Spent the Weekend on Upgrades

This weekend was spent upgrading to as3. It going to take at least 2 months to finish. Also the file viewer I was going to write will be in as3. That will be after some review and study on how to get as2 and as3 to communicate. I hear it is possible. I know this is jargon to most users. But when it is done most of the issues I've been having trouble with will be solved.

There are still some small boundary issues. So the craftboard is not perfect yet. But I never give up. As3 will be a big improvement.

Kaleidoscope Fix is Up

I finished the KI fix for boundaries. I also put a done button on it. So it makes it a saved item on the clipboard. After you click the done button it is not editable. If someone wants the K designs to be editable that can be done. Just send me the request.

Now to get that bottom viewer in for the designs. That's going to take a little time. Be sure to check back next week for it.

Small Issue Needs Fixing with Kaleidoscope

Yesterday I noticed an issue with the kaleidoscope boundaries. It uses the invisible pie wedge for the boundary. So the box looks bigger than it should. I tried several work arounds for this. But each one made problems with other parts of the program. So I was thinking about it last night and came up with another solution. I hope to have the fix up for it this weekend.

I was able to use the kaleidoscope successfully making a design. But when I went to delete another image on the board afterwards, the kaleidoscope was hit and deleted instead. And there went my pretty design. The undo button did work to get it back. So anyway, this weekend I will have that problem fixed.

I would like to welcome all the new users to the board that signed up last week. Please check this blog often if you're interested in what's next. I just got another hair brain idea. I thought it would be nice if shared designs would be put in a pop over under the tool bar. It would take about a week to install and test.

More next weekend...

Boundaries are up

To view the box for bounds without rotation hold down the CTRL and SHIFT key and press an item.

For those who don't know what boundaries are, they are the boxes that appear around the items that are loaded into the board. The boundaries were difficult to find on some translated and rotated items. I've added new code that get's the bounds almost exactly no matter what the alterations are to a shape or image.

It's still in testing but is better than it was.

While I was doing this I noticed my crop tool needs a little help. I'll check that tonight. Also I wanted to remind users that the undo and redo buttons only function with simple types of actions. Like movement or making items reappear. It does not recreate groups or put items back into the clipboard.

Hope I get some good reports on the update.

Boundary problems being resolved

For the last 4 days I've been redoing the boundary functions.
Seems like it would be a simple thing. But not so. If a movie is rotated the boundaries cannot be found in a normal fashion. Same for groups with rotated or translated (mirrored) items. This has been a complicated subject but I think I've finally got it.

With the new way of finding boundaries you will be able to see a bounding box for the shape that is always a box that has no rotation. And another box that shows the original position of the item. If the item is rotated this box is tilted.

I'll be testing this tomorrow before I upload it. I also am working on the email system for the new server. It is not sending all the emails.

The cart uses cgi scripts and email. So if this happens it does not affect receiving orders.

I hope to get this up by tomorrow and do another video of how the seedbead tool works this week.

New Update system

Because I have 2 servers going now I had to change the update system. So you may be encountering a large update if your not installing after today. I also added alot of updates to finding boundaries of masked items. That's still not perfect.

Tomorrow I want to do a video on seed beads. This weekend has been mostly taken with learning about servers, ftp, and email systems.

Yesterday I sat down and wrote my first download script in as3. That will take a few more days to perfect. It will give a view of what has been downloaded in the current session.

So that's it for my exciting week of no posting. I knew you wouldn't miss it.

Working on new help videos

In the last week I've been relearning how to use Camtasia. It's an easy program to use but I'm not the most coordinated person with timing and getting all the info needed in the right spot. So forgive me if you hear something strange or cut off. I'm getting better with practice.

I did away with the old videos because the interface has drastically changed. The new videos should go up pretty fast within the next 2 weeks. I had a problem with cached pages not showing new videos posted. So I wrote a new flashy system to load images instead of text.

Fixed Grammar, Rewrote Boundaries, and Updated Kaleidoscope

I spent the last 2 days redoing the boundary code. The boundaries for finding the sides of the scopes were off. I optimized the code for finding mask boundaries which led to rewriting most of the boundary code for all items. I also noticed some grammar errors. I just don't know how those can go unnoticed. I guess from looking at it so much. Some things go unnoticed. I also debugged the loading of the kaleidoscope. It was not working when changing the number of rays and then saving as a clip. So that took quite a while to find. So now I think I have it perfectly coded. We'll see.

I also made it so the CTRL key must be down when putting an item under a green ball to add it to a wedge. I think I said before in a previous post you can hold the CTRL key down and click the center to put more than 1 wedge on the scope. The number of wedges overlapping each other is unlimited. But you can have only 20 wedges around at this time. I might change that if I can get it to respond correctly now.

So I think I'm ready to move on to fix those rotating images on load to allow posted items to load into them. That code is started. But will take another week or so at least. Lot's of server side work and testing to complete it.

I just know this is very entertaining!
OK, so it's pretty boring... These videos might be a tad bit more interesting.
Video Help