At some point in the last few days, COMODO have revoked the certificate we use, for reasons I'm still trying to ascertain from their support department. The net result of this is every Cyotek product released in the past 10 months is now unusable, as when you try and start any executable, it will immediately crash due to the revoked certificate.
After the last mammoth update to Gif Animator, I wanted a task that was slightly distracting rather than just fixing bugs. A couple of requests in the past have been about localization, so I had a look at the metrics we have gathered on software usage to see what different languages were being used. The vast majority of sessions for all our products (around 70%) used English, followed by a variety of other locales, the top four being French, Chinese, Spanish and Russian (around 20% for those four) with the final 10% in a long list of other languages. So, well worth taking a look at localization, and this article describes some of the progress that has been made and the issues encountered.
It hasn't been long since the last update to Gif Animator, but here we are with a new monster update. This update offers various UI tweaks and enhancements, some performance improvements, the odd new tool and quite a few bug fixes.
The next update to the Gif Animator is fast approaching, and it's quite a big one - there's a very long list of both bug fixes and new features. In fact, I'm pretty pleased with the way the product is evolving, although there's still much to do. Several of the enhancements in the forthcoming updates deal with resizing animations and images and cropping images, and this post will briefly cover these new tools.
GIF images have both their strong sides and their downsides. Whilst not supporting any form of alpha transparency, they do offer turning one colour entry per frame into a fully transparent pixel. While our GIF animator fully supports this, it isn't the most user friendly of experiences. One of the improvements to be found in the next build is an improved transparency selection tool.
The version 0.0.3.0 update for Cyotek's Gif Animator has been released complete with several new features for working with animations.
In my last "all products" update, I discussed how the user interface was being made more useful. In this second, shorter, update I will briefly cover upcoming changes to how application settings are stored, both their format and the location.
All our current tools use a standard series of libraries we've developed over the years, and provide vast amounts of common functionality, from settings management, windows and UI components, plug-ins, and a lot more. However, they all work around the principle of a single application window bound to a single document, with a variable amount of custom views that can be hosted in that window. This post has a sneak peak at upcoming application features, chiefly (and finally!) multiple document support, and dockable windows.
Updates have been slow the last few months as most of our development time has been on rewriting our application framework, which I'll talk about in another post. With this post, I wanted to quickly demonstrate some upcoming features of the Color Palette Editor. The first of these features has been work in progress for a while now and regretfully it'll probably be WIP for a bit longer yet.
A new update to WebCopy has been released. The major features of this update are the ability to copy multiple hosts at once, and proxy server support.
Although we haven't really drawn attention to it by providing samples or SDK documentation, all of Cyotek's products are extensible in various ways. As long as you can code in a .NET language and can work with the API each product provides that is. Cyotek's Gif Animator is no exception. The currently released version supports the same level of "standard" add-ins that other products include, and the development version now includes a new experimental image effects plugin system too.
Some of the most frustrating support requests we deal with tend to be people trying to copy forums using WebCopy. While it's technically possible, it's not an easy thing. Forums can have many thousands of links, and a lot of them are replicated many times for "new posts" and "replies" and so on. In most cases, copying this is not what you want as it adds zero value to the copy. This topic describes briefly the approaches we are looking at and prototyping for the next version of WebCopy.