Starware - A new concept ?

[Ben]

Hi CC,

"ctrl-." works fine for stopping. No need to use the killer.

I'm going to take a crack at trying to dynamically load the gifs somehow. I don't know anything about gifs so have to learn something by trying.

It would be cool if we could get them into a picture control so we can control their update rate using a smaller club than defer panel updates.

No promises.

Ben

[chilly_charly]

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Ben a écrit: ... "ctrl-." works fine for stopping. No need to use the killer.

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Shame on me ! I never remember this fossil command, coming from the good old days of DOS... Should discuss that with my psy... 😄

Message Edité par chilly charly le 11-19-2007 04:49 PM

[Ben]

Damn there's a patent on the compresion. Will have to use an other approach.

Ben

[altenbach]

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Ben wrote:

"ctrl-." works fine for stopping. No need to use the killer.

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Last time I checked, It does not work if the VI has a custom menu with the "operate..stop" entry missing. Did anything change?

[Ben]

Nope!

CC just hid the tool bar.

Ben

[chilly_charly]

This is just to attrack your attention on this question I asked in the LabVIEW board. There are ways to play with Internet Explorer, much better than simulating mouse clicks and keyboard strokes...

[rolfk]

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Ben wrote:

Damn there's a patent on the compresion. Will have to use an other approach.

Ben

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If you refer to the Unisys patent that should have expired about two years ago or so. If you mean a different patent, what are you refering too?

Also last time I checked (admittingly some years ago) the decompression was considered free, but any tool that could create GIFs had to pay royalitites. But with the expired patent that should not be an issue either, though I would guess for displaying gifs you only need decompression.

Rolf Kalbermatter

Message Edited by rolfk on 11-20-2007 10:11 AM

[Ben]

Rolf,

This is a vacation project so I didn't want to do more work than I had to do.

CC et al,

I decided to go with grabing images f the the container that held the gif. This let me prgramatically control which emoticon I was selecting and get soemthing that I could put in a picture. Testing showed that I could not get the images very fat so to allow for a large number of gif's I elected to use a configuratio file to stor the URL and image info. This let me breal down the challengge into two parts, getting the images and presenting the selections. The presentation could have been done using a 2d array of pictures but I wanted to experiment with the picture control more. I used an approach that analyzed the area of non-white space in the images and only inserted same in the picture control. THe mouse move event was used to compare the mouse postion with the bounderies of each icon to determine whcich object was under the mouse.

"Get_Gif_images_withURL.vi" - This VI gathers an image from each URL the user specifies and adds a config file for that icon to the folder specified by the users. It can be used to add new emoticons or create a complete new set of config files. If you examine the code you will see some artifacts where I attempted to acquire all of the images from gif but ran into severe performance limitations with attempting to filter duplicate images. If anyone can get that stream lined we may be able to add animation. Make sure you specify an output path (Config file Path) before you run.

Read_All_to_Picture_w_MouseOver.vi - This will read from all of the files in Config and will pack as many emoticons as close together as possible. I'm taking artistic liberty when saying "as possible". I'd like to see routines that take advantage of the extra space around large icons. Since the images are inserted into a picture in the order the are read they end up in alpha order.

Read_All_to_Picture_w_Preview.vi - This VI is closer to what I see as a user interface. it includes a preview of the gif and demonstrates that using a picture control does solve the perrformance issue I was after in the first place.

If the above is inteagrated into the existing CC and Friends projects, we can solve the perrformance and expandibility issues.

Your thoughts?

Ben

Message Edited by Ben on 11-23-2007 04:03 PM

[chilly_charly]

Ben,

Seems you spent a fair amount of time on the subject !

I believe we could have a better appreciation of your work if the "get_size_of_non_withe" vi was also included... 😉 😄

Message Edité par chilly charly le 11-24-2007 11:58 PM

[Ben]

Sorry CC .

Try this.

Poke at it if you are so inclined.

Ben

Message Edited by Ben on 11-24-2007 05:06 PM