Seize the storm

The Road Runner and Me

Around noon, I saw that the cloud deck in Nebraska was eroding and would allow for a little more heating to occur.   With cells firing already in NE, I decided the strategy would be to go down to the SD border by Yankton and wait for them to come across the border.   I gave Nick Hartley a call and he climbed into the Baloo Mobile as the important navigator, data analyzer, and the ever important – second pair of eyes.   We finally got onto the first cell and had a wonderful view on a hilltop.   The wonderful view lasted for about a minute  - enough to snap two pictures and then think about what to do next.   By this time, the storm was gone, racing northward and away from us at 40-60 mph.   The next cell coming out of Nebraska looked awesome as the hook echo on the first was starting to fade.   We opted to stay behind, entrenching ourselves on the west side of the storm – the big and only mistake of the chase.

We watched and waited as the storm slowly drifted north.   We captured some pretty good pictures of a rotating wall cloud and supposed funnel.   I am always overly second guessing myself as to what I see and if it’s scud or something meaningful.   The plan was to let the storm pass and then head east to get behind it.   Sadly, there were some developing storms on the south side that kept us wondering if the storm was back-building.   We attempted to head east but recoiled due to heavy rain and low visibility – we weren’t about to throw ourselves headlong into a situation we weren’t prepared for.   Our data connection was spotty but even worse was the fact that the radar was already too old by the time we got it.   The storms had already moved at least 5-10 miles to the north as we got each new radar grab.

Finally, we got behind the storm but were racing to catch up with it.   I definitely felt like Wile E. Coyote on the rocket trying to keep up with the Road Runner.   We kept pursuing but could not grasp the prey.   A report would come over the radio of a tornado sited at this town and literally 5 minutes later, we would see a sign for that town.   Though we were going at least 20 mph faster than the storm, we could not keep up.   When it seemed like we were on the storm, a report came that it was still north of us.   After the chase, I could not believe Bill Doms’ pictures as we were right there, but saw nothing.   It was all about position and we had chosen the wrong point of entry into the chase.   All the way north, we were right behind it – Utica, Freeman, Bridgewater, Salem, Canova, Howard, Carthage, De Smet.   Looking back, I still think we might have been too far east.   Fortunately, we didn’t see much damage along the path that we did take.   We returned a frustrated bunch but grateful at least that there were tornadoes out there and it wasn’t a total bust.

***Important Notice***

 Due to popularity of Photo Ops and upcoming features, Photo Ops will no longer be freeware.   This decision was made to ensure an even more quality release and enhanced customer support.   Please stay tuned for exciting news and enhancements under way!

***Important Notice***

Over 55 hours of development went into this latest release of Photo Ops.   It was definitely a monumental task and kept me up many nights after my wife announced that she was going to bed.   After holding the release back at least about 3 or 4 times, I decided that this was up to the caliber I wanted.   So why update the software and what are the new features, keep reading my  friend, keep reading.

Photo Ops 1.3.1 received a lot of great feedback and praise.   As great as a time saver it was, the program was only a pliers or a screwdriver.   It lacked the handy-dandier time saving features that went beyond its original purpose.   This release compliments the original “amazing” features of 1.3.1 and adds a few more that soon will be a “can’t live without” feature.   So without further ado, here are the major enhancements for this release and a little explanation on them:

Reworked core code – I won’t go much into this as this is pretty much from a development stand-point.   If you were a programmer, you would probably really appreciate the lengths I went through to organize my code.   It will definitely aid in development for future development and cutting down new feature insertion time dramatically.

Vista – If you couldn’t tell, the screenshots do imply that Photo Ops is now Vista ready!   Don’t worry though, it still works on everything that it has run on in the past (Windows 2000, XP, etc).

Added Wizard mode – Some people are wizard fanatics, and others aren’t.   I wanted a method for informing the novice user as they went through the process.   It needed to have some directions without cluttering things too much.   The dialog might seem a little too busy, thus the need for the wizard.

Ability to move or copy photos – This will enable the user to move or copy photos from a source to a destination directory.   So what’s that mean?   It means that the user  can insert their memory card and set Photo Ops to access that location and move the files to a destination directory of their choice – most likely this would be the “My Pictures” folder.   If the directory doesn’t exist, it will create it and plop all the photos in there before it executes the organizing process.

Settings removed from the registry – This was a rather large update.   Everything is now stored in XML format, which is pretty easily read and manipulated.   These files are stored in the User\Application Data\Photo Ops\ folder.   If you go and manually mess with them, the bugs aren’t my fault.   If you want to totally reset everything, just go to that folder and delete all the files.

Saved settings – This came directly from a user and was such a great suggestion, I held back the release so I could get this in.   Different sets of settings can be remembered.   This allows you to set up one run through Photo Ops specifically for emailing, another run for website pictures, and maybe one more still for professional pictures.   These are loaded, saved, and removed from the Settings menu.

Check for updates feature – This is a pretty small feature that simply goes out to Carpe Tempestas and scans the Photo Ops page to check which version is available.   If the local version is different from the online version, it pops up a prompt to go out to the website to check to see if there’s a new version.

Progress now shown as photos are being organized – Another simple, meaningless feature, but it sure helps to know how things are coming along and when we can expect them to be done.

Date  insertion into file mask  - A new checkbox was added to the renaming part of Photo Ops that can insert a formatted date into the file name mask.   The user will see a “{date}” added into the text box.   Rest assured the date will be in there and that it will be the one you select.

Multiple-line watermarks – I added another button right next to the copyright insertion button that will insert a new line.   These buttons will further be referred to as “Quick Picks”.   In order to get alignment to work, I had to change things a little bit more in the code.

Still Free – I finally found some other applications online that do some similar types of things that Photo Ops does.   They are selling the software for $20-30.   After a lot of thought, I remained steadfast that Photo Ops would continue to be Freeware.   I would very much appreciate any donations though.   It really makes my time worth it and spurs me on toward future developments.

Free of adware, spyware, and viruses – Certification by Softpedia.

With that, the overview of Photo Ops 2.0 is complete.   If you have any questions, you can contact me through the contact form.  

Here are the links to other important areas:

• Photo Ops Main Page
• Download Photo Ops

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