viewer, gbl08ma.
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Eiyeron · Member Joined: 12 Dec 2011 Posts: 158

Can the CG10 read BMP captures?
I saw that CG20 could takes captures into BMP.

ANd... A addin can help to cheat, you know, and I don't even talk about eActs...
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gbl08ma · Posted: 27 Apr 2012 10:00:10 am Post subject:

If we start to talk about cheating, then just don't allow these calcs to get into exams, period. In Portugal, Maths/Chem (the two subjects where the calc is allowed in tests and exams) teachers are warned that the calcs can store anything you want, so they rarely ask very simple questions in tests - instead, they ask you questions that make you think instead of just copying over from your calculator (i.e. no "define what a secondary planet is" or "what is the 50th element of the periodic table" questions).

Regarding the image viewer I was trying to develop: the source code is on my server for anyone who wants to fix it and work on it (hint: I'm pretty sure there's something wrong in the LodePNG_loadFile function as buffersize is 0 after that function is called).
If you ever manage to do anything successful with my (unsuccessful) port of LodePNG, it'd be great if you credit me, although I'm not really sure I want to appear in the image-viewing-addin scene again anymore.
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JosJuice · Power User Joined: 17 Oct 2010 Posts: 306 Location: Sweden