[Newsletter] Announcements from Alchemy Mindworks

[Alchemy Mindworks]

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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. 

     ........................................................................


     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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