From alchemy8147 at mindworkshop.com Sat Mar 14 11:07:08 2015 From: alchemy8147 at mindworkshop.com (Alchemy Mindworks) Date: Sat, 14 Mar 2015 11:07:08 -0400 Subject: [Newsletter] Announcements from Alchemy Mindworks Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.20150314110708.01a78b28@localhost> _______________________________________________________________________ THIS IS AN AUTOMATIC POSTING FROM THE ALCHEMY MINDWORKS UPDATE MAILING LIST _______________________________________________________________________ Contents: 1. GIF Construction Set and PNG MNG Construction Set Text Effects Animation Plugins Updated 2. The Ultimate Screen Clock 5 Revision 5 (Second Notification) 3. If You're Reading This... 4. Replying to this Message and List Removal _______________________________________________________________________ Survive Spring Break! (Escape into this book.) http://www.stevenwilliamrimmer.com/lizardland.html _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ 1. GIF Construction Set and PNG MNG Construction Set Text Effects Animation Plugins Updated _______________________________________________________________________ The Text Effects plugins for GIF Construction Set Professional 5 and PNG MNG Construction 5 have been updated. These releases: - Fix a number of problems with the Texture engine, some of which could crash the application hosting your plugins. The others just created really nasty textures. - Enjoy more sophisticated memory management to occupy a smaller memory footprint, resulting in better performance... especially on systems with slower processors, limited resources or lots and lots of other stuff happening. - Improve the animation rendering engine for quicker builds. - Improve the color management when the plugins are creating GIF animations, for nicer looking results. - Improve the plugin interface, so GIF Construction Set and PNG MNG Construction Set can do less thinking when they import the plugins, and as such, boot up in less time. - Implements our work-around for the Microsoft installer limitation that hitherto required each previous release of the plugins to be uninstalled before an update could be installed. These releases of the plugins can be installed right over the previous ones - they will in fact automatically uninstall the previous plugins as part of the install. The updated plugins are: Text Effects #2: http://www.mindworkshop.com/animplugins-tx2.html Text Effects #3: http://www.mindworkshop.com/animplugins-tx3.html Text Effects #4: http://www.mindworkshop.com/animplugins-tx4.html Text Effects #5: http://www.mindworkshop.com/animplugins-tx5.html The plugin updates are available at no cost to previously-registered users of these products. They're $19.99 each if you've yet to experience them. Click on the above links to download their installers. _______________________________________________________________________ 2. The Ultimate Screen Clock 5 Revision 5 (Second Notification) _______________________________________________________________________ The Ultimate Screen Clock 5 has been updated. This release: - Adds an Alarm Clock feature. Have The Ultimate Screen Clock wake you up, notify you of important events or provide you with an excuse to beg off another evening of watching your brother-in-law practice Olympic free-style ferret juggling. The Alarm Clock is quick to enable, flexible in its choice of noises and effects and impossible to ignore. Select Alarm Clock from the right-click menu. - Fixes a number of issues in the World Time window - most of them having to do with the vagaries of daylight saving time - which saw it miscalculating the correct time at various places around the world. And yes, if you reside in North America, this is the weekend the clocks go forward and you can count on missing most of your favorite shows. - Adds an option to select which of the screen saver modes the Random mode option will select among. Click on Enable next to the Screen Saver Mode combo in Setup. - Addresses a number of user-interface elements in the various windows opened by The Ultimate Screen Clock, and updates its iconography. - Tidies up the right-click menu. - Fixes a few minor clock-metric problems. - Addresses a number of GDI and performance issues that software developers never really stop meddling with. - Updates the documentation. You can download The Ultimate Screen Clock 5 from: http://www.mindworkshop.com/clock.html#download ........................................................................ UPGRADES If you're still using The Ultimate Screen Clock 4, we invite you to upgrade to the current software and enjoy all the new clock styles and enhanced functionality it offers. As of this writing, upgrades to The Ultimate Screen Clock 5 are still available for half the single-user registration cost - $12.49. Please visit http://www.mindworkshop.com/upgrade.html to upgrade. _______________________________________________________________________ 3. If You're Reading This... _______________________________________________________________________ We've become aware of an increasing degree of paranoia among some commercial ISPs over the issue of putative spam on their networks. For the most part, we've become aware of it because we've heard back from users of Alchemy Mindworks software who have: - Discovered themselves unable to receive our weekly update postings some weekends. - Posed questions to our software support staff and heard little but crickets thereafter. - Bought our products and experienced difficulty receiving registration keys. We hasten to add that we respond promptly to all the e-mail we receive, and being mercenary capitalist swine, even more so to users sending us money. We've come to appreciate that some ISPs and "free" e-mail providers, in an effort to be perceived as protecting their users from spam, have erected brute-force mail filters that nuke lots of legitimate e-mail. Sometimes this includes ours. If you're reading this, having not seen one of our postings for several weeks, your mail provider is likely one of them. ........................................................................ In the event that you believe that you're not reliably receiving e-mail from Alchemy Mindworks, we suggest that you: - Check the spam folder of your mail account regularly. If you find some of our mail therein, mark it as not being spam. Some free mail systems actually honor such requests. Admittedly, a lot of the rest merely laugh at them. - See if your mail provider offers a "whitelist" feature, or an option to opt out of its anti-spam strategy. - Consider a second e-mail solution. As a rule, e-mail provided by ISPs isn't subject to quite the level of filtering as ostensibly free e-mail accounts. - Enable the Up To Date agent installed with all current Alchemy Mindworks software to keep you apprised of new releases of our software, for those times when your e-mail provider has lurched off the deep end. Up To Date can be accessed through the Start -> Programs (or All Programs) -> Alchemy Mindworks sub-menu on your system. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank all our users for their patience with this issue, and to reiterate our promise to reply to anything sent to us within one business day, and usually within a few minutes. If you don't hear back from us in this time frame - or if you don't receive the newsletter postings each weekend - your mail is being blocked. _______________________________________________________________________ 4. 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 - 2015 Alchemy Mindworks. All rights reserved. Use no hooks.