Three hundred photographs, and a window that stays still

A picture viewer is one of those things that works perfectly in a demo folder of twelve holiday photographs and falls apart in the folder people actually have: two years of a phone’s camera roll, a few hundred clips among them, all in one directory because that is where the phone put them.

Ours fell apart. Opening a large folder crawled, scrolling stuttered as tiles came and went, and moving from one picture to the next blanked the screen in between. Four separate causes, each reasonable on its own:

• Every tile decoded the whole file to draw a thumbnail the size of a stamp.
• Every clip’s tile was a live player, so a folder of fifty videos was fifty video players.
• Everything in the folder was drawn, whether or not it was on screen.
• Moving on emptied the stage and then started decoding the next picture.

What 1.14 does instead

A tile is now a small thumbnail the platform made once, which Rutba Office keeps on disk — so the second visit to a folder costs almost nothing, and the first costs one small image per file rather than a full decode. A clip’s tile is a single frame of it, not a player. The grid and the filmstrip draw only the rows in view, which is what makes a folder of five thousand cost about what a folder of fifty costs. And the stage keeps the picture you are looking at until the next one has finished decoding, so moving through a folder never flashes empty.

One smaller fix belongs with them: a photograph taken sideways on a phone is turned the right way up once, rather than once by the decoder and again by the viewer — which is the bug that leaves every portrait picture on its side.

The folder is the first screen now

With nothing open, the window fills with the folder itself: the folders inside it as tiles, chips counting what is in it by kind, a choice of order, and three tile sizes. One click opens a picture on a dark stage with a filmstrip underneath. It is a browser for the folder you have rather than a viewer waiting to be given a file.

Measured on a folder nobody hand-picked

Claims about speed are worth what the test folder is worth, so the checks build one: three hundred pictures and clips, generated, then opened by fourteen application checks that read back what the window actually did — what was drawn, what was kept, what was still on screen while the next picture decoded.

That is the same discipline as the rest of the suite’s checks, which run against the application rather than its code, and the same reason every release is proved by watching the previous one update itself.