This is a combination bug fix and minor feature enhancement release. The ability to change the format of the output images has been added (though by default it maintains the source format). As far as bugs are concerned the following have been fixed:

The build system (QMake configuration) has been changed to allow building out of the box on Unix platforms with shared Qt libraries. The OS X builds still default to a static build.

The suffix is now inserted in to the output file names before the final period, rather than before the first period.

Lossless (non-JPEG) image formats will always output the smallest file possible.

Five years after BIRT 1.0.0 was released, version 2 is ready for use. It is a complete rewrite using the Qt4 toolkit (version 1.x used Qt3). The move to Qt4 means that BIRT can be compiled on OS X and Windows as well as the usual Unix/X11 platforms. As such there are now binary distributions available for OS X Leopard and Windows XP/Vista. Due to the wide variation present in the Unix world, these platforms should continue to use the source distribution (though a Linux binary distribution isn't beyond the realms of possibility).

All the features of the original version have survived the rewrite. The major new feature is the recursive directory search, which makes dealing with large numbers of images spread across multiple directories less painful.

It's been a while since the last release, but BIRT 1.2.2 is now out. Only a bug fix release this time, primarily to allow the code to be compiled using more recent versions of GCC4.

Another bug fix release - this time to solve a problem with the Help dialog. Previously, if the dialog was closed with the titlebar's close window button rather than the "Quit" button, the dialog could not be reopened; it was necessary to restart the application to access the help. This has been fixed and the Help dialog can now be accessed multiple times, regardless of how it was closed.

Version 1.2.0 introduces a new ratio setting in the Image Processing Options section. The new matching functionality allows BIRT to resize a mixed set of portrait and landscape images while maintaing the correct orientation of each image.

This "Smart Ratio Match" option is explained in the online documentation.

Having finally found a Mac with a working development environment, BIRT is confirmed buildable and fully functional under OS X. The test build was against Qt 3.3.4 and used the Apple build of gcc 3.3. The application builds without any code changes and using the usual (qmake/make) sequence. Sadly the installation (make install) doesn't work out of the box and will require some tweaking for OS X. However, it is simple enough to drag the required files in to a new directory and run the application from there.

Version 1.1.1 is primarily a bug fix release. The previous version was unable to build on systems with an older version of Qt and GCC. In addition to fixing this the code has been made compatible with GCC4 and confirmed working.

BIRT now has an XML configuration file. Currently this is used to set the Processing Options defaults. For example if you'd rather the default size of new images was 1024x768 instead of 640x480 (the usual default) this can be set in the configuration file and will be applied whenever BIRT is started.

The online help has been updated and explains what each field in the config file represents as well as the valid values for it.

This is a bug fix release. The primary change is that the JPEG Quality setting is now only used in the output of JPEG type files. Previously the value would be passed to the output function for all file types, which resulted in loss-less file types (such as PNG) being larger than necessary.

The initial version of BIRT is now available for download. More comprehensive design document (especially for the XML help system) will be available soon.