Improved Hands-Free Mode and Printing

• A brief introduction of this idea and others is at GSoC 2013 Ideas

As its name implies, the search-results “Hands Free” Mode (and its “Full Screen” variant) is designed to support unmediated group viewing, say, on large displays. It shows results as several horizontal rows, that advance in a stepped fashion. “Hands Free” has become somewhat a misnomer in that controls are provided for play/pause, horizontal scroll speed +/-, and manipulation of individual rows of images. Also, one can click on a particular image to bring up a popup with details, including a link to the full record.

Desired improvements to this mode are:

• Scrolling is too jerky. Make it smoother.
• Whenever a new record comes in, the presentation always starts from the beginning of the queue. Consequently, if records are coming in pretty regularly, the display never gets very far down the queue, but instead keeps replaying ones near the beginning. It remains desirable to show a newly arriving record as soon as possible, so insertion of that record into the queue at just the right place should do it.
• New photos, and those with updated information, are marked with a “New or Updated” yellow tag. This tag may occlude the person's name (which was recently added to the pictures). Figure out a way to prevent this.
• Provide smart name captioning - the person's name should always be visible, readable, and fit the image.

If time allows, related improvements to printing can be considered, e.g.:

• From a details popup, printing should include all the person's notes.

(more to come)