If you have a digital still camera that you haven't been able to connect
to your BeOS machine, this package just may be your solution. It seems to
handle a wider range of cameras than the 'Camera' app that comes with the system.
It has no GUI of its own, being entirely command-line driven, but the package that I've put together for BeOS has some xicon scripts that give you easy access and management from the Tracker. The flipside of command-line orientation is that it is much more flexible than point-and-click apps. It accesses features of my camera that even the manufacturer's software doesn't!
My own camera is an Olympus D620L (C1400XL in Europe) and works admirably with it. Other makes and models reported to be compatible are: Agfa ePhoto 780, ePhoto 1280 and ePhoto 1680; Epson PhotoPC "classic", PhotoPC 500, PhotoPC 550 and PhotoPC 600; Nikon CoolPix 900S and CoolPix 900 (but not CoolPix 600!); Olympus D-220L, D-320L, D-340L, C-400L, C-400Z, D-400 Zoom, C-410L, D-500L, D-600L, D-600 Zoom, C-820L, C-840L, C-900 Zoom, C-1000L and C-1400L; Toshiba PDR-2; and Sanyo VPC-G200, VPC-G200EX, VPC-G210 and DSC-X300.
It reportedly will not work with Kodak, Minolta, Fuji, Panasonic, and other models that use a different protocol.
[If you're interested in some of the results I'm getting from the program,
you might check out my small gallery of shots from
Millennium London.
These were not actually taken with my digital camera-- they're Kodachrome
slides (from my other Olympus!) digitized through my D620L and a
little copying setup I've built. (If you have a slow connection, you may
want to skip this: it's 250K of images, which can take a minute or so to
load over a modem.)
I also now have some more pictures actually taken with my Olympus digicam.
The Berkeley community pitched in over recent weekends to build a cool
playground, and --as well as helping out myself -- I was there with my camera.
See the record here.]
photopc was written by
Eugene Crosser
in Moscow originally for Linux/Unix systems.
I am responsible only for the small modifications needed for BeOS,
for the xicon scripts, and for the packaging here.
The whole package, including source, is freely distributable.
A version for PPC is now also available (as of 7 May). It hasn't been
tested as extensively as the x86 one [because the camera cable is usually
attached to that machine...!], but it seems to do everything right.
If you have any problems please let me know. The source archive
is still only suitable for x86 because I had to hack a lot of the code
to stop the Metrowerks compiler from being a whiny b****. I won't bother
to release the PPC source unless somebody really wants it.
By the way, the package has no image manipulation capabilities aside
from downloading pictures, so even to rotate portrait-format images into
the upright position you'll need some sort of paint package.
ArtPaint 1.3 by Heikke Suhonen works well for me as a very capable general
painting app.