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Back To Normal!

We have finally finished moving and reorganizing all the files on Windows OnLine™ (BBS). With the help of William Brown, we have expanded the file directories to 150 different categories (63 directories for Windows files alone). There are still several empty spots available that we have not labeled yet. If you don't see a file category that you feel we should have, let us know.

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WinOnLine™ REVIEW™ Shareware Edition,

which is strictly shareware to go. This weekly magazine contains:

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A shareware Review or two

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Index Page

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(Click all Buttons)

   Shareware Briefs,  by Wolly

Shareware Choices For March!

  Visual Basic Insight,  by Steve Peschka

Customer Service Rating

  Sketcher,  by Richard Southern

  LPAC DoubleRes IV,  by Kingman Yee

  Micrografx Graphics Works,  by Rich Young

  Delta Point FreezeFrame,  by Steve Peschka

  Logitech CatchWord Pro,  by Randy Wong

  BoardWatch Contest Form


Shareware
  Wolly's Shareware Choices for March!

(The following were extracted from several articles contained in the new WinOnLine Review Shareware Edition)

SOFT KEYBOARD

A warm hearted shareware program for the handicapped

Soft Keyboard is a wonderful example of a practical program for the physically challenged. I typed this section using the program and was very impressed with the forethought and care that obviously went into it. That should come as no surprise. The author is disabled. To quote his readme.txt file: SoftKBD was created in the hope of providing motor impaired individuals with an opportunity to use a powerful computing environment for personal and professional gain. It can do just that.

The program presents a visual representation of a keyboard that can be configured in the typical QWERTY layout or two variations. One simply uses a pointing device within their abilities to choose the key needed; Soft Keyboard sends that character to the active window (a word processor or other application).

There is an extensive lookup table of words that constantly appear and change in the window above the keyboard. The most commonly used words are generally resident, but if you begin a word the lookup table follows your cue and displays words beginning with that string of characters. If the word you want is shown, simply click on it and the application receives the characters necessary to complete the word along with a space.

Soft Keyboard is not only impressive from its technological achievement, but also from its intelligent design and heart. As one who is well acquainted with physical disabilities (Wolly can't speak), it warms my heart to see this wonderful program offered in the shareware market for such a reasonable fee. Again, to quote the author: As a disabled individual I know the very high cost of special devices for the handicapped. Therefore, SoftKBD is released as Shareware for a $20 registration fee. I am most impressed with both Mr. Leotti and SKBD20.ZIP (121K).

WIN CLIP

Hey, is this column an OsoSoft commercial or what?

The only thing that can get out of hand quicker than font files is graphics collections. BMP and PCX seem to be the formats of choice with Windows. WinClip allows you to view your BMP and PCX files on screen, then print a catalog of all those graphics files or just the ones you select. This could be very handy when you're looking for just the right graphic to complete that DTP project.

The interface is intelligently done, with a large window at right for display of the files listed on the left. Using the control buttons in the middle you can easily view images, print a single image, with the filename, or print image catalogs. Images can be zoomed from 10% to 500% on screen or to the printer. A quick click calls up an edit program  (Paintbrush, for example) to alter the file.

One of the features I especially liked was the ability to view, and then copy, move and delete images right then and there. This is a boon to those of us with tons of graphics that need to be weeded of the junk, or organized into categories. WinClip supports 1, 4, 8, and 24-bit images on all displays.

Registration is just $20.00, which includes a fresh disk, printed manual and support. WCLIP30.ZIP (96K) is another OsoSoft program. Apparently these folks don't get out much in the winter.

FONT MONSTER Version 2.0

More Monstrously Munificent than Version 1

So much more has been added to the original Font Monster to perhaps justify a new name to differentiate it from Version 1.0. Functions within the program add a whole new dimension of usefulness.

Font Monster Version 2.0 addresses one of the problems with mega-collections of fonts. It has capabilities to install and deinstall defined groups of fonts, so you need not lug around all that font overhead every time you run Windows. A second bonus feature is the ability to view fonts prior to installing them. There are a lot of garbage or duplicate fonts floating around, and Font Monster allows their preview, avoiding the necessity of deinstalling or bumping into a font that already exists in your collection.

The interface is a series of buttons, my only minor criticism of the program. It's not particularly friendly, but the on-line help file certainly is thorough enough to get you through all the functions. Registration for FMONSTER.ZIP (112K) is still only a crisp $20 bill to the author in Taiwan.

  Wolly's Shareware Frowns:

Wolly hates DOC file extensions in his Windows shareware program zips!! C'mon authors, get it together. Wolly wants to double click into his association to read those documentation files with Notepad. Wolly hates to wait for fat old Microsoft Word to load and convert your lousy 1200 character text file! DOC is for MSWord, TXT is for pure text, WRI is for Windows Write, SAM is for AmiPro, etc. Wolly can excuse this in DOS shareware, but in Windows?!? Get with the program! <g> (or Wolly will refuse to associate with you).

Wolly's really bugged with shareware authors blowing up their archives by including VBRUN200.DLL! You, too??? For example, WinCal provides less than 100K of program files within its 342K download - the rest is our old pal VBRUN! This makes no sense for a BBS download.

Authors, please don't include VBRUN200.DLL anymore. Refer to it, tell us that it's required in your FILE_ID.DIZ, but don't waste my valuable phone time & bytes. Thanks!


SVP
Customer Service - Rating VB Vendors

Having had the opportunity to use and review a variety of Visual Basic and Visual Basic add-on packages, I've had more than my fair share of dealing with the dreaded Technical Support Line. In this month's VB Corner, I thought I'd share my personal rankings of the customer service that I have received from some VB vendors. Hopefully, you can use this article to make sure you're getting the most value for your dollar, and maybe avoid some of the potholes in the road to successful VB programs.

The Rating System

For this review, the rating system is going to be analogous to cars. The best vendors will be rated as the best cars; the worst vendor will be rated as, well, you'll see. In the interest of saving space (and your download time), I've decided to restrict my review to the four companies whose customer service policies have left the biggest impression on me.

  Desaware - Desaware's service is far and away the best I've had the pleasure of dealing with, and as such, their work has been deemed the Ferrari of customer service. As with most companies these days, you often have to leave a message when you have a question. However, unlike most companies these days, the folks at Desaware are always VERY prompt in returning phone calls - usually within an hour or two. In addition, when they return their phone calls, they are always very friendly and quite helpful in solving that which ails you.

Furthermore, one of their products, SpyWorks-VB, makes an offer that I haven't seen anywhere else. SpyWorks features a control called CBK, which provides your VB programs with a callback address (see issue our WOLR71 issue for a full review of SpyWorks-VB). There are some unique features associated with each function that uses a callback address, although the differences are small enough that many functions can use the same type callback. However, Desaware has gone so far as to offer to write a custom callback address if you come up with any function that can't be serviced from those provided with SpyWorks-VB. Moreover, they'll do this for free!

It's features like these that put Desaware at the top of the heap. In addition to the best service, they have some of the best products. Products such as SpyWorks-VB, CCF-Cursors, and Custom Control Factory offer outstanding values for your software dollar. Excellent job, Desaware.

  Pinnacle Publishing - Pinnacle Publishing's performance is like the police car - not real flashy, but the average exterior doesn't accurately reflect the power under the hood. Pinnacle Publishing, providers of the custom Graph control that comes with the Professional Edition of Visual Basic, also have an answering machine on which you typically have to leave a message.

Their response time isn't quite as good as Desaware's, although they usually get back on the same day in which you call. In addition, their support staff wasn't quite as adept at rooting out the underlying problem and suggesting alternatives, but they were still quite good, and extremely friendly.

My personal philosophy is that friendliness makes up for a lot of things. By the time you've been so frustrated as to have to call technical support, the last thing you need is somebody on the other end giving you a hard time. Pinnacle is very good in this regard, and deserves a thumbs up!

  Microsoft - for any of you who think this is Microsoft-bashing - forget it!  I firmly believe that, across the board, Microsoft makes the best Windows-products in the industry. The only reason they've fallen to number three on this list is that you cannot call for Visual Basic technical support - unless you're willing to pay for it. They have two different options - one that costs $2/minute (approximately) or $20/phone call. The other alternative is to email your problems to them electronically, such as through CompuServe. These limited options get Microsoft technical support the bulldozer - high marks for the powerful knowledge of their support staff, but not something you brag to your friends about ("Yo, Gomer - d'ya see my new 'dozer?  Totally cool.....").

  Crescent Software - dealing with Crescent was, hands down, the worst customer service I have ever received from any software vendor anywhere, anytime - and I don't mean to limit that strictly to VB or VB add-ons, either. The customer service staff was extraordinarily rude, were very short with me, cut me off, and made little, if any, attempt to listen to what I was saying to them. Their performance rated the second-hand, wobbly garage-sale bicycle. My personal recommendation would be if you have a choice, spend your money elsewhere. There's no need to put up with a bunch of grief when there are other options available.

Written By,

Steve Peschka


Sketcher Review

by Fractal Design

That's the only color you'll see in this article. And that's a good thing!

Attention all you wanna-be artists with black and white laser printers! This is the program you have been waiting for: Affordable, expandable and very capable!

Sketcher is a gray scale only program that runs in the Windows environment, has a Mac counterpart and some very powerful image control options.

Sketcher gets its grays by remapping your color pallet so anyone can run in 64 gray scale, yes, even those of you with 256k video cards. If you have more of a system, it'll work with graphic tablets that are pressure sensitive, enabling a more "natural" style of art, a long time complaint from many artists about mouse driven interfaces. If you have been looking at expensive  programs like the hallowed Photostyler, but couldn't pallet (pun intended) the hefty price tag, look no further. Retailing at $149 and with a street price under $100  it's a bargain, and money well spent.

One of it's many unique features allows you to apply a paper texture to your work, so you can put your image onto rice paper or heavy fibery stock, and it looks right. Printing this on a 300 DPI printer is great, higher resolution (read lino) renders an indistinguishable copy of the paper (with out the paper jams). This feature allows you to create some truly unique effects (Click for Example!) .

With all this praise comes some criticism, but not much.

If you are already familiar with Photostyler you might be disappointed with the lack of a magic-wand tool, but that is the only place Sketcher lags. Instead, you use a frisket tool to define your area for changes. There are both freehand and polygon options and you can have more than one frisket on the image. Using the frisket tools allows you to mask off an area that you want to change, be that bucket filling, applying texture or cutting. The frisket is really a definable stencil for anything you want, and like a stencil, can be reused.

If you already have Photostyler, you may have purchased the Gallery Effects, and if you don't own it, but are thinking about buying Sketcher, the Gallery Effects are a worthwhile addition, furthering the controls you have on the images appearance. Sketcher, like any serious drawing package, supports these additions, as well as TWAIN capabilities, the universal way to control scanners from differing manufactures from with-in the program. Just another way Sketcher flaunts its strengths as a professional grade drawing package.

This is the perfect package for the artist who wants to have more control over his/her work and works in a grey scale environment.

I think that its fair to say that for the money its probably the best drawing package on the market for those who don't deal with color.

There is also a version available for the Mac platform.

System Requirements

Note: Sketcher comes in a great little box that reminds me of a cigar box. If you want color, look for Painter, also by Fractal Design, the color based sibling to Sketcher, uniquely packaged in a paint can.

Fractal Design is headquartered at:

335 Spreckels

Aptos, Ca. 95003

(408) 688-8800 (voice)

(408) 688-8836 (FAX)

Written by,

Richard Southern

Freelance Writer


3-D Example

This unique effect took only a few minutes to create. Because you are seeing it in only 16 colors without the benefit of pallet remapping, much of its splendor is lost. The printed output is truly stunning.


System Requirements

Sketcher for Windows requires:

- a 386sx based machine or better

- VGA graphics (mono or color)

- 4 megs RAM

- Windows 3.X with a pointing device

Additional items also supported

- Kurta, Wacom and Calcomp pressure sensitive tablets

- A math coprocessor


Fractal Design

Fractal Design is headquartered at:

335 Spreckels

Aptos, Ca. 95003

Call (408) 688-8800 (voice)

 (408) 688-8836 (FAX)


Me


LPAC_DoubleRes_Review
doubleRES IV

by Kingman Yee

The recent introduction of the Hewlett Packard LaserJet IV has made many owners of HP LaserJet II and III's wondering if their printers are obsolete. The primary feature of the HP IV over its competitors is the 600 dots per inch (dpi) resolution. They even throw in more built in fonts, and all this for less than the price of a HP III. At 300 dpi with the Resolution Enhancement Technology (RET) turned on, the printed text is crisp and has the look of type approaching 600 dpi, but RET does not improve the print quality of pictures.

Pictures that have fine brightness gradients (for example, very gradual shadowing or gray scale) do not print well at 300 dpi. This is because differences in brightness are simulated on the print page by dithering (half toning). The significance of the dithering process to the perception of difference is brightness is to use that the ability of an observer to distinguish objects showing little contrast is proportional to the diameter of the object, where the proportionality constant is the difference in signal to noise ratio. The diameter of the object is proportional to the total pixels in the object (n2), given the definition of the detection ratio as,

This implies that increasing from 300 dpi to 600 dpi will double the detection ratio allowing a doubling in detecting brightness, a difference that is easily perceptible because the human eye can perceive differences in brightness as small as %1.

DoubleRES IV  give the owners of HP II/III the advantage of higher resolution under windows without buying a new printer. The $499. card plugs into the optional I/O port in the rear of the  HP II/III printer. Hardware installation is a matter of removing the parallel cable connection, unscrewing a pair of screws holding the I/O port cover, inserting the  doubleRES IV  card with the electronics components face down, replacing the two screws, and replacing the parallel cable connection onto the  doubleRES IV  card. The printer needs to be told which port is connected to the computer, which is done by selecting the I/O=option in the menu accessible in the printer's front panel. Software installation is even easier. From program manager, run install.exe from the floppy disk and select  doubleRES IV  from the printer menu inside the control panel. The  doubleRES IV  card was installed on a LaserJet III with 3 MB of printer ram. The connected computer was 40 MHz 386 with 8 MB of ram running Windows 3.1.

The  doubleRES IV  text quality is better. Vertical lines were slightly better but the area where the differences were most obvious is where there are diagonal lines such as italics. The lines are more crisp with a lot fewer jaggies, or bleeding effects. The font spacing in Words for Windows is slightly different for  doubleRES IV  than the HPIII with the  doubleRES IV  fonts taking slightly more space. With the print manager turned off, the print speed from Word for Windows using the  doubleRES IV  card for most text documents doubled, taking half as long to print a 37 page technical document containing two photos than with the standard HPIII drivers. LPAC recommends that print manager not be used. The advantage is less with print manager turned on, with gain in speed of 50-100%, depending on the length of the document. On some documents, print manager slows  doubleRES IV  to a crawl. The speed advantage quickly diminishes with increasing graphics in the printed document. The printing time to print a four page document containing two photos and a couple of tables without print manager printed was about the same for the HPIII and  doubleRES IV. With print manager,  doubleRES IV  took 30% longer to print this 4 page document than the standard HPIII. An image than requires some processing such as a photo in WinGif or Photostyler using the fit to page command took about 2-3 times longer (depending of the grade of dithering) for the doubleRES IV  than the HPIII. This makes sense since there is about 4 times the data in a 600 dpi than a 300 dpi image.

The real advantage of the  doubleRES IV  is in printing pictures. The increase in resolution and contrast is striking. This is not an effect just to dithering as done by the Microsoft Windows Printing System cartridge, which increase the photo's contrast by a quasi-minimum entropy dithering process. The dithering process can increase contrast at the expense of resolution or vice versa but it cannot do both. Details that were lost in a print out of a low contrast photo are regained at 600 dpi. Boundaries of a translucent object being barely distinguishable from background at 300 dpi are clearly distinguishable on print out from the  doubleRES IV. Contrast is increased (double from the discussion above) showing a wider range of gray scale with the dither dot less noticeable. At 600 dpi,  doubleRES IV  allows four different dither processes, normal, copier, transparent, and presentation.

The dithering dots get finer as you go from normal to presentation, with the presentation mode producing print outs nearly as good as an HP IV print out. The  doubleRES IV  prints have a rougher texture compared to the HP IV prints.  doubleRES IV's  normal mode outputs does not have the same resolution as a HP IV outputs, with the outputs showing a resolution somewhere around 450 dpi. At presentation mode, the contrast, acuity, and dither size is smaller than the HP IV outputs but contains more artifacts. Some horizontal banding artifacts are clearly visible at presentation mode but barely visible at normal mode. The banding is visible on virtually all printers (to varying degrees), possibly due to the non-constant velocity of the paper traveling across the print drum. Doubling the resolution only increases the sensitivity to this. The texts on some pages have the left side of the page printed darker than the right,  with the cause being in the toner cartridge. Shaking the toner cartridge corrected the problem.  doubleRES IV  also has an option to use a fine brush, with conjunction with a fine toner cartridge (which has particle 1/2 the size of normal)  will enhance the quality of print. LPAC offers to its  doubleRES IV  owners a special on their  doubleRES toner  for $119 with exchange.

If you already own a HP II or III, have document with graphics, and want to print presentable graphics then  doubleRES IV  is a good buy. If all your documents are text, you don't really need 600 dpi but if you have graphics, your graphics will be much more legible at 600 dpi.  doubleRES IV  offers symmetric increase of 300x300 to 600x600 dpi, not just an increase along the horizontal direction. The next question to ask is whether to buy  doubleRES IV  or a HP IV. This depends on whether Windows is the only environment you work in.  doubleRES IV  provides 600 dpi only in Windows while DOS applications print at 300 dpi. The HP IV prints at 600 dpi for all applications. If Windows is the only environment that you need 600 dpi,  doubleRES IV is a cost effective way to upgrade to 600 dpi.

For more information, please contact:

LPAC

Laser Printer Accessories Corporation

10865 Rancho Bernardo Road

San Diego, CA 92127

(619) 485-8411

FAX:  (619) 487-5809

Retail Price :  $599.

Reviewed by Kingman Yee

Freelance Writer


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GRAPHICS_WORKS
Micrografx

Graphics Works

Reviewed by Rich Young

I am the type of user who generally turns his nose up at integrated software packages, being used to the ones that stuff small, less robust modules into one weak product. I was anyway, until I got my hands on Graphics Works from the folks at Micrografx. Not only did they combine several full featured graphics products into one convenient package, but they also put the entire package with a complete set of images on a CD-ROM disk.

With Graphics Works you can create charts, graphs, drawings, paintings, and more Graphics Works includes

o	Windows Draw, the popular Windows drawing program. It comes with 150 TrueType fonts, a clip art manager for previewing symbols, and 30 translation filters. Windows Draw is a fun, fast, and friendly drawing package.

o	PhotoMagic, the easy way to retouch photo images. Sporting a helpful user interface and 40 special effects, PhotoMagic lets you create your own photo masterpieces.

o	Windows OrgChart, a quick and easy way to create and edit professional organization charts and tree diagrams. In a short time after installing Windows OrgChart, you will be able to design a chart and make it automatically fit the page or pages you choose.

o	WinChart, a powerful yet easy-to-use charting package that lets you create the charts you need from your data. You can design area, bar, column, line, pie, and table charts. If you change your data, the charts update automatically to reflect the changes.

o	SlideShow, the perfect way to show your presentations. SlideShow has 30 transitional effects and automatic and manual slide advancement.

o	10,000 Micrograpfx ClipArt symbols that you can use to add flair to your charts, newsletters, reports, and other documents.

o	1,000 photo images from the Micrografx Image Collection that you can use to enhance your documents.

Features at a glance

I found Windows Draw to be a simple, easy-to-use drawing program. I have tried using the bigger packages such as Corel Draw, but I found that they were too complex and overwhelming for my needs. Windows Draw is just right for what I use a drawing package for. As I have no artistic talent whatsoever, I appreciate Windows Draw for its extensive clip art handling.

With the ClipArt Catalog you can search for ClipArt symbols within the entire catalog, or within a subject in the catalog. I liked being able to preview the ClipArt symbols before using them. You also can use as many ClipArt symbols as you like in a drawing. If you happen to want to (or be able to!) create a symbol in your drawing, you just give it a name, then add it to a subject in the ClipArt Catalog for your future use.

Windows Draw offers a wealth of drawing and editing features. You get the ability to draw curves, lines polylines, and rounded rectangles; and reshape symbols using Bezier reshape. I like using color gradients for producing a realistic depth in a drawing, and hatch and bitmap fill patterns for enhancing the background of symbols.

You can define your own color palettes with HLS color mixing, and you get the ability to create, resize, and place an unlimited number of symbols on a page. You can blend one symbol into another symbol and slant or rotate symbols in one-degree increments. You can also choose the widths, end styles, and join styles for lines in your drawing.

I was impressed with Windows Draw for its text handling as well. You can use TrueType and scalable outline fonts, and the rich text feature for changing font styles, types, and sizes of text on the same line. Windows Draw sports flexible text alignment and indentation, with the ability to fit text to a curve. You can even convert text to a symbol for reshaping and adding gradients and pattern fills. You can also rotate text in increments as small as one degree.

Windows Draw will import and export AI, TIFF, TXT, WPG, and many other file formats. You get file and Clipboard compatibility with Micrografx Designer, Micrografx Charisma, Aldus PageMaker, Ventura Publisher, PC Paintbrush, and many other Windows applications. Windows Draw is also compatible with Adobe Type Manager and Adobe Type Align, including converting Type 1 fonts to curves.

PhotoMagic is easy to learn and fun to use. PhotoMagic sports many impressive features that should please even the power user. With PhotoMagic you can preview and edit images quickly with the ImageBrowser. Or you can zoom in on your images with the ZoomBar and ZoomBox. You can paint your photos with brush styles like Marker, Chalk, Charcoal, Crayon, and Neon. Add sensational special effects with the EffectsBrowser, and learn more about PhotoMagic using the hint lines in the status bar. You can even create Windows Wallpaper using ScreenMagic.

PhotoMagic is also a powerful package. You can change image color, but not the texture, with the Colorizer tool. Use selections to select portions of an image for editing, and you can size, scale rotate and flip selections. You can also protect or select image areas by color value with the Color Shield. Open and save images with JPEG compression algorithms (a real disk space saver) and use object linking and embedding (OLE) to link and imbed images into other programs. I was fascinated by all the ways you can edit and manipulate images. I spent hours just goofing around with all these fine features. PhotoMagic is a great utility!

Windows OrgChart is a simple, fast tool that lets you create organizational charts in an innovative point and click interface. I was able to lay out a chart and have it fit automatically to the page without much effort or learning. Since you create a chart in WYSIWYG screens, you always know how you work will look when printed. By using the mouse to perform all of the functions I needed, I saved time and the headache of having to learn a host of keyboard commands.

With Windows OrgChart you can use your charts to track important personnel information. Besides name and title, you can define your own fields like salary, date of hire, or last raise. You always have the option of displaying only the information you want in a chart. I found that you can also store pictures, which I thought was a fantastic idea. You can also store detailed notes about the people in your charts. All you have to do is point and click on a position to display the information or picture.

Windows OrgChart makes keeping track of minor personnel changes or  an entire corporate restructure easy. The editing process is fully automated. Whenever you make a change, Windows OrgChart updates the chart instantly. Finally, you can add your own finishing touches to create the exact look you want: move a box, add auxiliary lines, place text outside boxes, add color, thicken lines, and more.

WinChart is a simple yet effective little chart creation tool. You'll be able to add professional looking graphical representations of your data to documents and presentations. You can easily create many different types of charts from your data, and add titles and labels to them. You can quickly change the color of charts and text, if you so choose and the hint lines on the status bar help you learn more about WinChart, or you can use the extensive on-line help.

WinChart gives you access to powerful features such as using bezier curves to create illustrations. You can align symbols to each other as well. Symbols can be sized, rotated, and scaled to your liking. You can also import ClipArt from the Micrografx ClipArt Libraries to add extra flair to your charts. WinChart supports OLE to link and embed images in other programs. Another fine part of this impressive software product!

In Conclusion

Micrografx Graphics Works is a wonderful combination of tools that can make your life a bit easier. I found all of the elements in Graphics Works to be high quality and simple to use. Novices and power users alike should find this product to their liking. I would highly recommend Graphics Works to anyone who has need for a good quality graphics package.

For more information contact:

MICROGRAFX

1303 Arapaho

Richardson, TX 75081

(214) 234-1789

Brought to you by

   (Click)

  Rich Young

  Staff Writer

  Windows OnLine


Rich Sig


FreezeFrame_Review

by Delta Point

As we push forward here at Windows OnLine, trying to bring you the most informative and colorful magazine articles around, I felt the need for a high-performance graphics utility program. My first venture got me hooked up with HiJaak for Windows, which turned out to be a major disappointment. Fortunately, my next effort brought me Freeze Frame for Windows, and it has proven to be a real winner!

  The Program

Freeze Frame is split into four main modules:

  a capture utility

  a viewer utility

  a conversion utility

  an icon/bitmap/cursor editor

In addition, Freeze Frame also comes with hundreds of wallpaper-quality bitmaps, post script clipart pictures, icons, and cursor resources.

Capture Utility

The capture utility of Freeze Frame offers a number of image-capturing capabilities. You can capture information from a screen, window, an area, a freehand capture or coordinate-based capture. You "tell" Freeze Frame that you want to capture an image by pressing the hot-key combination that you define. For instance, I typically use the F12 key to capture an image. However, I'm unable to use it in certain programs, such as Word for Windows, because F12 is already used by the program for its own function.

In that situation, you just open Freeze Frame back up, and redefine your hot-key combo. You can use any combination of the SHIFT and CTRL keys, along with F1 through F12, and the Print Screen key.

When you capture an image, you have more options again. You can have it capture the image to the clipboard, to the printer, to a file, or any combination of the above. The file format in which the image is saved can be any one of seven file formats. In addition, after the image is captured, you can also have Freeze Frame automatically bring up the File Viewer module and have your captured image automatically loaded for your inspection. Could it possibly be any easier than this?  I don't think so.

Viewer Utility

I don't have a picture of this utility because there's not a whole lot to see - it just acts as a container for other pictures. It is quite nice, however, to be able to cruise through an assortment of clipart collections of various file formats so quickly and easily. When I wasn't sure what a particular piece of clipart looked like before Freeze Frame, I would start up Word for Windows or AmiPro, and then select Insert a Picture. Then I would go through the picture dialog box and one-by-one, view the images that those particular programs support. Freeze Frame's viewer provides the same capabilities, but it operates much faster, cleaner and on many more file formats than either of the word processors.

Conversion Utility

The conversion utility is another nice feature of Freeze Frame. I typically do a lot of drawing in Micrografx Windows Draw (another nice package). The problem is getting the drawing, which is in a proprietary DRW format, into something I can use. This hurdle exists no longer. Freeze Frame can convert between 50 file formats, including all your favorites:  BMP, WPG, TIF, EPS, PCX, and, of course, DRW, among others. In fact, the banner at the top of this article is a Draw object that was converted to a bitmap with Freeze Frame.

Icon Editor

I call this an icon editor, but that's only the beginning. Certainly, it edits icons. In fact, it is far and away the best icon editor I've ever seen, and I've experimented with quite a few. Not only does it do icons, though, it also does bitmaps and cursor resources, and has some totally wild ways to get in pictures.

As a bitmap editor, Freeze Frame is fairly limited - you still can't have a picture any bigger than an icon (32x32 pixels). The beauty of it is when you have an icon or a cursor resource that you want to save as a bitmap. No more fooling around with captures, edits and saves. Instead, you just open the icon or cursor in Freeze Frame, and then save it again, only this time, save it in bitmap format. That's all there is too it - it's real time saver!

Cursor resources are things like the arrow, crosshairs, the hourglass, etc. that you see when working in Windows. Being able to create, copy and edit your own cursor resources is a real boon to all Windows developers out there, big and small. This capability, when used in combination with a package like CCF-Cursors from Desaware, can add instant pizzazz and credibility to your Visual Basic applications.

In addition to the standard cut and paste for your pictures, Freeze Frame has a couple of radically cool ways to get information into the Icon Editor - Libraries and Snapshots. When you select the Open Library command from the File menu, you are given the option of choosing an EXE, DLL, DRV or IL file. When you pick a file, Freeze Frame goes through that file and loads all of the bitmap, icon and cursor resources into a palette. From there, you can select individual entries and save them as your own, change them and save them, or change them and save them in the original file.

For example, the picture on the right is an icon library that I opened. The source is the executable PW.EXE, which is ProComm Plus for Windows (another excellent program). I can manipulate any of the resources that you see in the palette. Incidentally, you can't see all the resources in this picture; the icon library can hold up to 200 resources from each file. I could copy a resource and save it as a bitmap, icon or cursor. Or, I could actually make changes to one of the resources, and then save it back into my executable, where it would be changed forever more.

The second slick way to get information into the icon editor is by snapshot. The basic snapshot is just like an icon capture utility. It enables you to capture an area 32x32 pixels and have it put in your icon editor. The second, and radically different method, enables you to click and drag around an area, and have Freeze Frame convert the image to icon size and put it in the editor.

For example, this picture [image] is an EPS format picture of a Dalmatian that comes with Freeze Frame. I opened the Icon Editor and selected Snapshot_Variable. The cursor changed to crosshairs, and I was able to click and drag around the portion of the picture that I wanted converted to an icon. Freeze Frame captured, compressed, and put the image into the editor, as seen here [image] . This has some really fantastic implications for artistic Neanderthals such as myself.

Summary

I have found Freeze Frame to be an excellent product, and an excellent value. At about $69., it is well worth the price of admission. I would highly recommend this product to anyone. You can reach the folks at Delta Point by calling (800) 367-4334.

Written By,

Steve Peschka


CatchWord_Review
Besides using a scanner for grabbing images, scanners can be used with optical character recognition (OCR) programs to copy text off a piece paper. I read a lot of printed material, and in some cases, I had to re-key the information into my computer. With OCR software, I would have saved myself a lot of time. Most scanners are bundled with several products including an OCR product. In my case, the Logitech ScanMan Color did not come packaged with an OCR product. The most likely vendor to get a good OCR software is from the vendor of the scanner you have. They should know how well their scanner works, and which OCR software works best with it. What Logitech offered me was the CatchWord Pro for Windows.

CatchWord Pro For Windows is a Windows based Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program. It is 99% accurate on a typewritten, laser, or near letter quality printed document. Newspaper, magazines, and fax transmitted text seems to transfer rather nicely into a document file. Using the omnifont technology, CatchWord Pro recognizes almost all type fonts and sizes. What is unusual is that the characters could be one of eleven languages that are supported. They are; English, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. Another feature, is that you can mix characters, and it will still recognize the text. Since it is a Windows product, CatchWord Pro will perform background recognition while you are working on something else.

CatchWord Pro is easy to use and easy to learn. The active area consists of a button bar, tool bar, and dropdown menu selection. A status bar, on the bottom, displays helpful information about what is going on. The button bar contains the most commonly used functions, such as scan, recognize, correcting invalid characters, copying, exporting, paging, image association, and Multiple Document Interface (MDI) window arrangements. The tool bar controls either the image window or the text window. It toggles between a text tool bar and an image tool bar. The tool bar is made up of various tools, such as alignment, block selection, cropping, trimming, compressing out spaces, and finding invalid characters.

CatchWord Pro supports BMP, PCX, and TIF image file format. You can open and save in these formats only. The other way to start processing an image is to scan the document into the image windows. Once you have the image that you want to process, you can now select the areas. Playing with column text, it was easier to scan each column separately. Select recognizes, and CatchWord Pro will now process the characters and place them into the text window. After the text has been successfully completed, you will want to save the converted file. There are several ways to approach this, you could copy and paste the text into your application. You may want to save the file as either ANSI or ASCII. I use the export file command to save the file in one of the 17 different file formats. Several popular file formats are AmiPro, dBase, Machintosh, MultiMate, RTF, WinWord, Word, Wordstar, Write, and others. CatchWord Pro also includes several macros for several of the major word processing products. One macro will place a CatchWord Pro item on the Word for Windows file menu for launching, scanning, and pasting into the document.

The Logitech CatchWord Pro is easy to use and performs very well under most conditions. Even though my fax software has its own OCR, CatchWord Pro does a better job in translating the text over to my word processor. Recognizing different languages is nice, but I doubt if I will ever use any language other than English, but one never knows. I like the exporting feature which supports many of the popular word processing, spreadsheet, and database products. Supporting the TWAIN-compliant technology is a major plus for this product. I was mildly surprised that a spell checker was not included, but then, that's what I do in my word processor. The lack of a learning mode limits CatchWord Pro for recognizing the more sophisticated types. CatchWord Pro is perfect for the occasional user who does OCR work on the side using a hand scanner. You might say, anyone that types might need to use an OCR package.

   Any Microsoft Windows based computer, a 386SX and higher based computer is recommended.

   Microsoft Windows 3.0 or later.

   4 MBytes and higher random access memory (RAM).

   Approximately 2 Mbytes of disk space is required to install. More disk space will be required for text files.

   Logitech ScanMan 256, ScanMan Color, or any other TWAIN-compliant hand-held or flatbed scanner.

   Any Windows pointing device.

For more information, please contact:

Logitech, Inc.

6505 Kaiser Drive

Fremont, CA 94555

510-795-8500

1-800-231-7717

FAX:  510-792-8901

List Price is $299.

(or)

$79.00 upgrade for any Logitech ScanMan owners

(or)

the bundle package of Logitech ScanMan 256


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