help with ThumbnailCtrl

[Brad Allen]

Hello Andrea Gavana and the wxPython list,

I have inherited a wxPython project at work which relies on 
ThumbnailCtrl. It is the version created by  A n d r e a   Gav a n a  
 a n d   P e t e r   D a m o c on   1 2   D e c   2 0 0 5.  (Thanks 
for creating ThumbnailCtrl!)

I am seeking advice on how best to proceed with several goals in 
relation to ThumbnailCtrl:

* support displaying thumbnails on TIF files that use group 4 compression
* how to improve performance to enhance UI responsiveness
* estimate the difficulty/development time in adding a feature for 
drag-reordering of thumbnails

On the second item, performance, I am wondering if maybe a caching 
scheme would be workable. The main user complaint is that every time 
they select a folder, they have to wait for the images to re-render. 
If we could cache the thumbnails in the filesystem, that might be 
helpful.

Also, I noticed that a newer ThumbnailCtrl was released in June 2006, 
which was supposed to improve performance. I have tried to integrate 
it with our app, but have run into difficulties getting it to work 
with the group 4 compressed TIFs the fax server generates.  My 
predecessor got this work with the old ThumbnailCtrl but the calling 
the same function with the new ThumbnailCtrl causes Python to crash 
(it's ActiveState Python 2.4.3 with the latest wxPython 2.8.1.1 
ansi). I can go into more detail on this if anyone is interested.

Unfortunately things have been complicated by our having custom code 
intermixed with the old 2005 version ThumbnailCtrl and 
ScrolledThumbnail; I have made  progress separating the two using 
subclasses, but it is still not pretty and I am not sure I have 
separated everything. It would be a big help if anyone could send me 
a copy of the ThumbnailCtrl as it existed in Dec 2005 so that I could 
perform a diff.

Any guidance or direction on these topics would be much appreciated.

Thanks!