Less Is More

There are numerous image-viewer libraries - some pretty well designed & coded - that provide everything from a simple grid layout to professional-quality image controls such as zooming, flipping & scaling.

While a few of these are really attractive with regard to design choices that the author made, they’re ultimately just that: choices of that author.

My north star for this project is simple: I’ll use OSS packages for infrastructure like the server, i.e. express, and transformational helpers like ffmpeg & dd, but everything else will be my own code.

I’ve no interest in debugging others’ incomplete implementations nor do I want to simply deploy someone else’s UX.

The fun stuff - the piece that customers will pay to obtain - will be transformations of the old land-locked audio & video files to modern portable formats.

That will require the customer to send me - in the real, physical world - these old CDs & tapes. You can’t expect an online service to magically jump the air-gap between the customer’s Mac or PC and be available to a point-and-click process. I’ve created magic before, but not quite like that.

You have to deal with this using real hardware that touches real media in the real world.