What to do after the closure of Midnight Mars Browser? Options

[paraisosdelsiste...]

I've been a heavy user of Midnight Mars Browser for several years and I'm incredibly grateful for the work that Michael has done.

Now I ask myself, should we create again an alternative way to look and search for images coming from Mars? In the last several months I developed a way to ingest InSight images in order to have a small database and a telegram bot that tells me when a new image is uploaded to the InSight web site and I can try to do the same with the MSL imagery.

But, I have several questions: What is the better way to show the data in the web page? Which is the best way to order the images?

I'd love to hear some suggestions for that.

Greetings.

[nogal]

I am releasing a few additional functions for the MSL Image Browser. In a separate post I'll discuss some issues which have influenced some decisions and prevented implementing some of the suggestions - I'm very grateful for those.

Recent images are now highlighted by a red border. Right now - and this is very easy to change - "recent" means the image has been added in the last 72 hours. I had to choose a criteria. It could have been "added since my last visit" but this implies storing the date and time of "my last visit" in a special area of the browser (using a standard - and safe - HTML 5 API). Please let me know if you're interested in having this option. A row of buttons for each sol with "recent" images (according to the above criteria) appears just below the page banner. Click them to go the the respective sol.

On the main page three new buttons (on the left panel) allow invoking three different views of a sol's image set:

• Grid view - just the images (reduced in size, if necessary), side by side (the layout already present in previous releases)
• List view - one image per row (reduced in size, if necessary) with a few basic data points
• Recent - only the sol's recent images in a grid layout

The Grid and List views are influenced by the filter selection buttons whereas the Recent view is not and always shows the recent images, regardless of the instrument or image type.
To speed-up the download it is now done in groups of up to 250 images each. This number was chosen because, right now, 54.3% of all sols have 250 images or less, 86.9% have 500 images or less, 95.6% have 750 or less, and 96.2% have 1000 images or less. Thus, the vast majority of sols requires very few clicks. The use of -thm thumbnails is discussed in another post. While there are more images to download a "Show more" button appears at the bottom of the images set.

I also added a "Go to Top" button at the bottom of the image set, for ease of use.

One consequence is that if one is looking for all the images of a certain category then all the sol's images must be downloaded. The list and grid views are independently loaded and scrolled; it is possible to have downloaded all images in one view but not on the other but, since the images are downloaded, showing them in a view is very fast. There is a new counter in the sol's statistics showing how many images have been downloaded (which changes with the view, naturally).

No changes were done to the URL list page.

The image view page now has a "magnifier" capability. This is intended to help better see details of the bigger images. Click the button (it is a toggle) and a small lens is positioned on the upper left corner of the image. The enlarged contents of the lens are shown on an overlay at the page top left (below the banner). The enlarged area is a 6x6 of the lens. Please let me know if you are interested in other settings or being able to set it as required.
Note: this does not increase the image's resolution, just enlarges the image, possibly blurring it. As such, the magnifier is not made available for small images.

You can download the image, in the original size, by right-clicking on it (the same is valid for the main page views).
Thank you for using the tool. Please let me know your thoughts, any requests, or bugs you may find.

Fernando

 MSL_Image_Viewer_2020NOV11.zip ( 17.11K ) Number of downloads: 142