Cooka

Description
Features
Screenshots
Download
Install and run

current release

0.3

release date

Feb 22,2007

Official logo

Logo_48x48 48x48 pixels

Logo_32x32 32x32 pixels

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Ckaicon Cooka 0.3 is here !!!

February 23,2007: Cooka is now an official LAAS Application
One year ago I released the first version of Cooka, my personal image viewer developed completely with Mono using Glade, Gtk and MonoDevelop. For a long time Cooka was just an advanced exercise made to learn the development process under Linux with the .NET Framewrok (mono).
Today Cooka is one of my "official" application that I want to share with the mono community. Current release is 0.3 and has a lot of new features.


Ckaicon Description

Cooka is a very simple image viewer written in C# (less than 900 lines of code, comments included) and compiled with Mono framework. The application is really essential: it has a file system browser in order to select the folder containing images to display; a thumbs viewer useful to see a preview of the images within the selected folder and some information like image's name, size and dimension; and finally a "view" area used to display the selected image.
In order to handle images and to enhance image viewing, Cooka provides a simple toolbar that allows users perform some basic operation such as rotate, zoom, set as background.
But, why Cooka is an old style image viewer ? Simply because it's possible to hide all the "interactive" areas (using keyboard shortcut) and focalize your attention on image. All the actions will be performed using your keyboard.


Ckaicon Features

Currently Cooka is able to display the followintype of images:

png, jpeg, jpg, gif, tga, bmp, ico, tiff, tif, ani, xpm, bmp, pnm, pbm, pgm, ppm, xbm ,tga

With Cooka you can browse your preferred folder using your mouse or, easily, using your keyboard. I think that when you are viewing a set of images all you want to see is "images", nothing else. So in Cooka all the features available with the mouse activity are also available simply using a key!
Here you find a list of useful keyboard shortcut:

Handling images:
  • Q: Fit to Window
  • W: Original Size
  • A: Rotate Left
  • S: Rotate Right
  • Z: Zoom Out
  • X: Zoom In
  • Left: Show Previous image
  • Right: Show Next image
  • PageUp: Show First image
  • PageDOwn: Show Last image
Application shortcut:
  • 1: Show/Hide file system viewer
  • 2: Show/Hide thumbs viewer
  • 3: Show/Hide toolbar
  • H: Show this window
  • M: [Un]Maximize Window
  • F: [Un]Fullscreen
  • O: About window
  • P: Quit
The only features not available as a keyboard shortcut are: file system browser, bookmark handler and "Set as wallpaper" feature.


Ckaicon Screenshots

Here are some screenshot of Cooka in action (click on image to view original size version):
Shot01th

This is the main Cooka image. You can easily see the classic 3-view model: a file system browser on NW corner, a thumbs viewer on SW corner, and the area where the images will be displayed currently used by the Cooka logo.

Shot02th

When you double click on file system browser, the content of selected folder is added to the thumbs viewer. Simply clicking on image's thumb will load the image in the "view" area.

Shot03th

Using the keyboard you can easily hide the file system browser in order to have more space for folder's thumbs.

Shot04th

Again, with a simple key press event you can hide also the thumbs viewer and allow selected image to fill all the area on your screen (try the M and F shortcut to enhance viewing)

Shot05th

Hiding the toolbar will allow you to see only images.

Shot06th

Fnally, the about window with credits and current version of the application.


Ckaicon Download

As usual for my application you can download a compiled versione of Cooka using the following link:

cooka-0.3_bin.tar.gz

or the complete source code and resources clicking on:

cooka-0.3_src.tar.gz

Finally, on my Ubuntu box I've created the deb package of current version:

Cooka-0.3.deb


Ckaicon Install and run

If you have downloaded the BIN* package, just unpack it and run the application using a terminal:

tar xzvf cooka-0.3_bin.tar.gz
...
mono Cooka.exe

The SRC** package contains all the ".cs" files (only one !) and resources that allow you to compile Cooka on your own:
tar xzvf cooka-0.3_src.tar.gz cd cooka-0.3 ./Make.sh

When process ends, you will find the Cooka.exe file on the Build subfolder; just use the previous syntax in a terminal window inorder to run the application.

Finally, the DEB*** package can be installed with the following:
dpkg -i Cooka-0.3.deb

You will find a shortcut to the aplpication onyour "Accessories" menu.

*You need mono installed on your system inorder to run every mono applications. If you download this package and want to make a shortcut on your desktop, in the source package you will find also the official Cooka's icon.
**The archive contains also all the files needed to open source code inside MonoDevelop.
***If the shortcut dows not work at first time, open and edit the application launcher in /usr/bin/ folder. Inside it there is a commented line that should be edited in order to run Cooka on some situations.