OpenRaster, SPI, etc.

After poking around ImageZ a bit late last night I thought i'd tackle multi-layer reading/writing.

So I wrote a writer and eventually a saver for OpenRaster format. I decided on OpenRaster since it is so simple, and it was pretty much how I was going to write it anyway - only I was going to avoid the XML. Being a zip file makes things simple om Java too. It seems to interoperate well enough so far (since I only have 'normal' blend mode working anyway), although if you save layers in greyscale or 16 bit formats from ImageZ and then load/save them from MyPaint, everything is converted to RGBA 8 bit.

I still need a float format though - I started looking into OpenEXR last year - but that was about when I stopped working on ImageZ for a chunk of time too - but I hit some walls with the test images. I can't recall where the issue was now though. This isn't really a high priority.

Today I thought I'd work on writing an ImageReaderSpi for the format as well - for example since currently OpenRaster files do not display in the open requester. But i got too side-tracked trying to implement meta-data and other features which in hindsight I probably don't need. I might revisit it again later with reduced requirements and see if I can get it working.

Along the way I also played with JAXB XML (de)serialisation which looks pretty nice - as nice as things can get with XML I guess. In general I try to avoid XML as much as possible because I think it's the phlegm, vomit, and anal leakage of devil's spawn, so this was a pleasant surprise. No surprise that it wasn't originally an apache project though ...

Also started work on a crop tool. This is exposing me once again to issues with the tool overlays, so I should probably think about cleaning that up somehow too. I'm using piccolo2d at the moment, but the way I have the tools track the current zoom is a right pigs breakfast.