Posting to the ARMini support mailing list, user Ross McGuiness asked a little over a week ago about the application JCut, and whether there was any chance of it being made ARMini (and Beagleboard) compatible. The software is part of a small suite of programs written some years ago by J. David Barrow for manipulating JPEG files without re-sampling them, and thus without causing any reduction in the image quality that normal editing can cause. The software does this by way of the Independant JPEG Group utility ‘jpegtran’, providing a RISC OS friendly front-end for the utility.
The applications themselves are all written in BASIC, so any incompatibility must clearly be with jpegtran, which was ported to RISC OS some time ago – an up to date port should therefore solve the problem. Just over a week later, and Chris Johnson was able to report to the list that he now had a working jpegtran utility, and that he was successfully using it with JCut and JClean.
This work wasn’t without problems – at first, while he was able to use jpegtran at the command line successfully, when he tried it with the more user friendly front-ends it resulted in an error, which he explained after solving it:
Part of the problem was that the original port of jpegtran and other utilities such as djpeg had been ‘customised’ a little and the calling convention was not quite standard.
Chris therefore modified the BASIC programs to work with the direct port and, now that they appear to be working correctly, he has offered to supply them to anyone wishing to try them out – to do so, just contact him.
The suite of programs themselves, unmodified and using the older jpegtran port – and therefore unsuitable for use on the ARMini or Beagleboard – can be found on the RISC OS downloads page of Tim Hill’s website.
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