Original review published on Steve Litchfield's 3-Lib.One of the much-vaunted features of the '5' has been its large 16-'colour'
screen. However, partly because the built-in Sketch is limited to 4 colours and
partly because application authors have heeded the warnings about higher
battery drain in 16-colour mode, the new screen doesn't seem to get used much.
One area where the screen will be useful is in viewing graphics that have
been converted over from a desk-top machine. Psion supplies a
Bmconv DOS-mode tool to do the conversions,
though it has to be said it's not the most intuitive tool in the world to work
with (see Phil Spencer's
graphics pages
for more advice). However, once your desk-top masterpieces have been converted
to EPOC picture files in 16 shades of grey your next task will be to work out
how to display them on the Series 5. Which, of course, is where
Mat Ripley and his
freeware tool PicSee comes in. I was looking at
v2.0, downloaded from his web site.
![[Screen Shot]](/reviews/3lib/PicSee/picsee1.gif)
From a simple dialog interface, PicSee (pronounced as in 'pixie', geddit?)
allows viewing of individual 2, 4 or 16-colour pictures or whole directories of
them in slide-show mode. Mat even supplies an example of a 'multi', short for
'multi-bitmap picture' (where the extension .MBM comes from, the default for
all EPOC pictures) , in which lots of different pictures can be concatenated in
one single file. This technique is often used by program authors to reduce the
number of files they need to distribute but can also be used (as Mat shows) for
doing simple animations. In PicSee's case, the example is of a spinning
ray-traced cow! Animation files using this technique tend to be on the large
side, though, so I wouldn't recommend it to everyone.
The utility handled all the pictures I threw at it without a murmur, with
options to scroll images around that exceed the 640 x 240 screen size of the
Series 5. There are a few basic help screens (available from within the
'Options' dialog) and not a lot else, but on the whole PicSee does the job it's
asked to do very well and is worth a place on anyone's Series 5.
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