[Newsletter] Announcements from Alchemy Mindworks
Alchemy Mindworks
alchemy8147 at mindworkshop.com
Sat Mar 14 11:07:08 EDT 2015
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THIS IS AN AUTOMATIC POSTING FROM
THE ALCHEMY MINDWORKS UPDATE MAILING LIST
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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
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Survive Spring Break! (Escape into this book.)
http://www.stevenwilliamrimmer.com/lizardland.html
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1. GIF Construction Set and PNG MNG Construction Set Text Effects
Animation Plugins Updated
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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.
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2. The Ultimate Screen Clock 5 Revision 5 (Second Notification)
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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
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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.
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3. If You're Reading This...
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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.
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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.
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4. Replying to this Message and List Removal
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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.
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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.
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