Oops...

Thanks to those of you who pointed out the deliberate mistake (okay, booboo) on our Downloads page - it works again now and we apologise for the glitch.

We'd tell you what caused it but we're too embarrassed.....

Another new build....

Hallooo - ahead of a bit of a push for testers, we've put up a new build with some cosmetic changes and the squishing of one or two tiresome buglets.

The "die" date on this version is Jan 2nd 2010, and as always there'll new version up there well before then.

Keep your comments coming in - interestingly your feedback to date's going to take Vixer in a direction we hadn't originally anticipated, so please don't feel your input isn't valued....

WPF and Direct2D

Seems to us to be the most obvious thing in the world to want to hit Direct2D from WPF but there's a severe scarcity of doc about how to do it.

We spent many happy hours hosting a C++ HWND in a WPF app and pinging messages to it, but then we stumbled on Mahmoud's piece about the Windows API Code Pack and our lives changed for the better.

In case you're interested, WPF has a retained mode model, so if you draw something it remembers what you drew for you, so when the window's repainted or resized it knows how to redraw. All of which is fine, but there are circumstances where you want immediate-mode graphics, so you own the display list and take ownership of the drawing.

Why might that be? Well, if your display list (i.e. the list of stuff you want to draw) is coming from somewhere else - a CAD system maybe, or a database - you don't want to keep it twice, and if it's hundreds of thousands of elements you're trying to do something WPF wasn't designed for. Direct2D, on the other hand, most definitely was.

But why do us Vixerer's care? Suffice to say Vixer's going to have a little sister sometime soon....

Yip, still alive...

Halloo - well all sorts of stuff's been going on to keep us busy. At a dull technical level the very astute amongst you might have noticed we've moved to a new hoster for our sites, but more importantly wearing our PollyTiles hats we've been engrossed in making the world's biggest jigsaw.

At a mere 1.2 million pieces it's a monster, and it's actually the second world record we've been involved in!

On the Vixer front, we're adding some new goodies, more of which very soon.....

Another New Free Version of Vixer?

Incredible, indeed. A new version crept onto the www yesterday with an expiry date in November, so we'd suggest you replace your current version with this one.

Your projects will still work - nothing at that low level needed to be changed, and if it did we'd have made sure your work was safe.

So.. download it, play with it, create superb videos, become internationally recognised and ludicrously wealthy, and... ah... drop us a note about it...

Windows 7 XP Mode - Very Cool Indeed

It's been a while since I needed to use Virtual Machines - they used to be a big part of my life, and suddenly they are again. I really feel the need to congratulate the Windows team on the new Virtual PC and XP Mode options in Windows 7 - what a truly superb job they've done.

One minor gotcha was trying to read an existing VM though - to enable the integration capabilities (so your VM can see the host machine and the internet), the VM starts asking for device drivers for USB (this being some of the clever stuff the new version has added). Where are those going to come from? Your Windows XP disc of course. How are you going to read that without the integration capabilities working? You ain't.

Unless someone knows better? Holler if you do...

Skype impact on ASP.NET!!!!

Moving to Windows 7, a couple of weird things happened, so (just in case you see them too) it turns out that the new Skype client (4.1) listens to http on port 80, as an alternative to its default port, and that's enough to prevent ASP.NET debugging your dev site. It's the kind of interaction between applications you'd never look for, and I'm hugely indebted to Martin Kulov - if you see the not terribly helpful "server committed a protocol violation" message, there's a very real chance if you kill the switch in Skype that lets it listen on 80 all will be well.

Also I suddenly discover I need to enable Windows authentication for VS2008-generated web sites - not sure whether that's fall out from the move to Windows 7 or not...

Off Topic...

We've just returned from the Edinburgh Festival, and my, what a splendid event it is. Not a cheap couple of days at all, in fact, quite the opposite, but a fantastic experience. If you're into drama, comedy, music or dance, or some combination, or all, of the above, it's got to be on your agenda. And if you're not, Edinburgh's a magnificent city so if all else fails you can drink in the architecture and the palpable buzz.

One lingering thought is that technology has pretty much failed to invade the world of art. We saw some plays which included video, and that was it. As a token, LED spotlights are everywhere, but that's hardly the point.

Of course there isn't much of an intersection between the arts and geek communities, but when you look at the presentation of a pop group from thirty years ago - drums, guitars, microphones, singers - and you look now, nothing much has changed.

Technologically we have the ability to create a much richer experience for the audience, and the tools are there (Vixer anyone?), and undoubtedly the creativity is there too, so where's the fusion?

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to devise a new art form that exploits the ubiquity of graphical technologies. If you take your show to Edinburgh next year, let us know eh?

ASP.NET- Unable to Start Debugging

We've been around ASP.NET since it was a baby, and have lost track of the number of times we've seen the pesky "unable to start debugging" message from Visual Studio. There are a zillion things that can cause it, and about two years ago we found the zillionth and first - one of the Windows updates hijacked a critical file.

Two years is a long time, and having just encountered yet another dead stop, we've just had to go through the whole sorry process again, to rediscover the same issue.

If you're at your wits' end with the self-same message, take a look at your "hosts" file (no, we didn't know we had one either)...

It's in the snappily-titled c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc and it's called simply "hosts" - it doesn't have a file extension. You'll need to be running as the administrator to mess with it (or right click on Notepad and take the "run as administrator" option) and inside (apart from some comments) you'll find the line:

127.0.0.1 localhost

and you may or may not find a second line:

::1 localhost

That second line may have been trashed - if it ain't there, add it in and save the file, and savour the joys of being able to create a new ASP.NET web site in IIS and debug it once again. Yip, it sounds like science fiction, but it's true.

We're a little unclear on the significance of it (and if anyone finds a human-readable piece on what on Earth an IPv6 loopback is do let us know). We're client-side graphics geeks, not server-side infrastructure boffins, and we're also sure there are good reasons for the horrific complexity of web site infrastructure. Okay, we're not at all sure there are.

In passing, if you ever wondered how the string 'localhost' became associated with the IP address '127.0.0.1', it's because of this file. You can add extra entries here too, so if you wanted to associate 'www.Vixer.co.uk' with '127.0.0.1' as well, you'd add an extra line into this file.

We have a side project running which is all about making the massively complex digestible through the use of graphics, and while it was never designed to deal with things that have grown up through the tangled machinations of standards bodies combined with knee-jerk reactions to unanticipated threats from hacker vermin, sprinkled liberally with dollops of glue to deal with its own ghastly legacy, it would nevertheless be an interesting exercise to try to go from "it's like this" to "and this is why". Still, we're ranting now...

Gone Quiet?

Yip - we've been quiet for a little while... it's the Summer so we're dodging the rain clouds and traffic jams in search of a photon of sunlight. In between, we're working on a build for a specific customer (nope, we can't tell you) but some of the goodies that are going into that will find their way into the mainstream product which is exciting.

We're also testing under Windows 7 (which went live just at the tail end of last week) and thus far all is well. One opportunity Windows 7 gives us is to do away with the need to grab video frames from the screen - there was a bug in previous versions of the .NET Framework that pushed us down that route and in theory it's fixed now. Hence we'll be looking into a Windows 7 version (or, rather, a .NET 4 version) in parallel with the XP and Vista version that's running wild out there now.

Exciting times....

Whaddya Think?

A request that comes up from time to time is for a way to make it easier to track over selected points in a picture - imagine a wedding photo where you'd want to fly the camera over each of a number of faces, zoom in and then zoom back again, effectively defining a flight path over the image.

You and we know you can do that today by stringing together several of the 3D Effects, but one school of thought says that's a bit fiddly, while the other says if we add a special way of solving that one problem we'll make the interface more complicated and hence scarier.

It's the age-old debate between power and ease-of-use - do we make it clever, or do we make it easy? Let us know where you stand - it's your choice....

What is it? We love Sony and we love XP... but....

Calling all Vixators (we really need a name as a community - not sure that's a good one) - what IS that issue with XP and video from Sony cameras? If you've seen it and can repro it, we'd be very pleased to hear and we'll pay handsomely (we lied about that bit) for a sample video that causes The Bug to stir from its slumbers.

Dear Bug... you is toast dude - the Vixators is on your case....

Sweet Sixteen

We've just posted another Vixer build onto the web site - it fixes an issue to do with the geeky post below - we weren't able to capture video on non-Aero Vista variants (e.g. Vista Basic) before, and now we can.

Just in case it's bothering you, the build is tagged "Stage16", hence "sweet sixteen"!

Detecting Aero

Bit of a geeky post this, but it took us a while to find any reference to how you'd work out (in a program) whether a Vista PC's running the Aero theme or not.

It's important to Vixer because if Aero isn't running we can't capture video against a transparent background, so some of the loveliness of our user interface gets nibbled away. The same's true on XP too.

It's worth adding that Plan A wasn't to capture video by taking a snap-shot of the desktop (which is what we do now) - in theory there's a better mechanism that uses WPF's RenderTargetBitmap, but it leaks memory even in .NET 3.5SP1. Our friends at Microsoft tell us it's fixed for .NET 4.0 and we'll find out when we look at Windows 7.

So... what's different between two PC's, one running the Windows Vista Basic "color scheme" and one runnning the Windows Aero variant?

It's all down to registry settings - if you look at:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM\

...the Composition and CompositionPolicy fields are set to 1 and 2 (respectively) for Aero, and both are zero otherwise.

If you want to know how to get at those from Managed Code, there's a great piece here.

Let us know if you plan to go to Windows 7 from the off - there are some features that will help us so we may do a Vixer that's specifically for Windows 7. It's only months away now and we're reading great things about it!

Editing Colour Schemes

At a bit of a tangent here... we're building a couple of websites in ASP.NET and Silverlight at the moment and one thing that was driving us nuts was trying to keep track of colour schemes.

Which colours gave rise to which gradients, or given a gradient image, what colours would reproduce it?

Which colours in which bits of CSS need to change to swing a purple theme to a green one?

Yes, we know you can store palettes in various tools (we're actually PaintShop Pro fans but don't tell those nice people at Adobe) but we wound up cobbling together a rather nifty application that amongst other things allows us to rotate colour gradients by hue (so a blue gradient becomes a pink one for example) and build colour schemes according to "proper" colour theory.

If it's just us being dumb and there are hundred tools out there already that do this stuff, let us know, but otherwise we'll publish our baby for free as soon as it's finished acquiring features....

Aw c'mon... you didn't know already...

Little known Vixer facts number sixty three... if you select text caption media on the timeline, the captions tab takes all the information off it (for example the text itself, the alignment, the colours and so on), and then if you drag from the captions tab and drop onto the selected text, it's updated.

So what, we hear you cry.

This means you can edit captions once they're in place - select them, make your changes, and drop from the captions tab onto the selected text.

So you misspelt something? Fixing it's easy!

Another Update?

Yip, the build we lovingly tagged "Stage15" has just been posted to the web site - there are a couple of very minor fixes included, along with a new text caption animation that drops letters into a word as though they're being typed.

We're looking at other animations - do you really want your letters bouncing round as though on springs? If not, let us know, or we'll do it 'cos it's fun....

Caption Text Animations

There's a library of different animations for text in Vixer (e.g. flying text bottom to top, fading in and out, and so on), and as we wander round the many video sharing sites we see all sorts of other caption animations. None of them are remotely difficult to do technically, but there could easily come a point when the list of animation types gets unwieldy. What if there were fifty? It's supposed to be easy to use, not scary!

So... which are your favourites, which should we be supporting, and which do you find overblown and tacky?

Let us know...!

Vacation Work?

We're hearing everywhere that it's nearly impossible to get holiday or vacation work this Summer, so here's an idea. Of course you could wash your neighbours' car or mow their lawn, but wouldn't it be a lot more fun to...

* Make a video of their family holiday pictures set to a favourite song; or...

* If their wedding pictures are printed you could scan them and create a video set to the song they danced to on the big day, or if their piccies are digital it's even easier; or...

* Maybe they're trying to sell their house? Maybe a video interpersing stills of the garden with video clips of a tour of the house would help them sell it on the internet and avoid estate agents' fees?

If you're comfortable with PC technology you can capitalise on those skills very easily - with your know-how and Vixer there's a much better way to earn cash than trying to get seagull droppings off an old Ford...

Mixing audio and video

So... can you mix a photos and video clips on a single poster in Vixer?

Yip, you can.

We mention here it because it falls into that large bucket of things we know we can do and therefore forgot to tell anyone about! Hence your presentations can mix photos and videos seamlessly and very easily.

If you stumble on anything else you're pleasantly (or indeed unpleasantly) surprised by, do let us know....

There's a new Vixer in Town!

Any minute now there'll be a new version of Vixer to play with out on www.Vixer.co.uk.

It's still free, and it has a number of new features, especially the new text captioning and a number of tweaks to make it play more sociably with Windows XP.

If your kids are getting bored during the school holidays, this is the very thing for them to download - it's very easy to use, very forgiving, very friendly, and they'll get great results quickly with plenty of scope for pushing the boundaries as they learn more about its more powerful features.

If you're proud of their work let us know and we'll post it in our gallery (subject to the rules of copyright of course - get them to sing the soundtrack instead of lifting it straight from an MP3!).....

Gotcha! XP Video Creation Issue

Many thanks to all of you who helped us get the video creation buglet into a corner - it's been released humanely into the wild where we sincerely hope it won't breed.

If you're a .NET geek you'll have come across the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) which is our primary graphics technolog for Vixer. Suffice to say there are some aspects of WPF that behave very differently on XP, and some that behave very subtlely differently, and those are the very trying ones.

Drop us a line if you want to know more or chat about the differences - we're not seeing huge amounts of documentation on the WWW about them and there should be a lot more!

As Promised...

The picture below shows text outlining....



...while this one shows the use of a gradient image as a text outline brush and the new shadowing capability...




Rocket Science? No. Visually more appealing? You betcha...

New! Improved! Text Captioning...

One of the areas we've wanted to improve on for quite some time is the way that text captions work - we were a bit unhappy with them being a wee bit limited, so going live any day now is a new version.

Now, as well as the solid and transparent brushes text had before, you can add image brushes, either to the body of the text or its outline, or both.

This turns out to be very neat way of adding some rather impressive effects. You choose the image you want, and if you pick an image with a gradient (say a white spot blending radially out to a black background) you can very easily create very cool highlight effects.

We'll post some images to illustrate the point in a few minutes - in the meantime feel free to treat yourself to a cup of tea!

Call for XP Testers

Halloo - we're seeing some issues on XP that we're not seeing on Vista, and they're proving a little difficult to isolate. If you have access to a Windows XP machine we'd be delighted to hear how you get on with creating a video, whether you're successful or otherwise - there's some combination of circumstances that causes a bug to raise its ugly head and we could do with some help!

Please ping us a mail via the website

Thanks in advance

Vixer Team UK

The Vixer has Landed!

Last week, www.Vixer.co.uk crept quietly onto the web. The software's there to download and experiment with, and for the time being it's free, so get over there now!