Author Topic: mViewer GX: Image viewing for everyone! (well, almost)  (Read 24713 times)

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Offline DJ Omnimaga

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mViewer GX: Image viewing for everyone! (well, almost)
« on: January 18, 2014, 06:04:06 pm »
A few years ago, Critor from TI-Planet released mViewer, a TI-Nspire image viewer that ran via Ndless. It was later ported to color calculator models as mViewer CX and added support for various image formats, allowing people to store more images on their calculators. A few years later, Legimet started working on nPDF, a PDF reader for the TI-Nspire.

However, since then, Texas Instruments have since started to block Ndless instead of fixing OS bugs, meaning that fewer and fewer people can use mViewer, nPDF and the other Ndless programs.


Well, here are some good news: A few weeks ago, a Lua version of mViewer, called mViewer GX, has been released! Not only does it support images of various format, but also PDFs. mViewer GX works differently, however, in the way that it is basically an online converter, located on TI-Planet, that will generate files that you can then view on your calculator. Although it will work in any OS that supports Lua, this new document viewer takes advantage of the considerable Lua image speed improvements since OS 3.2, and no, don't be scared: Despite being Lua, the scrolling speed will be much more than the 5 frames per second we often saw in advanced Lua programs. You can access mViewer GX at http://tiplanet.org/forum/editgx.php (requires TI-Planet account)


And that's not all! There are now HP Prime and Casio PRIZM versions too!

The HP Prime version, thanks to the extremely powerful HP PPL language and the 400 MHz processor, was easier to pull off in terms of required on-calc code, because the BASIC-like language supports images of any size (although programs that are over 2 MB large will render the calculator unstable) and even stretching, as we can often see in HP games nowadays. The touch screen makes it very easy to use on the user side and the program, as expected, is very fast. Basically, you convert a document using the online converter linked above, then it generates the HP PPL code for you, along with the image data, so you can visualize your image easily.

As for the Casio PRIZM version, it is written in native code and was released shortly after the HP Prime version. Although there was also ImageViewer being available before, mViewer GX takes things some steps further by adding support beyond just non-progressive JPEG and making image viewing much faster. Despite the speed gain over ImageViewer, this version of mViewer GX is slower than its HP/TI counterparts, since the calculator doesn't have much RAM for ASM/C programmers (about 128K) and has a slower processor (max overclock speed is 94.3 MHz via OverClui), but it is still pretty impressive and the program was tweaked to make it intuitive regardless of the calculator limitations. Note that in the Casio community, people in general had agreed to not tamper with the FX-cg10 built-in image support restrictions to avoid having to deal with the same thing Ndless is going through (which TI is blocking to prevent cheating), so any image viewing program that got released for the PRIZM will not let you open g3p/g3b files.


For people who have the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, IViewer is available for viewing images. There is currently no way to display custom images in less than one AAA battery set on the ClassPad II, let alone ones with more than 8 colors. Only the Casio proprietary images are available for this model.


Anyway, enjoy!

mViewer GX for the TI-Nspire
mViewer GX for the HP Prime
mViewer GX for the fx-CG10/20
« Last Edit: January 18, 2014, 06:08:39 pm by DJ Omnimaga »

Offline Sorunome

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Re: mViewer GX: Image viewing for everyone! (well, almost)
« Reply #1 on: January 18, 2014, 06:51:01 pm »
That is looking pretty awesome! :D

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Offline critor

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Re: mViewer GX: Image viewing for everyone! (well, almost)
« Reply #2 on: January 24, 2014, 05:00:13 pm »
Thanks for the news about this work.
I do appreciate it.

The online converter now supports the TI-84 Plus C, and the generated files are meant to be compatible with IViewer.
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Re: mViewer GX: Image viewing for everyone! (well, almost)
« Reply #3 on: January 24, 2014, 05:08:59 pm »
That's good to hear. I plan to post a news about the 84+CSE version at one point, probably before the next HP Prime news, since for the latter I was waiting until Trailblazer is completed and that Life Force reaches fully playable demo status.

Is there a way to use mViewer GX without a (working) TI-Planet account?

Offline critor

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Re: mViewer GX: Image viewing for everyone! (well, almost)
« Reply #4 on: January 24, 2014, 05:25:36 pm »
Your account should be working if that's the question.
(or should be back this week-end or something like that if I remember well)

For the moment, the tool is only accessible to registered users.
We might make it accessible to guests, as I've already wondered about this.
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Re: mViewer GX: Image viewing for everyone! (well, almost)
« Reply #5 on: January 24, 2014, 07:18:38 pm »
Oh ok I wasn't sure. But yeah even then I thought it would be nice to have it available to guests (even if with fewer options like SourceCoder). Some people here had troubles figuring out how to register for some reasons. D:

Offline critor

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Re: mViewer GX: Image viewing for everyone! (well, almost)
« Reply #6 on: January 25, 2014, 06:18:48 am »
Could you point me the registration problems please ?

As far as I know, the whole registration interface should be displayed into english if this is your browser default language, even the test asking you to prove that you're a human being.
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Offline Adriweb

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Re: mViewer GX: Image viewing for everyone! (well, almost)
« Reply #7 on: January 25, 2014, 06:53:30 am »
Maybe (if that's even possible through the phpBB custom page interface) we should look into having a register button on pages that simply say that you have to be logged in.
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Offline critor

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Re: mViewer GX: Image viewing for everyone! (well, almost)
« Reply #8 on: January 25, 2014, 07:32:38 am »
What are you talking about ?
There is such message for guest users as far as I know, together with a link.
« Last Edit: January 25, 2014, 07:33:03 am by critor »
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Offline nspireguy

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Re: mViewer GX: Image viewing for everyone! (well, almost)
« Reply #9 on: January 25, 2014, 08:06:23 am »
so how many mor pics can you have?(compared to the older one?)

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Re: mViewer GX: Image viewing for everyone! (well, almost)
« Reply #10 on: January 25, 2014, 08:40:33 am »
The limits are unchanged, as the calculators memory issues remain:
- 6 pages per TI-Nspire document
- 1 page per HP-Prime program
- 100 pages (in theory) per TI-84+C program - we could even allow more than this, but you would have less characters for the document name (8 characters max)

But you can still upload more pages than that - the downloaded pack with just include more files.
« Last Edit: January 25, 2014, 08:42:34 am by critor »
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Offline nspireguy

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Re: mViewer GX: Image viewing for everyone! (well, almost)
« Reply #11 on: January 25, 2014, 09:53:36 am »
ok thx!

Offline Legimet

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Re: mViewer GX: Image viewing for everyone! (well, almost)
« Reply #12 on: January 25, 2014, 11:43:57 am »
What PDF library do you use?

(And I need to work on nPDF, i haven't done much calc development in over a month D:)

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Re: mViewer GX: Image viewing for everyone! (well, almost)
« Reply #13 on: January 25, 2014, 11:48:58 am »
For the TI-Nspire ?
It's a Lua program, so no existing C/C++ PDF library.
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Offline Legimet

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Re: mViewer GX: Image viewing for everyone! (well, almost)
« Reply #14 on: January 25, 2014, 12:11:50 pm »
I mean for the web tool.