Collage

Welcome to Collage.

This application is designed to surf through the photos you specify on your computer and present them with a collage/Polaroid type view. It's mostly finished. More or less. I didn't create the code that does the really cool Polaroid effect, that came from the below link. What I did do as add all the other stuff around it.

Original project came from:
http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Photo-Screensaver

Code Project link for this project:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/Collage.aspx

Couple things first:

• There may be profanity or bad, bad, bad words in the quotes and words.
• In fact, there is. I haven't taken them out.
• Some events or text may be too long and it gets cut off.
• So keep your custom quotes of wisdom to smallish text.
• This project came from an open source project which provided my starting point.
• But was a pretty cool app to get me started on this.
• I've rewritten the bulk of it and now it's VB.NET.
• Has little resemblence to original project.
• It displays quotes, events and word definitions. That's why it's just about 14MB.
• It was originally written with most values hard coded.
• I've put in the ability to change a lot of what you can do.
• Some font combos won't work, really dependant on font you choose.
• If you're scared, just go with the defaults.
• They've been tried and tested.
• If you stuff things up, hit reset.
• There is a single thread for painting. For each form.
• Most collections and thread-safe and sync locks are used.
• .NET 4.0 is required. I'll be surprised if you're reading this in the app without it.
• Give us a shot if you want something done to it.
• Source code is available to those who want it.
• Data is Unicode. So go crazy with special characters.
• Alot of options can be configured - not everything, but you can customize it quite abit.

A note on photo dates and captions

• The date comes from the Date Taken of a photo.
• This isn't available on all photos, in case of null, nothing is displayed.
• The caption comes from the photo title (again, metadata).
• If that's not available, the filename is used.
• If odd characters are present, the caption is not used.

Directories

• Enter directories to search here.
• If you include a directory with child directories, they are included automatically.
• If you enter a child directory when you have entered the parent, you should be shot.
• Saying that, the system doesn't care, but photos will be added twice.

Sidebar

• The sidebar displays quotes, events, your quotes, and word definitions.
• You can turn these on or off. Depending on your fancy.
• Play around with the values to see what happens.
• Use fonts wisely. Big fonts will probably screw things up.

Custom Quotes

• Enter your own quotes in here, something like:

Quote text|Quote Author
Quote text>Another line|Quote Author

• Use > character for new line.
• If you actually want the > character, use another one. Like › or something else.

Advanced

• When the text on the right is drawn, it piggy backs on the event for when a photo is drawn.
• There is a reason why the times are linked (ie. read above point).
• Opacity is well... opacity.
• Caption date format is handy to change.
• Enclose characters in double quotes when you want to use them.
• Like "date:" (the d won't be considered the day then).
• Fonts can be changed, but change them wisely.
• Bold fonts on the photos only suit certain fonts.
• Forcing the text to lowercase wasn't done on the captions.
• That's because casing is sometimes wanted for captions.
• Like OMG. Or WTF. Or I feel SUPER DUPER Captain AWESOME!!!!
• Note the use of capitals.
• Layout can't be changed.
• Percentages were put in so not to use all of the data.
• Percentages indicate a ceiling is used on data, but the arrays are shuffled.
• That means the same data is not used all the time.

All in all, pretty happy with the screen saver, give us a yell if something dodge happens.