vkdt dev diary pt 3

Software vkdt
2

Have tried vkdt a little bit, have a mixed feeling about it.
First of all, it looks very promising WRT image processing part. Fast, clean, neat. The implementation of compute-heavy stuff is really impressive!
As to UI, it’s rather disappointing ATM. Being quite low-level, it takes a lot more time to process a photo than using dt. Provided that there’s no convenient tooling neither to copy-paste the development steps to another photo nor to customize a default workflow, it becomes very time-consuming. I realize that it’s also a matter of habit, I’ve spent a lot more time with dt than with vkdt. Thus ATM I’d say vkdt is more a toy to play than a tool to work with. Yet a very funny toy! IMHO the UI needs much more love than it received so far to make vkdt a real photographer’s tool.
Also there are handful of bugs/weirdnesses I noticed.

  1. vkdt reports writing to ~/.config/vkdt/config.rc but writes nothing there. It’s still 0 bytes long.
  2. I don’t know how to stop vkdt properly. Alt-F4 closes the window but the process is still there and I have to kill it manually.
  3. Probably it’s consequent to #2, but vkdt now and then forgets the history, settings and last directory and starts clean with home dir again.
  4. It doesn’t respect UTF-8 file names, I see question marks instead of Cyrillic dir names. Funny “Guess the tune” game:-) And BTW the font is too large in open dir dialog.
  5. I was struggling with vertical shots without any success. vkdt did not pick the orientaton up from exif, trying to rotate it manually just crops the top and bottom parts, leaving the frame in landscape position.
  6. And, vkdt doesn’t seem to use exif much while it might benefit from the exif info massively.
  7. I also find the docs too short and sometimes a little bit cryptic. Given a quite specific UI along with some new concepts introduced, the full and clear docs are of much importance!

@hanatos, if you want me to file bugs on that matters for easy tracking, just let me know. I still consider vkdt worth time and efforts to be learned! Looking forward to the moment I’m able to overcome the dt development with it in terms of resulting PQ!
Thanks for your efforts!

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