I absoulutely enjoyed conceptualizing and later developing FOW (fotos on web). In my later years in Belgium – which looks so distant now – I wanted to spend sometime updating my software skills amidst roaming around, capturing beauty – both in still & video camera and enjoying what life had to offer me. Since my interests were in travel and photography, I decided to do something to cover both fields. And on the software side, Linux was catching up fast and XML/XSL technology was hot. I researched deep enough to cover all of these. That is when I decided to write an easy-to-use application to create photo albums that would use XML/XSL and would run both in Windows and Linux. Java seemed an obvious answer; but more I played with it, I learnt that it is definitely not suited for creating a desktop UI application. Continuing with the search, I stumbled on wxWidgets (then called WxWindows). That was it, my search was over; it had all I needed – the source tree could be compiled in Windows and Linux to produce a native executable; there was a large user-base which was ready to help and not saying the usual RTFM; it worked in almost all the c/c++ compilers under heaven; and more than everything it was really free in all sense.
Bingo, I jumped right on to develop FOW. I did face lots of obstacles, but finally I got FOW to work to my satisfaction. Since I wasn’t very sure of the cleanliness of the code, I released the application as a freeware and not an open source one. Wow! I didn’t expect such an overwhelming response. Lockergnome provided a superb review and FOW was featured in couple of German, Italian and Dutch software magazines. The user base for FOW increased and I got so many appreciations that, ‘it was simple to use; but effective in results’. As much as I planned to follow-up and release successive versions, one event after another happened which shook me and kept me busy in all other aspects of my life. Whenever I receive an email asking for clarification or for further releases, I feel guilty and regret for not making it open source. I guess the time has come to do it, in spite of my fear that it is a spaghetti code. I do not have the time and infrastructure to setup an account in sourceforge (or any other open source repository) and to maintain the code. So if anyone is interested, please do let me know (contact information is available from my homepage). I will forward the code-base and you can take it from there. I would appreciate if you could credit me as the original author. While contacting me, please do include your personal webpage or few information about you.