[release] V Animator (includes Buttonanimator V2)

@ firecracker6

About halo-effected frame: yeah, I know this bug. I took dimensions from the original images from vAnim folder. The frame consists of 4 images and in accordance with your screenshots 2 of them are stretched (if the textarea is higher than one row). If I increase dimensions in my new images, than corners will look crappy. IMHO vJay should implement a new way to draw halo effect, like 4 lines + 4 corners

@ Church Punk

vAnim is not always correctly extracting buttons. I use Xero's Tiger and vAnim extracted buttons in wrong colours: crappy graphite ones instead of blue aqua - and the pulsing effect was also crappy. But then I took buttons from Mac OS X Tiger and included them into archive you can download =)

#286638

@ mntnbkr1065, check your email

Edit: odd, the email was just returned to me... i wonder if it does not like .rar files, I will try to resend it as a .zip.

Edit2: Ok, not working:

----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.:

>>> DATA

<<< 552 5.7.0 Illegal Attachment

554 ... Service unavailable

Got another email account, or lower your security settings?

@va-deam: yeah.. i know about the tradeoffs of the current drawing implementation.. I really do hope vjay will grace this thead once more... *waits patiently*

#286655

thats so strange, its worked before...

do you think you can try one more time with arnaud_crowther@hotmail.com

#286746

ok, just sent to arnaud_crowther@hotmail.com, let me know if you it worked this time.

#286781

i just emailed you saying it worked. but i was mistaken. the reason its not working is because it thinks theres a virus in it. hotmails telling me it wont let me download it because it contains and unknown virus

maybe if you changed the extension to "jpg" or something

#286829

try this....

1) go to the first post.

2) right click on the link "download" and choose "copy link location" (in firefox) / "copy shortcut" (in windows)

3) now, in your address bar, right click, and paste text into the field, hit enter.

4) save to desktop or wherever, if popup blocking's goins on... do what you do to allow the download.

this should work... if not, i'll send another round

#286879

hah that worked. thank you very much for all your trouble.

#287063

@mntnbkr1065: no problem

#288064

Hi, i viewed my weblogs a little time ago and im suprised, peaople are still downloading this.

I have uploaded a new version - link is in the first post for everybody who is interested in.

Grettings

Vjay

#313640

Vjay! Welcome back. I knew if I waited patiently enough you'd suprise us with another release I have been using your app faithfully since we first started on this thread. I'm glad to see you on it again. To tell you the truth in my last 4 installs... each pc would hang on vanim when trying to shutdown. I've grown to using forced shutdown routines but was feeling more and more disheartened with what I thought would be the inevitable retiremet of Vanimator from my systems. I've been thinking that with these OS updates, maybe something was up.

Anways, I'm crossing my fingers now, hoping your new release helps.

#313691

Hi fc,

yep i was a lot lazy the last w.. hm months

I know that there were serious bugs in the "old" versions, because i learned while i built em. That includes a lot of playing and testing around and changings here and there and thats how bugs are born.

Hm, i never mentioned a shutdown - problem, okay a stayaliveuntilshutdown-problem but not a shutdown problem. - Sorry, other people other systems, i cant test every case because of that you can post your experiences and problems here. 1. I never read of that problem 2. How often do you reinstall??? I install only once a year or so, and im playing a lot with my os...

Ive testet it a minute ago it shutdowns correctly... hope it makes its thing on your machine too..

How i wrote in the first post i changed the complete "underground" - how the program works, hope it runs stable now and i can focus on new things and not on problems you cant see.

greetings

#313729

This new version is wonderful! THis couldn't have been a greater surprise for today

I'm sorry I didn't make myself very clear earlier about the bug: When I go to shutdown/reboot my computer, a dialogue window would pop up saying something like vanim cannot end right now... or something, i forget at the moment. So, the system would wait on that dialog window until you click cancel, or ok or something. (basically, it was an issue we discussed in this thread a while ago, an dI think you fixed it once, basically it resurfaced. But I'm really pleased to announce that the new vanim, does NOT have this problem. I have tested it on 2 OS's now and so far, they have shutdown without an issue. I really like the transparent halo effect you achieved. Just one question though. On one OS, the halo is a bit off. (notice the one on the left is a bit pixelated, and the bottom frame looks just a bit misaligned) Where as the one on the right is much smoother.

Edit: I just double checked to make sure it wasn't just a lighter wall paper giving off the illusion that vanim was behaving differently between the OSs, and I was wrong. The issue I described for the image on the left is the same for the OS on the right. There is a slight mis-alignment on the bottom frame and it does not matter if you have a single line file name, or multiple lined longer file names.

Anyways Vjay, thanks again.

#313788

Hi there,

i fixed that and upped the new version. But for some reasons i cant edit my first post. You can download the new version and just replace the hookdll, this should make it (+reboot .

Im thinking about making the Editcontrols round like in osx, but i dont know if this would result in too much problems with different apps, that are designed for normal edits.

#313841

I just tried out the new version with the corrected halo. It looks very good. Will there be the ability to choose different halo effects in the future? Even maybe a color dropper?

Could you please explain what the "Editcontrols round like in osx" referrs to?

I discovered that when you rightclick on the vanim systray icon and choose settings, there is a quick flash of a window on the left of the screen (then disappears) before the settings window appears. It's so quick it's hard to get a screenshot of.

Also, I have been playing around with the button animator and was wondering if you could provide some advice on how I would (if possible) get LonghornAlternative WB skin buttons to look good. Is there a trick possibly? I always try to get button (non-aqua aswell) to benefit from your program but with not very good luck. Please see screenshot.

#313893

helo vjay, thanx for the hardwork ,

I have a problem, the taskbar becomes odd when i start VAnim... :S

Plz see the screenie..

the apple logo changes into a button. It starts a few second after i start VAnim.

#313899

@fc,

Yes i will build in new options, this was more a simple test if it works the way i thought of. I'm testing the new version like you only since two days and it seems that it really runs stable. Yeah i finally made it :) In OSX the Editcontrols are round at the edges. Look on top of this page the forum-search-edit looks like it.

Original this program was designed or "invented" to give you the last step in OSX emulation - that a visual style cant do. Because of that all defaults are(and will be) set (like the buttons) to emulate osx.

To your buttonproblem: The function to take them from Windows is hold very simple and designed for standard aqua skins. You have to make screenshots of them and replace the buttonimages in the VAnim folder by yourself and now i explain why.

The VAnim only takes the pure images of Buttons in the different states and trys to guess where the transparent pixels are and how it should be painted. Another problem is that vanim until now only uses simple Bitmaps and not PNGs (which are able of full alpha-transparency). Standard 24Bit (1byte for every colour) are not able to hold the alpha-informations. So you can set the x/y position of a pixel in the vanim-configdialog which colour is used as transparency. Also it trys to guess the colour of the pulsed buttons and so on. If you now think about how many styles exist out there (included your longhorn) style you can imagine that this wouldnt work very well. So its up to you making screenshots of buttons and replacing the vanim bitmaps.

@kavin

When the buttonspulser is activated it captures every new created button for itself, included the startbarbutton. This should not happen because normally the startbar is created before vanim starts if you created a link in your auto-startup-folder. I can only explain it to me, that your startbar is destroyed and recreated after vanim runs or that vanim starts somehow before your explorer starts. I can build in that the explorer-bar should be ignored, until then you could add the explorer.exe to the exlude-list of vanim and reboot.

Greetings

#313938

Thanks for the explanation Vjay... So does this mean that you have plans to use PNGs in the future?

Also, what image type are you using for the transparency in the halo effect? And since you are overlaying an image around the text input field, what would stop you from overlaying your own completely new text field that would allow you to completely hide (at least temporarily, while your are editing a file's name) window's native text field, instead overlaying it with the nice halo effect, but also provide transparency under the typed text? I suppose you would then be capturing user text input and passing it to the windows file name field and so all the naming rules would apply etc. Could this be done though? It would be really cool.

Also, have you seen this app?

http://www.punksoftware.com/index.php?opti...mid=174〈=en

I just wanted to share this with you as it seems like you guys would be treading similar ground.

Cheers.

#313951

Nice to see you'll work again on this.

*Cheers "machmalnenbierauf"

#313974

Thanx Vjay, I restarted the explorer and start button was back.

Thanx for ur hard work.

#314159

@fc

PNG: Yes i have them, but im unsure about the way ill take. I think i use the gdiplus.dll like all the other applications do. The highest priority for me is to hold the application tiny and fast, and the gdiplus is really big, but most othere apps use it 2, so it wouldnt matter anymore. The only requirement is that the user would delete them from any application and move a copy to his system32 directory, so not X different versions are loaded into ram. PS drawing without alphatransparency is much faster than drawing with it...

Until then the halo - effect is hard-coded in the program, because you remember how it looked with bitmaps... With PNGs it should be possible to get something together that looks better.

Overlaying: Yes this are sentences of people, dont knowing how difficult this is (Its not meant in a hurting way, or how you say it) You can look in the hooksourcecode folder and the PulseButtonUnit.pas this monster is 26kb, using this technique. Now think about how complex a button is and how compex an editcontrol is, including copy paste rightclickmenu and so on. I would NEVER completely replace it, but there is a way to move the editable region of a editcontrol arround in it, maybe there is a way... I have programmed my own windowmanager long time ago, but i didnt remember how i did it and lost the password to the encrypted source.. This is the program if you want to see it, http://www.mynrg.de/downloads/nrgpro/index.html you can completely redesign the controls when holding down STRG/CTRL and clicking on them like in VAnim the buttons. But this project was too heavy and i didnt continue it.

The other app is a cool idea, but they are moving on completly different grounds. I think they hook your Keyboard/Mouse, when you doubleclick they look if the cursor is over a icon, they then create their own window and draw the effects. Im not 100% sure about the first part, because the sourcecode is not available

@ Toner: ;-P

@kavin: I upped a new version, this ignores the taskbar even if its created later. So if you redownload in future you can remove the explorer.exe from the exludelist.

#314204

Sweet prog Vjay! keep up the great work!

#314231

Cool---glad to see you're continuing the development of this baby

-NC

#314620

I thought someone just necro posted this thread but to my suprise and joy you editied it 3 days ago!

It was an already great program but to know that development started again is sweetness!

Keep up the great work!

#314649

Pardon my confusion

#314731