From alchemy8147 at mindworkshop.com Sat Oct 4 09:13:00 2014 From: alchemy8147 at mindworkshop.com (Alchemy Mindworks) Date: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 09:13:00 -0400 Subject: [Newsletter] Announcements from Alchemy Mindworks Message-ID: <20141004133223.70EEF940B0A@mindworkshop.com> _______________________________________________________________________ THIS IS AN AUTOMATIC POSTING FROM THE ALCHEMY MINDWORKS UPDATE MAILING LIST _______________________________________________________________________ Contents: 1. GIF Construction Set Professional 5 Revision 3 2. Font Wrangler Revision 2 (Second Notification) 3. Graphic Workshop Professional 5 Revision 4 (Additional Notification) 4. Graphic Workshop 4 Resource Leak (Additional Notification) 5. Potential Windows Software Installation Issue (Second Notification) 6. Steven William Rimmer's Novels on Kindle Unlimited in the UK (Second Notification) 7. Negative on Shellshock (Second Notification) 8. Replying to this Message and List Removal _______________________________________________________________________ Bankers weren't exactly loved in the nineteenth century either. http://www.stevenwilliamrimmer.com/theorder.html _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ 1. GIF Construction Set Professional 5 Revision 3 _______________________________________________________________________ GIF Construction Set Professional 5 has been updated. This release: - Adds thumbnails to the File menu history, so you can remind yourself what your animations looked like before you open them. See the discussion of Opening and Saving Files in the Reference document of the GIF Construction Set Manual for assistance with configuring this feature... or disabling it, should you ultimately decide that it's a tool of unclean spirits or liberal politicians. - Improves a number of aspects of the aforementioned File menu history feature. - Addresses a number of performance issues in Animation Wizard to make it quicker and to improve its color management, which will result in more attractive finished animations in many cases. - Fixes a very subtle and potentially nasty resource leak in the Animation Wizard's folder tree, which could crash GIF Construction Set and potentially destabilize Windows. IMPORTANT: If you're still using GIF Construction Set 4, we urge you to consider upgrading to GIF Construction Set Professional 5. Doing so will resolve the aforementioned resource leak, and prevent it from biting you somewhere impolite when you least expect it. - Fixes a bug in the PNG import library that could crash the Animation Wizard window and several File Open windows if a grey-scale PNG file were selected. - Fixes a number of issues that appeared during the upgrade to version 5. You can download GIF Construction Set Professional 5 from: http://www.mindworkshop.com/gifcon.html#download ........................................................................ UPGRADES If you registered or upgraded a registration for GIF Construction Set Professional 4 on or after May 1, 2013, you?re welcome to a free upgrade to GIF Construction Set Professional 5. If you registered or upgraded a registration for GIF Construction Set Professional 4 prior to May 1, 2013, you can upgrade to GIF Construction Set Professional 5 for half the cost of a new single-user license. When you first run GIF Construction Set Professional 5, it will check to see if you have a registration for GIF Construction Set Professional 4 on your system. If it finds one, it will display a window to tell you which of the foregoing upgrade options is applicable. Click on the Upgrade button to visit our web page and request or order an upgrade. The upgrade window can subsequently be accessed through the Help > Upgrade Manager > Upgrade from Previous Version item of GIF Construction Set Professional 5's menu bar. You can also visit the no-cost upgrade page directly at: http://www.mindworkshop.com/gcskey.html and the upgrade order page at: http://www.mindworkshop.com/upgrade.html _______________________________________________________________________ 2. Font Wrangler Revision 2 (Second Notification) _______________________________________________________________________ Font Wrangler 5 has been updated. This release: - Rewrites the Change Font Name function to handle a larger variety of weird and mutant fonts... of which the known universe has way too many. The Change Font Name window now includes an optional Detailed mode to manage all the typeface-name related fields of a font file, allowing your renamed fonts to better interact with Windows and its slightly brain-damaged typographic management. It also includes a warning mechanism to alert you if you're about to change the name of a font into something that Windows won't get along with. - Adds a Refresh function to the Files pane of the Font Wrangler application window. - Fixes a very subtle and potentially nasty resource leak in the Font Wrangler application window. If you're still using Font Wrangler 4, we urge you to upgrade to version 5 to address this issue, as it could potentially crash Font Wrangler and destabilize Windows. - Addresses a number of issues in the font sample window. - Adds a View Font Structure window, to allow you to see selected tables stored in font files. Knowing what's going on inside the beasts is often helpful in resolving font conflicts and other typographic conundrums... or would that be "connumdria?" - Tidies up the font displays in the list panes of the Font Wrangler application window. - Addresses several issues in the Print function. - Implements our work-around for the Microsoft installer limitation that hitherto required each previous release of Font Wrangler to be uninstalled before an update could be installed. This release of Font Wrangler 5 can be installed right over the previous one - it will in fact automatically uninstall the previous software as part of the install. While we're just tickled with how well this worked in house, we are aware that some third-party install managers and security applications meddle with the software installation process, and in so doing might break our clever innovation. If you encounter any issues with installing this release of Font Wrangler, please let us know what happened. We hasten to add that you'll still need to click on the Enter Your Registration Key button in the opening window of the newly updated Font Wrangler 5 to handle validating it. Assuming that you allowed Font Wrangler to save your key to disk last time, this will involve clicking on Next several times and then closing the "thank you" window. - Fixes a number of issues that appeared during the upgrade to version 5. - Updates the documentation. Please see the discussion of version 5 enhancements at: http://www.mindworkshop.info/gif-construction-set/v5-upgrades/ You can download Font Wrangler 5 from: http://www.mindworkshop.com/fontrang.html#download ........................................................................ UPGRADES If you registered or upgraded a registration for Font Wrangler 4 on or after July 1, 2013, you?re welcome to a free upgrade to Font Wrangler 5. If you registered or upgraded a registration for Font Wrangler 4 prior to July 1, 2013, you can upgrade to Font Wrangler 5 for half the cost of a new single-user license. When you first run Font Wrangler 5, it will check to see if you have a registration for Font Wrangler 4 on your system. If it finds one, it will display a window to tell you which of the foregoing upgrade options is applicable. Click on the Upgrade button to visit our web page and request or order an upgrade. The upgrade window can subsequently be accessed through the Font Wrangler Help -> Upgrade Manager -> Upgrade from Previous Version menu item. You can also visit the no-cost upgrade page directly at: http://www.mindworkshop.com/fntkey.html and the upgrade order page at: http://www.mindworkshop.com/upgrade.html _______________________________________________________________________ 3. Graphic Workshop Professional 5 Revision 4 (Additional Notification) _______________________________________________________________________ Graphic Workshop Professional 5 has been updated. This release: - Adds middle-click functionality. The middle mouse button is now configurable to perform one of several functions in the View window. The most useful of these is toggling the Zoom function - middle-click to select between the default zoom level for a picture and zoom-to-fill. See the Configure item in the Picture menu of the Zoom window to change the behavior of the middle button. - Fixes a bug in the PNG reader that prevented it from reading some 16-bit PNG graphics correctly. - Fixes a bug in the PNG import library that could crash several of Graphic Workshop's ancillary applications if they encountered a malformed PNG file. - Adds the capability of creating new folders, renaming folders and deleting folders from within the Destination and the Move and Copy windows. Right-click in the folder tree to access it. - Adds the capability of creating new folders, renaming folders and deleting folders from within the GWS Camera screen capture application. Right-click in the folder tree to access it. - Addresses a number of issues in the Textures and Fractals window, and removes a spurious texture mode that didn't actually do anything. - Fixes a very subtle and potentially nasty resource leak in the various folder trees that appear in Graphic Workshop's browser windows and dialogs. - Improves the Windows shell interface, so files created by Graphic Workshop will appear in Explorer with less delay. - Improves the performance of the Graphic Workshop tool bar, so it appears sooner... and all at once... when the application starts up. - Fixes a bug in the Line tool of the e-Paint UltraLight application included with Graphic Workshop that caused it to position incorrectly when the snap-to grid was active, under some builds of Windows. - Fixes a bug that prevented the folder history list from appearing in the File menu under some circumstances. - Adds an option to the White Balance filter to allow it to use the selectable paper color as its white reference. - Fixes a number of issues that appeared during the upgrade to version 5. - Updates the documentation. Please visit: http://www.mindworkshop.com/gwspro.html#download to download Graphic Workshop Professional 5. ........................................................................ UPGRADES If you registered or upgraded a registration for Graphic Workshop Professional 4 on or after May 1, 2013, you?re welcome to a free upgrade to Graphic Workshop Professional 5. If you registered or upgraded a registration for Graphic Workshop Professional 4 prior to May 1, 2013, you can upgrade to Graphic Workshop Professional 5 for half the cost of a new single-user license. When you first run Graphic Workshop Professional 5, it will check to see if you have a registration for Graphic Workshop Professional 4 on your system. If it finds one, it will display a window to tell you which of the foregoing upgrade options is applicable. Click on the Upgrade button to visit our web page and request or order an upgrade. The upgrade window can subsequently be accessed through the Help > Upgrade Manager > Upgrade from Previous Version item of Graphic Workshop Professional 5's menu bar. You can also visit the no-cost upgrade page directly at: http://www.mindworkshop.com/gwskey.html and the upgrade order page at: http://www.mindworkshop.com/upgrade.html _______________________________________________________________________ 4. Graphic Workshop 4 Resource Leak (Additional Notification) _______________________________________________________________________ It has come to our attention that the recently-discovered resource leak in Graphic Workshop Professional 5 also affects earlier releases of Graphic Workshop. We suspect that it may have been caused by a recent Windows update, as it hasn't been detected previously. Users of Graphic Workshop Professional 5 can resolve this issue by installing the revision announced in the foregoing item of this posting. If you're still using Graphic Workshop 4... or the seriously ancient Graphic Workshop 3... we'd like to take this opportunity to urge you to consider upgrading to Graphic Workshop Professional 5. Left to its own devices, this resource leak could cause Graphic Workshop to crash unexpectedly, possibly destabilizing Windows. Please see: http://www.mindworkshop.com/upgrade.html to upgrade. _______________________________________________________________________ 5. Potential Windows Software Installation Issue (Second Notification) _______________________________________________________________________ We've become aware that a recent Windows update has broken the Windows software installation functionality. This can affect the .MSI installers used to distribute Alchemy Mindworks software. It manifests itself by aborting an installation before it has completed its install. The installer will display the messages "Object Already Exists," "Key not Valid for Use," "Crypt Provider not Initialized" and several others. This issue will only appear under certain builds and configurations of Windows. If you don't encounter it, yours isn't one of them, and you can safely stop reading now. Should you encounter this issue, you can resolve it by removing the Windows update that caused it. We assume that Microsoft will replace the update in question with a non-broken one shortly. To remove the offending update: 1. Open the Windows Control Panel. 2. Open the Programs and Features or Add / Remove Programs applet... probably the former. 3. Click on View Installed Updates. 4. Locate KB2918614 - the Search Installed Updates field will likely prove to be of assistance in this regard. 5. Right-click on it and uninstall it. We hasten to add that if this issue affects your computer, it will break the software installation functionality for most products, not just ours. _______________________________________________________________________ 6. Steven William Rimmer's Novels on Kindle Unlimited in the UK (Second Notification) _______________________________________________________________________ Kindle Unlimited users in the United Kingdom and Ireland can now access Steve's legendary cult fiction through Kindle Unlimited. Kindle Unlimited allows users to read e-books at no cost. Steve gets paid directly by Amazon when this happens. We too were shocked when this actually proved to work as advertised. There's more about Steven William Rimmer's fiction at: http://www.stevenwilliamrimmer.com For more about Kindle Unlimited, please visit: http://www.stevenwilliamrimmer.com/index.html#lending and click on the link at the end of the section. _______________________________________________________________________ 7. Negative on Shellshock (Second Notification) _______________________________________________________________________ We'd like to take this opportunity to note that the Alchemy Mindworks web servers have been tested for the recently-discovered Shellshock vulnerability. Shellshock is not present on any of our systems. Your downloads and transactions with our web servers remain secure. _______________________________________________________________________ 8. Replying to this Message and List Removal _______________________________________________________________________ This message has been sent from an unmonitored address - please do not reply to it. To remove your address from this mailing list or to change your address, please visit our web page at: http://www.mindworkshop.com/update-list.html Removal requests will be processed instantly. ....................................................................... If you have questions about this list or any Alchemy Mindworks products, please contact us at: http://www.mindworkshop.com/email-alchemy.html You can contact us by telephone at (705) 789-5238, and by snail-mail at Alchemy Mindworks, L10 C8 Brunel, Huntsville, ON P1H 2J3, CANADA. **************************************************************************** Copyright (c) 1998 - 2014 Alchemy Mindworks. All rights reserved. Use no hooks.