Scalado, a developer of mobile imagine software, has announced a new toolkit which it says will allow mobile imaging software developers to boost the speed of their apps.
SpeedView, which is the company's most recent addition to their CAPS SDK, promises to enable camera phone software to browse through and view high-resolution images "instantly" on the handset. According to Scalado, "One of the most commonly used functions within a camera phone is opening the photo gallery application, where users browse thumbnails, open an image and then browse screen size images zooming and panning over them." Scalado criticise some camera phones, saying such operations "can take minutes".
This writer's N70 is an order of magnitude quicker than the "minutes" Scalado moan about, but it's not exactly as quick as a PC. However, the longest operation appears to be loading thumbnails in the gallery, which may simply be the memory card's slow read speeds.
That aside, Scalado's CAPS SDK is designed to let software developers write imaging apps for phones that make efficient use of CPU and memory, which is nice, seeing as the ridiculous amount of power we have on desktop machines these days means nobody knows how to write proper programs any more (calm down, you grumpy old man - Ed). Add to pot the fact that mobile phones can now take photos above and beyond 3 megapixels, and a toolkit that creates apps with a small footprint on the CPU and memory usage charts is an appealing prospect.
Scalado say their secret is a patented JPEG codec called RAJPEG. It's designed for the memory capacity of a modern phone and can work on regions of a high resolution JPEG without processing unnecessary areas of it.
SpeedView will be in use in phones come the middle of 2007 and Scalado will be demoing the benefits of their new solution at this month's 3GSM telecom expo in Barcelona.
More details can be found in the SpeedView press release and the Scalado website.
