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Contents:
- Announcing
Calendar Wizard 10
- Announcing
The Ultimate Screen Clock 10 (second notification)
- GIF
Construction Set 10 Revision 2 (additional notification)
- Graphic
Workshop Professional 10 Revision 3 (additional notification)
- New
Web Server
- Replying to
this Message, List Removal and Details
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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. |
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Announcing Calendar Wizard 10
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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.
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Announcing The Ultimate Screen Clock
10
(second notification)
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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 3600 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.
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GIF Construction Set Professional 10
Revision 2 (additional notification)
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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.
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Graphic Workshop Professional 10
Revision 3
(second notification)
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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.
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New Web Server
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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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Replying to this Message, List Removal
and Details
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reserved. Use no hooks.
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