Photoshop thumbnails and CS4

Yes, let's dig the old bug reports! Hope that they are still available with Red Wednesday... my thoughts are with those that got pinkslipped. I hope that the Photoshop team did not suffer too much, but it is very selfish...

I'm sorry, but I have to add my two cents. Reading this current exchange, It seems that we have a Microsoft team member who is willing to help (almost bend over backwards) and the Adobe team member who seems to be very resistant. I would hope that isn't the pervasive philosophy within the Adobe team.

Thank you Brandon for joining in.

Paul

> There's also been a bug for a while that could cause Explorer to "forget" view settings for some folders, basically a corruption bug in the persisted settings data.

That's the one! Thanks for replying anyway Brandon.

Hey John,

On Vista and XP, window sizes are stored on a per-folder basis. So if you open Computer, resize it, and then close it - it should be the same size when you open it again. But if you open Documents, that may be a different size (the size you last closed Documents at, or the default). Modifier keys have never done anything special when pressing the close button - no idea where that rumor got started.

There's also been a bug for a while that could cause Explorer to "forget" view settings for some folders, basically a corruption bug in the persisted settings data. We finally were able to track this down and made a fix for this in Vista SP2 (and Win7).

Also, the Explorer window size behavior seems to have changed for Win7, as the Explorer now opens at the last size and position it was closed at, no matter what folder location you open to.

Brandon,

As an Explorer team man please reveal how we can get the size and view settings of Explorer Windows to stick permanently. Nothing seems to work; not even clicking the close button with modifier keys. And it's just as bad in Vista!

Edit: Sorry for the OT excursion, this has bugged me since Windows 3.0. :(

Chris - I work on the Explorer team. If you have a specific bug to report please do so, but none of the in-box handlers have such problems, and none of the APIs have known issues. Repeating that claim won't make it true!

As part of the Windows 7 Beta SDK release we're doing a big push to get developers with file formats to implement a complete set of format handlers. That includes things like thumbnail handlers, preview handlers, property handlers, and IFilters (for files with textual content). The Win7 Beta SDK will include a tool we demo'd at PDC that will run a series of tests against your file format's handlers and report what is missing or where common issues/bugs are found. This tool might be of help to you in ensuring a great experience for your Windows users working with your file formats like PSD.

As I said, we'd love to have Adobe provide a full set of handlers including thumbnails for PSD. In fact, in Vista or later you don't even need to implement a thumbnail handler, you can have a property handler that returns the thumbnail via the PKEY_Thumbnail property. If your format already includes a lower-res thumbnail image embedded in it, it can't get much easier than that.

Now if you don't want to or don't have the time to implement proper support for your format, that's your call. And while I know you probably have lots of users running XP and will for a while still, I'm betting your Vista and Win7 users would be grateful if you added such support using one of the Vista mechanisms.

Brandon

Brandon - the bugs are still outstanding with Microsoft, but we've stopped pressing for fixes and moved on. Other apps have seen the same bugs, with completely independent implementations - which is why other apps have also dropped their thumbnailing explorer extensions (or continue to live with "file is busy or in use", which you still see from the MS provided thumbnailers).

And we have to write code to support XP and Vista, so we can't use just the latest Vista APIs (assuming they worked correctly, but they don't).

Can't say fairer than that!

Chris - There aren't any known bugs like that in Explorer, and we'd surely know about them if there were (after all, the dozens of in-box thumbnail handlers use the same APIs, as do Office and countless other third parties).

Most likely a bug in your code was leaking something that caused the behavior you saw. The pre-Vista API for providing thumbnails (IExtractImage) was a bit less than straight-forward so I'm not surprised that some developers ran into issues getting it working properly.

However, in Vista the new IThumbnailProvider API is extremely simple and very easy to implement, with some great samples available in the Windows SDK and easy to follow tutorials on MSDN. It even supports out-of-proc implementations so you don't have to worry about destabilizing the shell and can even write them in .NET.

Details about building a thumbnail provider can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc144118(VS.85).aspx

If you have an implementation that appears to be causing problems with file locking and such, please let me know. It would be very helpful to share that with my team so we can figure out what the cause of your problem is.

Thanks,
Brandon

Brandon - I don't have the code handy now. We tried a few different techniques, and in every case the MS code called before our code was leaving the file marked as busy. Basically, it's a bug we can't work around.