summer is on its way..

not only does that mean I spend less time infront of the PC, but it also means that I start to enjoy my garden again.

I bought these recently. some of the brightest LED garden lights I've seen yet.
http://www.greenorb.co.uk/product_info.php?products_id=174

Great little unit that adds that extra to any garden.

Life used to be easier

Why is that I always take too much on board. I'm trying to have acalmer life yet I always seem have to many self targets. Heres the list that I have currently.
1) Redesign Theora Plugin for BlitzMax so that it can create Theora movies.
2) Adding a web crawler to RichMosaic
3) Working on a secret project.. something I like to call 'Project A' ;-)
4) Working on a puzzle game for the PC.
5) Full time job

Thats just my coding life.. I've yet to mention the never ending DIY list from my beautiful wife.

For those that may also be interested.. at the end of summer a friend and me will be cycling from Geneva to Montpellier for charity. The route and charity are yet to be decided. I will probably keep you all updated (If there is any one out there)

Anyhows... one day I may get a RichMosaic update to you.

Its been a long time since the last post.
I've decided to go back to this project after a 6 month break. A lot has happenedin those 6 months. For those that are interested, I got married last year. Obivouly with a great wife comes great responsibility so my coding had calm down a bit. I have been working on a few projects including a Theora movie plugin for BlitzMax.

i have now decided to re-visit RichMosaic, get a few fixes done. Make a better advertising panel, and hopefully add a web crawler so that you don't have to have your pictures to hand. Obviously this will take some time but I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, a great source of my christmas gifts came from the wonderful GreenOrb. Grab yourself some of the latest green gadgets there.

V3 released!

Finally, I've managed to release the next version of RichMosaic. Its taken a while but well worth it I think.
If you have problems finding the instructions for setting up the movies, then you can go here.
I've submitted it to Softpedia. Unfortunately, this time the haven't given it a clean certificate due to the unobtrusive advertising I put in the application. No need to worry though.
You can download it from here.

typical...

Just about to release version 3 when suddenly the network cards on my laptop decided to fail. Still haven't managed to fix them so, unfortunately, version 3 will have to wait for a bit while I sort out the issues. Sorry everyone

Its been a while

WOW! 2 months since my last update. Apologies all around.
In the past months I have been working on multiple projects. My Theroa lib for BlitzMax has been through a very important update, been working on 2 secret projects (shhhh its a secret) and most importantly, I've been putting some more touches to version 3 of RichMosaic.

Still got an options page to design and then some more instructions to write.

V3 teaser

(click on the image for larger web output)

The above image is comprised from the following new options in V3.
1) Individual frames from the movie "Back to the Future". Now avaliable directly from RichMosaic via virtualdub
2) Contour mapping where the thumbs, rather than being uniform, wrap themselves to the shapes within the image.
3) New web output options

at deaths door

Well it felt like I was very close to deaths door, maybe in the same hallway. I've finally got over the cold from hell. Thankfully, I was prescribed a good helping of Peep Show and next thing you know, 4 days later, I was cured.
Anyways.. now I'm better, I suppose I best get back to RichMosaic v3

Nearly finished new output tab

I've now tidy up'd the output tab for RichMosaic. Just got some coding to do behind the scenes....
Then I'll ave to make sure the special feature is also fully coded (more on that later) before I release v3

download-tastic

Just seen my web report for Feb.. thanks to the popularity of RichMosaic (4000+ downloads), my traffic for February is currently at 1.8GB. Unfortunately I only have a 2GB bandwidth... Got 4 days to get through with out going over the limit.

This may be my fault as well as I've released 3 updates this month... oops

Any donations for extra bandwidth would be welcome ;-)

not much to announce

Its been one of those weeks.. what with the full time job and also being called out a few times this week.. I'm kinda tired.
Not much has been done on RichMosaic.. I have been thinking about an inifinite mosaic function.. but that will have to come at a later date as I still need to finish off the current version.
The next release (if no issues are spotted with v2) will be version 3 as there is a big change in the way it can draw the mosaics. That will be in a few weeks.

Till then you can show off your mosaics on this forum thread..
I may even choose some of you examples (if any) to put on the main examples webpage

2.04 released

A new version has now been released. This fixes an error in 2.03 when the user didn't have admin privileges on the host computer. See update page here

New forum

I've now setup a forum for RichMosaic (and my other applications) so that issues and examples can be shown there.. Click here to see the forum.

re-designing GUI

I'm trying to re-design the output tab in the GUI so that is more clear on the output formats.. picture/web, jpeg/png/htm etc. Thought it would be easy, but its a fine line between design and logic. Harder than i thought ;-) Now that I've started I'm going to have to finish.. heres a screen shot.. (I've smudged the title of one of the tabs.. its a very new secret special feature thats still in development and testing)

2.03 released

Today a tester noticed that old cache files weren't being read if not used for a long time. This had to do with naming and dates of the cache file. This has now been fixed in v2.03. Get the update here

Uploaded to Softpedia

Not only does this mean that RichMosaic is now in a vast software library, it also means that the download has been approved 100% secure from malware, spyware and virus by Softpedia. See the link here.
Hopefully there will be some constructive reviews now from users so that I can improve features.

new blog

Today I posted my first ever blog entry. Hopefully this blog will provide more information about the development of RichMosaic and a behind-the-scenes look at things to come for this app. I plan to use an RSS feed to link to these blog entries as well.