Jos Kirps's Popular Science and Technology Blog

Cool Image Tool Now Available Under The GPL

December 12, 2007

AFELO is a nice tool for all those who like uploading images onto websites. It allows to do everything you need, step by step: select images on your local computer, edit them (resize, crop, rotate, adjust brightness and contrast, ...), and save them - either locally onto your computer, or directly to your website.

AFELO has now been released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and is thus available as Open Source software, the latest release can be downloaded from www.afelo.com. The program is very easy to use and it runs on Microsoft Windows, Apple MacOS X (Tiger, Leopard) and Linux/UNIX operating systems (you may have to install JAVA if you don't have it yet).

Using AFELO to upload images to a website is quite simple: If you're using the OLEFA web application suite then you can simply use your OLEFA username and password. If your server supports FTP then you can simply use your FTP username and password. Webmasters may install the AFELO Gateway Script on their server to allow people uploading images using AFELO.

I originally had the idea for AFELO back in 2005, as many OLEFA web application suite customers (mostly teachers and students) had a lot of problems when uploading images onto their websites. Photoshop, GIMP, FTP clients and such alike were just too complex and complicated for our end users, as some of them never heard of pixels, image sizes and webservers before.

The solution was a single simple tool that would be very easy to use and could do everything users would need. I had finished the application design in late 2005, and the application was finally developed by Tim Gottwald. It was released in mid 2006 as a side project of the OLEFA web application suite and immediately got a lot of positive feedback.

Unfortunately it could not be used with third party web applications and it was never released under an Open Source license and so it remained a niche product mostly used by students and teachers in Luxembourg, Europe. But this has been changed now, the new release supports an open gateway that can be easily integrated in any web application suite, and AFELO itself now uses the GPL so that new features can be added by anyone.

The future development of the AFELO software will be lead by the OLEFA Project and you can expect updated versions to be released on a regular basis. Of course feedback and code enhancements are always welcome - send your comments and additions to support@olefa.com (sorry, but there is no public repository or community platform yet, we're working on it...).

We will now concentrate on the application performance (first click on the main screen is still quite slow), on the image quality (compression quality is not satisfying yet) and on further interface enhancements. It would be cool to see CMS and web application developers integrate the AFELO Gateway so that users could use AFELO on various web platforms.

Update - 2010: As you may know I'm no longer involved in the development of OLEFA and AFELO. As AFELO has been released under the GPL in 2007 I'm now continuing to develop this cool tool under the OLMO CMS label. You may download the latest version of the AFELO successor here:

www.olmo-cms.com

What's next?