Corydalis v2025.21.0 - new features!

I just released yesterday a new version of Corydalis (https://demo.corydalis.io, https://github.com/iustin/corydalis). To me personally, it’s a major improvement, since the native (my own) image viewer finally gets zooming, panning, gesture handling, etc. This is table-stakes for an image viewer, but oh well, it took me a long time to implement it, because of multiple things: lack of time, the JS library I was using for gestures was pretty old and unmaintained and it caused more trouble than was helping, etc.

The feature is not perfect, and on the demo site there’s already a bug since all images are smaller than the screen, and this I didn’t test 😅, so double-click to zoom doesn’t work: says “Already at minimum zoom”, but zooming otherwise (+/- on the keyboard, mouse wheel, gesture) works.

End-to-end, the major development for this release was done over around two weeks, which is pretty short: I extensively used Claude Sonnet and Grok to unblock myself. Not to write code per se - although there is code written 1:1 by LLMs, but most of the code is weirdly wrong, and I have to either correct it or just use it as a starter and rewrite most of it. But to discuss and unblock, and learn about new things, the current LLMs are very good at.

And yet, sometimes even what they’re good at, fails hard. I asked for ideas to simplify a piece of code, and it went nowhere, even if there were significant rewrite possibilities. I spent the brain cycles on it, reverse engineered my own code, then simplified. I’ll have to write a separate blog post on this…

In any case, this (zooming) was the last major feature I was missing. There are image viewer libraries, but most of them slow, compared to the bare-bones (well, now not so much anymore) viewer that I use as main viewer. From now on, it will me minor incremental features, mostly around Exif management/handling, etc. Or, well, internal cleanups: extend test coverage, remove use of JQuery in the frontend, etc., there are tons of things to do.

Fun fact: I managed to discover a Safari iOS bug. Or at least I think it’s a bug, so reported it and curious what’ll come out of it.

Finally, I still couldn’t fix the GitHub actions bug where the git describe doesn’t see the just pushed tag, sigh, so the demo site still lists Corydalis v2024.12.0-133-g00edf63 as the version 😅