Resco Photo Viewer ( alpha ) – a finger friendly image viewer for Windows Mobile | Best Windows Mobile Games / Windows Phone Apps Review

Sep 3, 2009 Posted by CrisRowlands in Featured Articles, Uncategorized | 11 comments

Resco Photo Viewer ( alpha ) – a finger friendly image viewer for Windows Mobile

Developer : Resco

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Updated Version Review is now available : Click Here

When it comes to picture viewers, there are the good, the bad and the ugly, but now “Resco Photo Viewer” has entered the scene in a whole new class of its own. Brimming with features, Resco Photo Viewer is still only in the “Alpha” stage of its development, but it’s shaping up to be a fantastic piece of kit. If you’re a professional photographer or your average Joe, looking through your holiday snaps, it covers all of your photo viewing needs. Please keep in mind that this is only an Alpha version of the app and is not ready for every day use, but we were so happy with the app and it did not feel like a alpha version of an application and decided to do a mini Preview of the app.

The “home” screen shows you a bunch of locations to view pictures from, including the option of browsing through your device. You can also mark folders as “Favorites” which gives you easy access to them from the home screen. When browsing through folders, you can choose to go through with a big finger friendly browser, or you can use a tree view to find the folder you want, and then open it in the more finger friendly version. This browser shows previews of what pictures are contained in each folder and when you enter the folder, it gives a preview of each picture to the left of its name. You can also browse through your images using an icon view, which hides the file names.

RescoPhotoViewer Home and Browser

Everything throughout Resco Photo Viewer is good for single finger use and you never need a stylus. Along the bottom of the screen are large buttons to help you navigate through the program. These are pretty self-explanatory. The most useful of these perhaps, is the “Actions” button. When pressed, it shows tick boxes over each item shown in the browser (includes both pictures and folders.) When you have selected the items you want, click on “Action” to show a list of what you can do with what you have selected. This give you access some of Resco Photo Viewer’s more interesting features, like direct uploading your pictures to your Flickr or Facebook accounts, as well as easy access to sending images across Bluetooth, infrared, email or MMS. If you ask to do something that requires confirmation, like moving or deleting files, it brings up large, friendly buttons, continuing the finger friendly interface throughout.

Resco Photo Viewer's finger friendly interface

Looking through the images in a folder is a breeze, with swipe gestures to slide sideways between pictures. Tap on the picture to make more options fade into existence. You can rotate images either way and zooming is smooth and quick, which can be done using a double tap to go between “Real size” and “Fit to screen” or you can go into a custom distance by sliding up and down on the zoom bar on the right hand side. There is also the option to “Send to…” as well as advanced editing. Sadly the editing feature comes up with a message saying “Not implemented yet” which means they hadn’t finished programming it before they released this alpha edition, but it will be there in the final version. Another feature not yet implemented is something which appears to add notes to your images, which can be viewed and edited through Resco Photo Viewer. There is also a setting to show the notes during slide-shows.

Image Viewing, Properties and Settings

There are many settings to be played with, which include the ability to associate Resco Photo Viewer with the large quantity of file-types that it is compatible with. It even copes with RAW files, a file-type which isn’t normally supported most image viewers. It can handle animated GIF files really smoothly, but doesn’t support videos. There are options to change how you order the files, to set images as a contact picture or wallpaper, to copy or move to another folder and save a copy as. Even the built in slide show feature has plenty of settings. I must also note that the whole program works brilliantly if you switch it to landscape. It has G-sensor support and fits to the screen easily, no matter which way you have it.

RescoPhotoViewer Menus

Edit: The camera button on the home-screen takes you directly to your default camera application, not a new one built into Resco Photo Viewer as I thought. This was a mix up due to having only even bought devices made by HTC which always have HTC’s own brand camera application instead of the Windows Mobile default. Thank you to Koofteh for pointing this out.

Overall, this is a top notch piece of software. It’s easy to use, big enough buttons to prod at easily, and it looks great. It holds an arsenal of features, including uploading to online services and support for loads of image file-types. Resco Photo Viewer has shaped up to be the image viewer which could change the way you use photos on the go. Despite only being an alpha version, I recommend getting this to use until the final version is released.

Pros:

Great interface
Finger friendly throughout the whole app
Smooth scrolling
Uploading to Facebook and Flickr
Supports a large amount of image file-types
Loads of settings
Gsensor support

Cons:

Alpha release, may contain unknown bugs ( not that we came across any )
Some features aren’t included yet ( Edit notes etc )

Resco Photo Viewer Review

Price : Alpha Version is FREE

Version Under Review : Alpha

User Interface Rating:

Features Rating:

Ease of Use Rating:

Re-use Value Rating:

Overall Rating:

NOTE : The first Beta version will be availlable on Monday, with added features like Upload to Picassa , Edit notes , etc

Download from our Store : ( Note this is NOT the FREE alpha version but the current Stable release )

11 Responses to “Resco Photo Viewer ( alpha ) – a finger friendly image viewer for Windows Mobile”

Koofteh says:

September 4, 2009 at 5:02 am

It's a really nice program indeed… for those who are wondering you can change the path for the camera roll option to where you phone actually stores your photos. You can change it under the registry under HKLM/Software/Resco/Browser 1.

On the i900 which I'm currently using though, the camera button just brings up the default camera app so I doubt this has its own camera application. I think you are probably seeing the WM emulator default?

Reply
suniljozef says:

September 4, 2009 at 7:59 am

Excellent piece of software, i am using it own my omnia i900. good work

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PPCInformer says:

September 4, 2009 at 8:59 am

thanks for the tip

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CrisRowlands says:

September 4, 2009 at 9:54 am

Yes, whilst playing with the WM emulator, I discovered that to be the default camera application included with windows mobile.

This is an error on my part due to always having used HTC phones which use their own brand camera apps. Sorry.

Reply
WVGA Games says:

October 22, 2009 at 3:31 pm

Thanks for the review, I had not heard of this program yet! Tested it on my HTC Touch HD.

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patcom23 says:

November 1, 2009 at 2:52 pm

Thanks for a fantastic touch software. It working excellent on my pda. But how do I keep it working on my PDA. It has expired.
Thanks a million.

Reply
patcom23 says:

November 1, 2009 at 8:52 pm

Thanks for a fantastic touch software. It working excellent on my pda. But how do I keep it working on my PDA. It has expired.
Thanks a million.

Reply