Monday, July 23, 2012

DNGMonochrome 0.9.2 beta released

Programmers - well most of them anyway - like speed. I'm not sure why that is. I guess because they always have the idea things can go faster if it's programmed smarter. Becomes a bit of an honorary thing... or an ego trip, depending on the programmer.

But most of the time, speed is simply a necessity, or even a demand. Speed can be a true bottleneck, for interoperability, for user experience or for other practical reasons. Slow software also has a high irritation factor. Research done by Microsoft shows that users will start to get irritated in a web browser or with regular software, if there's no response within five seconds.

Now what's five seconds?

To be honest, I think people are still quite patient with five seconds :-)

Of course 'not responding' and 'slow' are also two different things.

Anyway... I wasn't too happy with the processing speed of DNGMonochrome, but at first I couldn't figure out why some of the functions were executing like a snail. Then after concentrating on parts of the different algorithms, I was able to identify the main culprit.

And then it became fairly easy to turn it around into a faster version.

So 0.9.2 beta can be downloaded, with a speedier regular conversion, and more speed in the red and blue conversion. Although in those, phase 4 and 5 are still as slow as ever. I might be able to smarten that up too, but no promises.

Also in this version the Save dialog for Windows XP SP3 is fixed and should work now properly.

Still designated 'beta', feels more comfortable for now...

You can download this new version here.

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