Does anyone know if a logo could be animated?? Perhaps like an animated gif?

Reg #2845: Mark 1 #00173, Mark 2 #119

It 'can' be done yes. After all, the empeg is like any computer, it does what you program it to do (I can see people looking at me right now thinking : 'Where does this guy come from, outer space ?'). Is such animation currently programmed into it (during bootlogo displaying). To the best of my knowledge the answer to that would be no. Perhaps this is something you would want to add to the wishlist forum.

Cheers,
Hans


Mk2 - Blue - 080000431

Liufeng, could you try this one for me? I have re-implemented window positioning, only I'm doing it differently now. I think it'll work on your system, but I want to be sure. It now saves and restores the window positions from the INI file.

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Tony Fabris

Yes that version works dandy. I even positioned it off screen slightly and then closed it and it reopened at the same position but a different window size.

Tom

Reg #2845: Mark 1 #00173, Mark 2 #119

it reopened at the same position but a different window size.

Ah, good, glad it's working. The "different window size" is because I only save the window size when you pick a zoom level from the view menu. When you size it by dragging the window edges, it doesn't remember that. I'm implementing the painting tools now, and I might just remove the ability to drag-n-size because of the problems it causes for the painting tools. I haven't decided what my final solution is going to be.

I'm getting ICQ reports from another user who's having trouble getting it to work on his Voodoo Banshee card, is anyone else having trouble?

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Tony Fabris

I tried the begub version, and it worked fine.

I couldn't get the other versions to run on my Rage 128.

TommyE

I tried the begub version, and it worked fine. I couldn't get the other versions to run on my Rage 128.

Ok, cool, thanks. The next release will have some painting tools, and will behave the way the debug version did with respect to window sizing, so it should work OK for you.

I'm reaching a point with the software where I have to make a decision:

Do I just implement just a few rudimentary painting tools, assuming that everyone has a favorite image editor they can use if they need to work in more detail? Or do I try to make it a fully-featured image editor with marquee selections, geometric shape tools, fonts, etc.?

I'm leaning towards the former, because making an image editor is a lot of work. Also, the language it's written in isn't the fastest thing in the world, so any attempts I make at serious image-editing tools would be a pale second to any real image editor, even compared to something as simple as Windows Paint.

As it stands right now, you can paint with your mouse in different brush widths. There is a toolbar to select the brush thickness and colors. And there are keyboard shortcuts so you just press "1" for black, "2" for dark gray, "3" for light gray, and "4" for white. I'll add a few more image commands (probably negative-image and swap home/car, maybe a flood fill), but beyond that there won't be much.

Before I release this, I have to work out a few bugs, and decide how to handle the preview window while painting.

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Tony Fabris

I would say only some basic tools ...

From what I see the only thing I miss is the ability to do minor pixel touchups once you see the logo in the preview and decide 1 or 2 of those pixels do not come out right. As for more complex things there are plenty of editors out already. I am not sure where you should stop, giving nothing more then a pixel editor only or some basic shapes to go with it (very basic shapes that is). I could see the use of having a linedraw tool, a rectangle tool and a circle/elipse tool but anything more then that is just too much.

Cheers,
Hans


Mk2 - Blue - 080000431

Thanks, I was wondering about photoshop.

Truth is, I'm just lazy... I work in a software development house, and we've got an entire department devoted to graphics and multimedia. I could have just walked it over to the desk of someone who had photoshop installed, and then tried it. Somehow it seemed easier to get one of you poor saps to try it for me.



Just another comment from a poor sap.

Photoshop 5/5.5, Painter 6.0 and Paint Shop Pro 7.0 also seem to work fine.

Just for kicks, and because I was bored, I even tried it with Flash 5 and it worked.
Of course, the sizing was off, but at least it worked.




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Donato
MkII/Blue/40GB/080000565

I'd say the same, only basic tools are needed to make minor tweaks after you bring in the image. That was the problem i had before, seeing how the image would look on the empeg, then tweaking, uploading the image, blah, tweak, up etc... Just basic tools would save tons of time, and all the fancy extras aren't really needed. There's tons of other image editors already out there for that sort of functionality.


|| loren.cox
|| 080000446

Photoshop 5/5.5, Painter 6.0 and Paint Shop Pro 7.0 also seem to work fine.

Thanks. On my home computer, ACDSee copies to the clipboard differently and it doesn't work for me, so I asumed that there would be a handful of graphics apps which had trouble. Now I see that there's nothing to worry about. (Strangely, ACDSee on my work computer is fine.)

Good thing, since I'm using VB's built-in clipboard function to get the job done and it'd be a pain to have do get my hands dirty with the Windows API to take care of it.

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Tony Fabris

Subject line says it all. You can snag it right here.

I have done a bunch of under-the-hood stuff to this version. One of the things I did was tweak the cutoff values and gray display levels. I discovered this was necessary after I implemented the painting tools. It seems that if you tell the Windows API to perform a flood fill in 16-bit color, and the 24-bit color you're flooding falls inbetween two of the 16-bit shades, then it does its painting in a strange dither that isn't very compatible with the way my program works. So I tweaked the grays so they wouldn't dither on 16-bit video modes. Although I've only tested this on my home system, so I'd appreciate it if other folks could try it out and tell me if the middle grays look solid when they do flood fills and fat paintbrush strokes.

The readme file contains information about how to use the painting tools. Read it... Learn it... Live it...

Tomorrow, I'm going to make an official web page at my site for this program. Seeing as how it's on its feet now and everything. After I do that, I'll update the links in the logo faq to include it. Others who wish to link to the program will be able to link to that page.

Enjoy!

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Tony Fabris

Works okay for me Tony.

Dell Latitude laptop with an ATI Rage Mobility 8mb videocard.

One remark though, when closing the program on my docking station with 19 inch monitor (resolution 1600x1200) and subsequently firing it up again in undocked mode (LCD at 1024x768) I loose stuff. No doubt because it remembers the last positions of the windows and those I lost were out of the 1024x768 area. Perhaps it would be safe to add a check on that or something (maybe remember the positions per resolution). Getting them back is not that hard (just edit logoedit.ini) but others might get a little confused.

Once again ... Thank you Toooooniieeeee!

Cheers,
Hans




Mk2 - Blue - 080000431

Interesting!

The idea of "make sure the windows fall within the screen area" had occurred to me, but I didn't think it was a big deal because most folks run their desktops at the same rez all the time. I hadn't counted on the dock-undock thing. I'll put that on my to-do list. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Note: Another work around (without editing the INI file) is to select the window that's offscreen (click on its icon in the task bar), press ALT+Spacebar to open its control menu, press M for move, then use the arrow keys to drag it back onscreen.

This was related to a fun practical joke I used to pull on co-workers back in the 3.1 days. You could drag File Manager and Program Manager, or just about any other program off the screen and have them save their window positions. Then the user would return to their computer and try to run them, and Windows would run them, but they never appeared on the screen. And since 3.1 didn't have a task bar, there was no obvious way of knowing that the program was really running. So they would spend all this time trying to figure out why their software was crashing without an error message. Rebooting didn't fix it becuase the window positions were saved. They'd reboot and fiddle around for hours without knowing what was wrong. Great fun.

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Tony Fabris

That is just plain evil .

Cheers,
Hans


Mk2 - Blue - 080000431

This was related to a fun practical joke I used to pull on co-workers back in the 3.1 days...

You used to be able to close the Start button in base Win95. Just click on it, press ESC (leaving the focus on it). Then press Alt+Hyphen to bring up the Start button's system menu.


Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

Or having a 'screendump' on the screen, and putting all icons away in a corner.
Look at user try to doubleclick on the screen dump. Great fun too.

TommyE

Wow! It worked! We still use 95 at work and I just tried it. The start key on the keyboard won't bring it back either... that's just nuts. Is there a way to get it back without restarting explorer?

You used to be able to close the Start button in base Win95. Just click on it, press ESC (leaving the focus on it). Then press Alt+Hyphen to bring up the Start button's system menu.

Wow, I think it's feature-complete (knock on wood). There's a bunch of new stuff in this version, look at the release notes in the readme.txt for details.

I also now have an official web page for the program right here, so y'all can link it now. Bang on it and let me know if it's stable enough to link from the FAQ.

Since the preview colors are editable (see COLORS.TXT for instructions), I'd love it some owners of different colored screens would submit their versions of the color values. I could plug them in as defaults.

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Tony Fabris

Since no one complained about 0.9, I added one more feature and put up version 1.0. The new feature is a "Delete logos from player" menu item. It can be found right here.

Enjoy!

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Tony Fabris

I would't worry about the window problem too much as almost all applications have this problem. It's on I'm trying to solve on our Win2K Terminal Servers as when a user logs in from a web browser or at a lower res than thir first logon, you loose whatever is outside of the new sreen res.

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MK II, (Blue but should be Amber) SN: 118