• Why another command line slideshow program?
  • Initially diascope was intended to create short DV clips that could be mixed with regular DV footage in kino. This is why diascope supports DV and SMIL files. Moreover, I wanted it to perform that kind of luma transitions as kino has them.
  • Later I figured that diascope was useful for making slideshows in their own right, so I added other output formats, simple titles etc.
• Which features will diascope provide in the future?
  • Good question - HDTV is straightforward to implement in case there's a need for it. A better title generator could be useful, too. I'm open for realistic suggestions.
• Which features will diascope not provide?
  • Diascope was not designed to author DVDs. Diascope's intention is to create shorter slideshows tweaked to the last frame. Hence it provides options such as hyper-smooth pan and zoom ("Ken Burns effect") oversampling and the recycle mode that allows to adjust each single scene of a long show until you're satisfied, without the need for recalculating the whole show. If you're looking for a slideshow program with dvd-authoring capabilities, you may prefer dvd-slideshow.
• What if you could start all over?
  • In hindsight, using a programming language for which ImageMagick bindings exist could give a significant performance boost to diascope. Awk, on the other hand, is a very user-friendly language. Without it diascope would probably be far from what it is now.

Send comments, questions, bug reports and, preferably, bug fixes, to Martin Stoll and be sure to have "diascope" in the subject or your mail may get lost in the spam filter.