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 Contents:

  1.  Announcing Calendar Wizard 10
  2.  Announcing The Ultimate Screen Clock 10 (second notification)
  3.  GIF Construction Set 10 Revision 2 (additional notification)
  4.  Graphic Workshop Professional 10 Revision 3 (additional notification)
  5.  New Web Server
  6.  Replying to this Message, List Removal and Details

We'd like to take this opportunity to wish all the users of our software the very best of the festive season, whatever it's called in your house.

We'd also like to wish you substantially less snowfall than is illustrated here.

May the season bring you joy, the comfort of family, the serenity of the closing of the year, and no socks.

Announcing Calendar Wizard 10

We've enhanced functionality of Calendar Wizard, added some radical new clock styles, improved its performance and generally refined it to better get along with Windows 10. (We hasten to add that it still performs admirably under earlier builds of Windows, all the way back to Windows XP, if you're feeling retro.)

Among the new features and enhancements to Calendar Wizard, you'll find that it:

  • Adds a palette of frame styles to the Month editor tabs. In addition to traditional square frames, Calendar Wizard can now create gradient frames and cornered frames, as are illustrated to your right.

    This represents a mere fraction of the calendar styles you can create with the new frame styles.

    To access the new frames, open a Month edit window and click on the Heading tab.

    The Heading tab in Calendar Wizard 10 also includes a Line Size field, to allow you to specify the line weight from frames.

  • Updates the user interface of the Year and Month editors. In previous editions of Calendar Wizard, it was possible to enter out-of-range values in the numeric fields of the editors under some builds of Windows... which could result in some pretty weird calendars.

  • Updates the Print Dodecahedral calendar logic, that will render your calendars as twelve-sized desk toys that can be printed, cut out and folded into three-dimensional objects.

    There were a few printer inconsistencies in the previous edition that turned up on some output devices.

    Should the dodecahedral calendar option have thus far eluded notice, there's an example shown here prior to the application of scissors and tape. It takes about five minutes to cut one out and assemble it... and then most of the following year to stop playing with it.

    We hasten to add that you can choose the design elements in

    dodecahedral calendars — this includes adding pictures or textures to their faces, in place of the solid color illustrated in this posting.

  • Updates the JPEG library used by Calendar Wizard to the latest release. This addresses several potential security and image quality issues, and a few... albeit very obscure... bugs. We'd like to take this opportunity to stress the importance of keeping whatever reads JPG files on your computer up to date — there are unquestionably maliciously-crafted graphics in the wild that can crash older JPEG software and execute arbitrary, and potentially nasty, code on your computer.

  • Updates the WebP libraries to the latest software from Google.

  • Further enhances the sneakiness of the validation logic to reduce the likelihood of Calendar Wizard un-registering itself and thereafter deciding that its key is already in use because Windows 10 has silently updated something. Hopefully this one nails the problem until the end of time. Yes, we said that last year too, but Windows 10 proved to be sneakier than we'd anticipated.

  • Addresses a number of GDI and performance issues that software developers never really stop meddling with.
         
  • Updates the documentation.

As in years past, when you run Calendar Wizard 10 for the first time, it will look for a previous installation of Calendar Wizard 9 and optionally copy your existing configuration, so you won't have to set everything up by hand.


Click on the blue button to download Calendar Wizard 10.


Upgrades

If you have registered or upgraded a registration for Calendar Wizard 9 on or after June 1, 2019, you're welcome to a no-cost upgrade to Calendar Wizard 10.

If you have registered or upgraded a registration for Calendar Wizard 9 prior to June 1, 2019, we invite you to upgrade to Calendar Wizard 10 for half the current new-user price.

The first time you run Calendar Wizard 10, it will determine which upgrade option applies to your license.

Click on the blue button below to visit the upgrade page.


You can access the no-cost upgrade page directly by clicking on the foregoing link.



Announcing The Ultimate Screen Clock 10
(second notification)

We've enhanced functionality of The Ultimate Screen Clock, added some radical new clock styles, improved its performance and generally refined it to better get along with Windows 10. (We hasten to add that it still performs admirably under earlier builds of Windows, all the way back to Windows XP, if you're feeling retro.)

Among the new features and enhancements to The Ultimate Screen Clock, you'll find that it:

  • Adds the Stratosphere clock style, available in two sizes and in light and dark manifestations the dark version is shown here. Channeling the high-end watches of an earlier epoch that required an advanced degree in quantum physics to understand all their dials and functions, Stratosphere will make your desktop look like it drives a Lambo and knows intuitively how to choose really expensive wine.

    We hasten to add that the clock to your right is an animation, not actual software. There's a one in 36
    00 chance that it's actually displaying the correct time as you read this.

  • Adds the Iridium clock style, illustrated below. While it appears somewhat conventional in this posting, it's an animated style when it turns up in The Ultimate Screen Clock. Its digits morph, and it's somewhat hypnotic to observe.

    It comes in a substantial number of permutations of colors and sizes, with and without a bezel.


    Unlike the analog clocks included in this posting, Iridium doesn't lend itself to an animation, as its digits change more rapidly than can be managed by a GIF file. We also hasten to add that it requires somewhat more processor resources than most of the clock styles included with The Ultimate Screen Clock, and it may prove unsuitable for systems with slower processors, limited resources or a lot of other stuff happening.

    As someone will certainly inquire, Iridium refers to the chemical element having the atomic number 77, a silvery-white transition metal of the platinum group, not the eponymous satellite telephone network.

  • Adds the Sextant clock style, an example of which appears to your right. Reminiscent of the clocks of another epoch, when ships sailed at the pleasure of the winds and navigators guided them through dark incantations assisted by the ability to perform complex trigonometry in their heads — the Sextant style would lend your desktop an air of timelessness, were that not something of a contradiction in terms for a clock.

    Sextant comes in two sizes.

    Once again, the Sextant clock shown here is an animation, rather than software
    , and as such is cosmically unlikely to be displaying the correct time. The Ultimate Screen Clock invariably will.

  • Adds a Timeline window, a browsable history of the past few hundred years. Right-click in The Ultimate Screen Clock and select Calendar → Timeline to experience it.

    We hasten to add that the contents of the Timeline window are editable, should you discover that you prefer your perception of history to ours. Timeline also lends itself to being re-purposed
    — you can replace its somewhat global history with your family's history, the history of your newly-restored classic Jag or the history of your sock collection.

  • Adds logic to the screen saver background manager to allow full-screen background graphics to be optionally resized rather than tiled, so they appear without seams on displays with unusual dimensions — laptops being the most likely suspects.

  • Updates the clock rendering engine to improve the appearance of several of the analog hand styles.

  • Updates the discussion of Net Time in the Reference document of The Ultimate Screen Clock's manual to include a permanent, elegant and largely bulletproof solution to the issue of Windows 10 blocking The Ultimate Screen Clock from setting the system time. See the Net Time section of the Reference Document, and the digression concerning Windows' security therein, for the complete epic.

  • Updates the JPEG library used by The Ultimate Screen Clock to the latest release. This addresses several potential security and image quality issues, and a few... albeit very obscure... bugs. We'd like to take this opportunity to stress the importance of keeping whatever reads JPG files on your computer up to date — there are unquestionably maliciously-crafted graphics in the wild that can crash older JPEG software and execute arbitrary, and potentially nasty, code on your computer.

  • Updates the WebP libraries to the latest software from Google.

  • Further enhances the sneakiness of the validation logic to reduce the likelihood of The Ultimate Screen Clock un-registering itself and thereafter deciding that its key is already in use because Windows 10 has silently updated something. Hopefully this one nails the problem until the end of time. Yes, we said that last year too, but Windows 10 proved to be sneakier than we'd anticipated.

  • Addresses a number of GDI and performance issues that software developers never really stop meddling with.
         
  • Updates the documentation.

As in years past, when you run The Ultimate Screen Clock 10 for the first time, it will look for a previous installation of The Ultimate Screen Clock 9 and optionally copy your existing configuration, so you won't have to set everything up by hand.


Click on the blue button to download The Ultimate Screen Clock 10.

Note that in addition to installing The Ultimate Screen Clock, you'll probably also want to install The Ultimate Screen Clock Extra Styles library, which will augment it with wealth of additional clock styles, including some of the ones mentioned herein. The Extra Styles library is also accessible through this big blue  button.


Upgrades

If you have registered or upgraded a registration for The Ultimate Screen Clock 9 on or after June 1, 2019, you're welcome to a no-cost upgrade to The Ultimate Screen Clock 10.

If you have registered or upgraded a registration for The Ultimate Screen Clock 9 prior to June 1, 2019, we invite you to upgrade to The Ultimate Screen Clock 10 for half the current new-user price.

The first time you run The Ultimate Screen Clock 10, it will determine which upgrade option applies to your license.

Click on the blue button below to visit the upgrade page.


You can access the no-cost upgrade page directly by clicking on the foregoing link.



GIF Construction Set Professional 10 Revision 2 (additional notification)

GIF Construction Set Professional 10 has been updated. This release:


  • Updates the color selection windows that appear in a number of GIF Construction Set's animation generators to include an editable hexadecimal color value field. This allows colors to be directly copied and pasted into web page HTML documents, and between applications that support this notation.

  • Addresses a number of issues from the initial release.

  • Fixes a bug in the Favorites window that prevented it from opening its galleries of favorite documents under some builds of Windows — which largely defeated the purpose of the Favorites window.

  • Nails a problem with the internal default document path for GIF Construction Set Professional, which confused a number of features which looked for things that weren't there.

  • Addresses a number of theoretical security issues in the WebP animation interface.

  • Improves the performance of the Shadow window.

  • Further enhances the sneakiness of the validation logic to reduce the likelihood of GIF Construction Set un-registering itself and thereafter deciding that its key is already in use because Windows 10 has silently updated something. Hopefully this one nails the problem until the end of time. Yes, we said that last year too, but Windows 10 proved to be sneakier than we'd anticipated.
  • Addresses a number of issues in the Photo Stack animation window. Should you have missed Photo Stack when it appeared a few weeks ago, an example can be seen to your right. Photo stacks will let you add your pictures, graphics, banners or other elements to your web page or social media as an animation that suggests a collection of paper photographs being dropped onto a table. If it were any cooler, it would be attracting polar bears... and you'd have bears in your house, which isn't wholly desirable.

  • Addresses a number of GDI and performance issues that software developers never really stop meddling with.
         
  • Updates the documentation.

 

Click on the blue button to download GIF Construction Set Professional 10.



Upgrades

If you have registered or upgraded a registration for GIF Construction Set Professional 9 on or after April 1, 2019, you're welcome to a no-cost upgrade to GIF Construction Set Professional 10.

If you have registered or upgraded a registration for GIF Construction Set Professional 9 prior to April 1, 2019, we invite you to upgrade to GIF Construction Set Professional 10 for half the current new-user price.

The first time you run GIF Construction Set Professional 10, it will determine which upgrade option applies to your license.

Click on the blue button below to visit the upgrade page.


You can access the no-cost upgrade page directly by clicking on the foregoing link.



Graphic Workshop Professional 10 Revision 3
(second notification)

Graphic Workshop Professional 10 has been updated. This release:

  • Redesigns the batch Identify Mystery Files window to allow its contents to be sorted by name, type, size and date. This makes it a lot easier to locate the files you'd like to identify. Should you have missed the batch Identify Mystery Files window thus far, hold down the Shift key on your keyboard and select Identify Mystery Files from the Graphic Workshop Professional 10 File menu.

  • Updates the color selection windows that appear in Graphic Workshop and all its ancillary applications to include an editable hexadecimal color value field. This allows colors to be directly copied and pasted into web page HTML documents, and between applications that support this notation.

  • Improves the performance of the Identify Mystery Files window when it's confronted with a WebP document... of which there appear to be more with each passing second.

  • Adds a Windows File Explorer emulation mode to Graphic Workshop's drag and drop functionality — it can be enabled in the Setup → Browser → Drop Options field. With Windows Emulation selected, dragging files between folders on the same drive will move them, dragging files between drives will copy them and holding down the Ctrl key when you drag and drop files will copy them no matter where they're going.

  • Updates Archive Manager so a Wait window appears when files are dropped into a ZIP archive. It also fine-tunes the user interface of its various File Open and File Save windows.

  • Further improves the new validation logic to reduce the likelihood of Graphic Workshop unregistering itself due to silent Windows upgrades. We hasten to add that since the release of Graphic Workshop Professional 10, this has occurred precisely zero times.

  • Fixes a bug in the Ultralight Screen Clock that could cause some of the animated styles to display a white rectangle in place of the leading digit for one second at the top of each hour under some builds and configurations of Windows.

  • Addresses a number of GDI and performance issues that software developers never really stop meddling with.

  • Updates the documentation.

If you haven't installed Graphic Workshop Professional 10 yet, you might want to review a more extensive list of its new functionality and enhancements.

Click on the blue button to download Graphic Workshop Professional 10.

 

Upgrades

If you have registered or upgraded a registration for Graphic Workshop Professional 9 on or after April 1, 2019, you're welcome to a no-cost upgrade to Graphic Workshop Professional 10.

If you have registered or upgraded a registration for Graphic Workshop Professional 9 prior to April 1, 2018, we invite you to upgrade to Graphic Workshop Professional 10 for half the current new-user price.

The first time you run Graphic Workshop Professional 10, it will determine which upgrade option applies to your license.

Click on the blue button below to visit the upgrade page.


You can access the no-cost upgrade page directly by clicking on the foregoing link.


New Web Server

The hardware that runs a web server is typically reliable for about four years. Our previous server has been nearing its end of life of late, and last week we migrated our stuff to a new server.

It's likely you'd never have noticed the change if we hadn't mentioned it
— one server is pretty much like another. Actually, the new one's somewhat quicker than its predecessor.

This said, in the event that you encounter any issues, problems, inconsistencies or weird behavior when you access our web site, we ask that you click on the big blue button below and share your experiences.



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