Performance Enhancements and Touch Input Improvements · Release Candidate 37

Performance Improvements

The "Loading Revisions" step of loading a library is now potentially orders of magnitude faster than before for large libraries. Instead of reading each whole revision file, now typically only the first few hundred bytes are read from disk.

Just as significant, the step where the catalog file is read and the internal in-memory library structure is created has received some very significant optimizations in terms of memory management, which makes it much faster and at the same time results in a lot less memory use, for our example library going down from 8 GB to 2.5 GB.

On top of these general improvements, the Linux version has received a few additional performance fixes that remove two very noticeable hangs in the startup p process. Together with the other improvements, on our testing library that is stored on a slow external hard drive, the total startup time on Linux, including loading the library, has gone down dramatically, from about 30 seconds on 1.0.0-rc.36 to just over 3 seconds on 1.0.0-rc.37.

Touch Screen Handling

Except for the Windows version, including the iOS version, touch screen input was erroneously mapped to mouse inputs instead of being processed directly. This meant that scrolling various panes was not possible with the usual swipe gesture.

On top of fixing this issue we have made a few improvements that bring the multi-touch experience close the expected behavior:

• Long-tapping now opens the context menu
• Double taps are recognized
• Simple swipe gestures don't invoke drag'n'drop operations to avoid accidental dragging of items

That being said, touch input on the desktop version is still limited in several areas and is not a fully supported means to control the application. Particularly the behavior for selecting, dragging and activating items has not been adjusted for touch input and there is no logic for making it easier to hit small controls with the finger by virtually enlarging their hit area. This will be improved further over time, as the mobile version gets a more complex UI.

Bug Fixes

Apart from some fixes for reported crashes, this release also fixes an issue where previously an application restart would be required in order to sidestep synchronization errors, whenever revisions had been cleaned up as part of the synchronization process.

Another potentially noticeable fix has been made to the layout of the notification center. Long texts within notifications or activities could previously lead to the width of the right bar temporarily changing, which in turn could cause the scroll position of the center pane to jump, particularly when being at the bottom of the photo stream.

As always, see the change log for the full list of changes.