World: r3wp

good idea

If View sucks, well then. But it is a good measure of how it is "usable" 
in real-life ...

try image magic.  its fast, easy to use on the command-line, it can 
process in up to 640 bits images and there is limit on capacity as 
it can actually use disk as ram while its processing!  I rendered 
20GB worth of images into one composite ... using 500MB of ram.

and there are no higher quality engines out there... but that all 
depends if it does what you need in terms of image and graphics.

we can't build an extension for imagemagick yet, can we?

yes we could.

I hadn't even tought about that

at this rate, we could have a dozen extensions by spring.

Do we have any extensions yet?

two so far, AFAIK

and they are available somewhere ?  What are they?

Not available yet. Not sure they will be, but maybe. Robert is working 
on an SQLite extension and a Windows COM interface.

there is a text to speach extension that has been released on the 
extensions group.

I have done three  "experimental" extensions : a text to speech, 
a matlab engine extension, a simple windows api with some useful 
calls : http://www.colineau.fr/rebol/R3_extensions.html

Cool Jocko. I have an old send-keys dialect as well. I think I did 
a dialect experiment over MCI command strings, but I'm not sure if 
I posted it anywhere.

Max, thanks for the additional info. Actually, NConvert is great 
but only as a command-line tool, it's not available in library form, 
so I'll probably end up wrapping Image Magick.

there is already an image magic R2 wrapper on rebol.org you can use 
to start, I've used it and it works... but you need to find the proper 
version of image magick (an older version).

Doc, BILINEAR is in R2 but you can only upscale with that filter. 
Not good for thmbnails. If Carl want's to do frequent R2 updates 
it would be easy for me to add downscaling+lanzos filter to R2 DRAW. 
I think this is one of most requested feature and I actually have 
it already implemented in my separated R2draw.dll

Other possibilty would be to use my R2 JIT compiler and program the 
filter as JIT function. Could be a good test example but not sooner 
until I get it to 'alpha stage' ;-)

Cyphre: great, so we will get downscaling bilinear+lanczos filters 
in 2.7.8 next month? :-)

If Carl have time for including/testing the change then why not. 
I can add the low-level code in a hour or so. But the dialect parser 
change needs to be tested after Carl compile the new r2 exe.

So in other words: bug Carl about this one :)

Looks like a job for Pekr! ;-)

It would be really helpful, firing a 10MB package just to get decent 
thumbnails is hurting my programmer's feelings. Making thumbnails 
is one of the most common task today in web sites for a graphic library.

Would it be too slow to calculate it in plain REBOL for your application?

If yes, then you could make a thumbnail algorithm in plain C and 
build your own dll. Calculating each pixel in the thumbnail as a 
mean value of a number of pixels in the original image should give 
a nice result, I think.

For Lanczos filter, I find it even slow with NConvert for bigger 
images (1MB+), but I guess that the CALL overhead is significant 
there.

I thought about it but don't have enough free time to implement it 
myself. Btw passing image! datatype through a routine! is quite tricky 
IIRC?

with proper thumbnailing in r2, you are good on the way to implement 
a photo album browser. as it is now, that's not possible.

Oh, I forgot that the server it's running on has a mono-core Atom 
as CPU! Speed should be ok starting from a mid-level CPU.

I haven't got experience with routine! calls, so I can't say. A way 
to get the data to the C code is to save it on disk as BMP from REBOL 
first. If you need really high speed, this might not do it for you 
though.

Or in stead of BMP, just save it as binary. (Which is about the same, 
I guess.)

Now I'm in doubt of the correct term. Is it still called bilinear 
filtering (which is bilinear interpolation), when scaling down? I 
mean, we're not doing interpolation then, but instead calculating 
mean values.

I think the correct term is 'filter with resampling'. If you add 
the resampling step then the image looks much beter. Then different 
filter algorithms can even improve the quality (usually the beter 
filter the slower the calcualtion is)

R2 Draw is currently using only 'resizing' not 'resampling' routine.

Doc - I am good at bugging anyone, so just confirm you want it :-)

Doc - nconvert is an exe, but xnview package has complete API to 
wrap. We even did some basic stuff in the past with Cyphre ...

but Image Magick is probably more popular, dunno ..

Thumbnailing is very marketable. With what REBOL has, and could have 
without too much effort, we could target the 5% most used ImageMagick 
functions and create an alternative.

the issue being that image magic does things incredibly fast.  its 
a library with its origins in very high-end visual effects, and is 
used massively by that industry.

but for stuff like web sites... an encaped and purposed-build view 
could be viable, if a few filters added a bit more quality/options 
to their mantle.

and a few other image formats too.  (image magic loads/saves more 
than 100)

Pekr: I would like to have that feature, but workarounds exists. 
If Carl has to spend time on R2, I prefer him working on fixes for 
long standing native bugs instead.

We could certainly use a save/jpg option.  That's gotta be a longstanding 
request by many.

Nick, IIRC, /jpg will make REBOL about 100kB larger, that's why it's 
not there. If you know about smaller JPEG saver, I think it may be 
included.

http://rebol.wik.is/Rebol3/Schemes/Imap4
Updated to version 0.0.2 
Logs into Imap server using cram-md5 if available
Switches to inbox
gets inbox status for unseen messages
Retrieves the first 3 messages

ooop ... wrong channel ...

now that we have ssl in view (woot) can we access gmail's api?

What api ?

Rebolek, like many other options, things like save/jpg may not need 
to be included in the default slim installation of REBOL, but I'm 
sure there are many users who would love to have the option of downloading 
a 100k+ library, function, plugin, etc. to easily enable this functionality. 
 I don't care if I have to download and do some code, that's trivial 
- just having the option available would be phenomenal.