An Example of What BitmapCompare Can Do

Here's a little taste of what BitmapCompare can do for you.  No only can it do slightly fuzzy comparisons that filter out the noise introduced by, say, a lossy compression algorithm.  It can also tell you what is wrong with an image.  

Expected:

Actual:

Actual marked up with errors (different kinds of mark up):

So when you are using it in a test, you assert on whether or not the images are equal and you report the marked up actual to cue you in on what's wrong.

Looking for BitmapCompare Beta Testers

Quite some time ago, I wrote a utility I called "BitmapCompare."  My intent was to enable test-driven graphics.  That is, I wanted a compositor to be able to produce a picture specifying how something (a web page, a GUI control... it doesn't really matter) should look.  Then I want to be able to turn that into a test.

The last version of BitmapCompare was marginally inflexible and I was trying to release it as a commercial product.

I may eventually want to go commercial but I don't have the time to put into it right now, so I'm going open source/redistributable for the time being.  I'm using the MIT license.  This version and anything I do in the immediate future will probably stay under the MIT license.

The new version is a lot more flexible than its predecessor.  You can swap in how pixels are measured and how they are compared, in addition to how they are marked right or wrong (as you always could).  There are some basic fuzzy measurement and comparison tools that let you do things like blend together neighboring pictures and define a radius within the color space for determining equivalence.

Before I figure out where and how to deliver BitmapCompare, I was hoping to get a few people to try it out and let me know how they ended up using it, what the problems were, etc.  If you are interested, let me know.