Mar 032005
 

At the moment (well not THIS moment), I am creating an image grabbing (as in: downloading) application/tool. Just for the fun of it. There are a lot of imagegrabbers out there. Mine is simple (for now). It expects you to input an URL of an image (the first one would be nice) of an image gallery, that has images like picture001.jpg, picture002.jpg, etc. Together with this URL you need to specify how many images are there. It will increase from 001 to 002 to 003 etc until it fetched the number of images you specified (it handles gaps (non-existant images) properly).

For internet-communication, I use the Indy components.

To have an “AfterPaste” event, I created a descendant of TEdit (I call it TRaReEdit). It fires the AfterPaste (still OnPaste, but I have to rename that) event when you paste something in the URL-field, either by using the keyboard (CTRL-V) or the mouse (Right-click & Paste). I needed this event to split up the URL into pieces, whereas I assume(d) that when typing (instead of pasting) a user would not mind tabbing between fields.

Images can be saved in a directory the user specifies.

For now, you have to wait until the first batch of images is done, before you can have another go. This will change when I move the downloading part to a seperate thread. Yep, multithreading, with some sort of queueing mechanism filling the thread.

Already in place is a thumbnail of the last downloaded image. This will change when the downloads are actually “remembered” (enter: database backend), because clicking a thumbnail will bring up the actual image (if still accessible). When the image is not on disk anymore, an dialog will ask if you want to download the image again.

Anyone coming up with a neat name for this will have his/her name stated in the credits.

I won’t post a screenshot, since most imagegrabbers know: it is nsfw!

 Posted by at 00:54
Mar 022005
 

Thanks, Slashdot, for spotting. With Microsoft’s XAML on the horizon, I guess Adobe felt a little left behind, and now released Adam and Eve2 to the Open Source community. Eve (now at version 2) is a language to create Human Interfaces (GUI’s) and was first prototyped in Photoshop 5.
Adam on the other hand is (as I understand it) an event-engine tying the components you use in Eve2 together. Both libraries are available in portable C++ source format.

 Posted by at 23:25
Mar 022005
 

There was a discussion on Allen Bauer’s blog some time ago, what Delphi’s future should be. One suggestion was integration with Eclipse (so it would support Objectpascal/Delphi as well as Java). I was surprised by this suggestion, but it seems Borland likes Eclipse. They are releasing plugins for Eclipse to enable Borlands Software Delivery Platform to be used with Eclipse. Together, StarTeam, CaliberRM and Optimizeit now can be used with Eclipse.
Read the full article on BDN.

 Posted by at 10:14
Feb 252005
 

In case you’ve missed it, FireFox 1.0.1 is out. Basically it’s just a security update, but we like security, don’t we?
Not all languages are available yet, but English, French, German, Dutch, Italian and some others will serve quite an audience already I guess.

 Posted by at 22:03
Feb 242005
 

To have an OnPaste property in a TEdit component, I wrote a little unit/package to create a descendant of TEdit. At the moment it only has OnPaste as an extra property (event), but I will extent it with OnCopy, OnCut, since they might come in handy in the future.

 Posted by at 00:19
Feb 222005
 

Because of the ongoing S.M.A.R.T. prediction of a harddisk failure, I finally replaced the disk. First I connected the new drive to the system, partitioned it like I wanted (the old one has 3 partitions, and I liked that setup), and copied all data from the old to the new disk.

I shut down the system, disconnect the old disk, connect the new harddisk to the “old” cable and started Windows again. From within Windows XP I changed the new driveletters to resemble the old, and things are working like a charm now.

No more F1 when starting my computer. Yeah! And another 40GB extra, since I replaced a 40G with a 80G.

 Posted by at 23:42
Feb 222005
 

I’m creating an image-grabbing application, just for the fun of it. I ran into a problem on how to detect text was pasted instead of typed into a field (TEdit). Of course I tried the onChange, and when using that event things go fine when Pasting text (it’s fired right after the Paste action). But when typing into the same field, the event fires after every keystroke. Any hints?

Oh, it’s Delphi 6, so Win32 solutions please.

 Posted by at 00:55
Feb 212005
 

Corel is working with Pixmatic, and they announced to give away Rawshooter for free (press release). Rawshooter integrates with several Corel products as well as Jasc Paintshop Pro.

In this feature matrix, Rawshooter is compared to Phase One’s C1 and to Adobe’s Camera RAW.

A lot of RAW formats are supported, amongst others Fuji S2 Pro, Fuji S3 Pro, Nikon D100, Nikon D70, Canon 300D and Canon 20D to name a few popular D-SLR’s.

On the Corel site is the download page.

 Posted by at 10:58
Feb 212005
 

If you need to learn something about Visual Studio, or to be specific Visual Basic, then have a look at this tutorial. It shows you what you need to know, in a very humorous way. Even if you already know VB, it’s still worth a read.

 Posted by at 09:38