For more than 5 years we developed a number of different products. Unfortunately we are not Microsoft-scale company and cannot afford to develop multiple completely different products in the same time. As a result some products was not modified several years. In these several years a lot of much better competitor products appeared. But it is not fine for us to offer customers any products which we do not deem to be the best. That's we we decided that it would be fair to remove these old products. Instead of it we will concentrate on our flagship products and do our best with them.

Discontinued Products 

Let's see which products will not be available anymore:

• Media Gallery
• All ActiveX components (all of them have .NET siblings - they are still alive!):
  
  • AVI Processor (ActiveX)
  • Media Processor (ActiveX)
  • Graphics Mill for ActiveX
• FlashChart 

Of course if you have already built an application where some of these products are used and need to distribute them, we will provide it to you. But it will not be available on our website, we will not market it, and moreover we will not develop it anymore. However if existing customers will discover any problems with it, just contact our support guys, we will try to help.

Existing Products

You may wonder which products we still support and develop. We start year 2008 having two product lines, each consists of two products:

1. File transfer browser extensions:
   1. Image Uploader
   2. File Downloader
   
   
2. Imaging solutions for .NET apps:
   1. Graphics Mill for .NET with all its addons
   2. PhotoEditor

We are going to make great improvements in these products, moreover perhaps we will try ourselves in new directions, but... These plans are subject for separate topics!

It's finally there! In the last days of year 2007, Aurigma web designers have completely revamped the appearance of our so much loved web site!

Also, some products have got their new fancy illustrations :)

I hope that our visitors will love the new style - we also did our best to improve usability. Also, the home page content is now different - it's has wizard-like structure to help our customers in finding a necessary solution. We always try to make our website a really nice place to visit.

So, how's the new looks - what do you think guys? We are always open to suggestions - that would certainly help to make aurigma.com a place to stay at ;)

PS Some things are yet being fixed - they will look much better in a couple of days :)

Christmas is coming soon and this is the time when miracles happen, you know. Though, we believe that most miracles (not all!) are made happen by people. So, we made version 4.5 of Graphics Mill for .NET happen almost on the Christmas Eve, shortly after version 4.1. You may find that the new version includes some new features:

New Features

• You can now extract and save individual blocks to Adobe Resources.
• A kind .NET Christmas Fairy Improved multi-line text support:
  • Possibility to retrieve height of the multi-line text block rectangle when it is drawn.
  • Possibility to horizontally align multi-line text to both edges (justify).

Bug Fixes from Santa :)

• Reader no more hangs up when trying to load JPEG file with corrupted embedded color profile.
• A horde of little Christmas elves resolved the problem with launching multiple processes which use Graphics Mill for .NET concurrently.
• A .NET Codewizard fixed the problem with memory leak when image save operation fails.
• Santa’s Scandinavian deer fixed the problem with Swedish symbols in XMP.
• The BitmapViewer AJAX Control now works correctly with UpdatePanel.
• Scrolling now works correctly in FireFox when you left-click scroll-bars of the BitmapViewer AJAX Control with active PanNavigator.
• Mouse pointers are displayed correctly when you change zoom of image loaded in the BitmapViewer AJAX Control using ZoomInNavigator and ZoomOutNavigator.
• ...a number of miscellaneous minor bug fixes as usual.

  Ok, ok, we do not have elves, fairies or wizards. Or deers – but who cares! Did not you at least once wish that a Godmother Fairy could fix a bug or add a feature merely with a swing of her magic wand? So, let’s not ruin the feeling of a miracle and pretend some practical Christmas codemagic has been worked.

  If you have any questions or suggestions – feel free to contact us. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

  May all your challenges be resolved as if with a swing of a magic wand in the oncoming year!

  Best regards, Aurigma X-Mas CodeMagic Team.

Hello.

Today we have released Graphics Mill 4.5 for .NET. The new version contains some improvements and bug fixes.

We added improved support of Adobe Image Resources to the product. Adobe Image Resource Blocks (also known as 8BIM resources) are represented by binary buffer which contains meta-data information specialized for Adobe products family. For example, you can find there settings of color management, clipping path, background color and the others specified in the Photoshop properties. This meta-information is saved along with PSD, JPEG and TIFF files. The full specification of Adobe Image Resource Blocks you can find in the Adobe Photoshop File Formats Specification paper available on the Adobe site.

Graphics Mill 4.5 for .NET lets you iterate through all Adobe Image Resource Blocks and perform the needed operations. For example, you can get Adobe Image Resources from one file, make some modifications (for example, remove thumbnail saved in Adobe Resources by Photoshop) and save it along with another image file.

Another significant feature of Graphics Mill 4.5 for .NET is improved multiline text support. The previous implementation of multiline text is based on Windows GDI. We understood that this support of text is so limited and our customers need more flexible solution. New text support was implemented from the ground and is based on Uniscribe - the Microsoft set of services for rendering Unicode-encoded text.

The new text support implementation has 2 major differences from the previous one: it supports justification (now you can align text to left and right at the same time) and now you can measure multiline text. “It is not so much”, - you can say. You are right – on the first sight it is not so much. But actually a lot of work was done and it gives the good basis which allows us to improve text support in the future releases and provide our customers with flexible text rendering solution.

Also Graphics Mill for 4.5 .NET contains some important bug fixes, you can find them in the What’s new topic.

I hope you will like the new version of Graphics Mill for .NET. And we in our turn do our best to provide you with effective and convenient imaging solution.

Today is 22, December 2007 and I and all members of Aurigma Inc. want to wish you Merry Christmas and happy New Year.

As Alex wrote before, we have released new version of Image Uploader. In addition to a number of new features, we also made several modifications in our licensing model. In fact we wanted to do it much earlier, but we decided to do it together with the major release to reduce problems for existing customers who already purchased Image Uploader under old licensing terms.

Let's see what is new.

1. Different licensing for standalone servers and web farms

Now it matters whether you run Image Uploader on one server or on load-balanced multi-server web farm. In short:

1. Standard Domain and IP licenses are applicable for single server. Moreover, it should have 1 or 2 CPUs.
2. For multi-server environment an alternative licensing model is used: you should have one Web Farm license + Server Connector licenses per each server in the web farm.
   
   Example: Your website is running on web farm consisting of 4 servers. You need one Web Farm license + 4 Server Connectors.   
   
   
3. If you have no web farm, but have a single server with more than 2 CPUs, you should have a standard Domain or IP license (according to your needs) + as many Server Connectors as additional CPUs you have.
   
   Example: Your website is running on a server with 8 CPUs which uploads files to a single page (one domain). You need one Domain License + 6 Server Connectors.  

 2. Upload processing page (Action param) and the page which hosts Image Uploader should belong to the same website

Now you should not upload files from one website to another using Image Uploader. In other words, if the control is hosted on www.mydomain.com and uploads files to www.megapopularphotosharing.com, it will not work.

But it is still ok to upload to the page which is within the same domain (even if their full-qualified domain names are different). For example, it is correct to host the control on www.mydomain.com and upload to upload.mydomain.com (provided of course that you have a license for upload.mydomain.com). 

3. Standard licenses do not apply to SaaS solutions

If you create a SaaS solution, it is virtually the same as if you sublicense Image Uploader to your customers. That's why it requires another licensing model, which is discussed individually in each case.

You may wonder where is the boundary of SaaS apps and common websites. The criteria is the following - SaaS is a multi-tenant application. In other words if the account your customers create can be interpreted as a standalone application (as if it is installed on their own servers) - this is SaaS. Examples examples to name a few are hosted CRM solutions (like salesforce.com) where customers manage their own company's records, or hosted CMS systems where they build their own websites.

4. For private-label version owners - in some cases re-preparation of the pvt build is paid

Unfortunately pvt build preparation takes certain time. It is ok for us to do it once or twice, but when it happens too often, it slows down Image Uploader development process. That's why we decided to limit a number of free preparations of private-label builds. I hope for your understanding.

Of course, there will be some situations when pvt updates will be free. In particular they are:

1. First time.
2. Once per a minor update (i.e. when we replace, say, 5.0 to 5.1).
3. Critical bugfixes.
4. When it happens naturally (e.g. we send you a modified version for some reason).

Also most probably the price will vary depending on whether it is necessary just to recompile or also create a .CAB file signed with your digital cert. Of course we will provide you instructions how to do it yourself, so that you will also have a choice.

That's all. If you have any questions, feel free to drop email to sales@aurigma.com. Also, if you find that your old version does not fall under new licensing terms, and you wonder how to upgrade, feel free to let me know.

Hello All!

I have great news for you! We have released Image Uploader 5.0 at last. This new version is more stable, there are many interesting features in it. We have really made a great work on it. You can read the full feature list here. As for me I would like to tell my own thoughts about this new version. Some time ago I started making a list of ideas to be added and problems to be fixed in Image Uploader. Some of the ideas were difficult to be done but we understood that we have to do it. Here is a list of the features which (as I think) our clients will like:

1. Vista native view – first version of Image Uploader with Vista support (no crushes, correct upload) was v4.1. Starting from v5.0 for ActiveX it has native view on this operating system. Now we are using Vista interface drawing APIs. As for Java version, we are waiting for JRE with Vista look-and-feel to be implemented.
2. Configurable POST request format. Let me describe what it means. Image Uploader had its own sequence of fields (FileCount, PackageIndex, PackageCount and so on) with concrete names (e.g. Thumbnail1_1). It was not very convenient in some situations:
   • If you wanted to insert Image Uploader to any content management system (CMS) he should write your own upload processing code even if there has been upload functionality before in this CMS. Some our clients have even ordered a private label versions with custom field names to avoid CMS scripts changing.
   • If you wanted any open API to store your images on flickr.com or similar site you had to write some complex upload processing scripts to resend images after upload to flickr.com in the target website API proprietary format.
   Now you are able to rename any field in POST request or even turn all textual fields of to add only your own in format that you need.
3. Full thumbnail generation classes rewritten in Image Uploader for Java. We and our clients have been waiting for this for a long time. The most inconvenient thing in Image Uploader for Java is its thumbnail generator which was not as stable as everybody would like it to be. We have spent a lot of time trying to find any image processing library but were not successful until recently. Our testing has shown that almost all the problems were while making thumbnails via JIMI. When thumbnails were made via ImageIO almost everything was OK. Thus, we decided to disable JIMI usage in Image Uploader for Java (by the way, as a result ImageUploader5.cab is 100 kb smaller than ImageUploader2.cab). As a result Image Uploader for Java supports less image formats but we have found a solution to add additional file formats support for our clients who need it. I will describe additional format support feature in my future posts. So by now Image Uploader 5.0 uses only one image processing library, ImageIO. As for resize modes, we have made a lot of testing on tons of images and made appropriate parameter sets for all resize quality modes.
4. Zip compression feature. That is not only one more supported format. We have added the ability to specify how to save bandwidth for any type of files. Before Image Uploader 5.0, there was only the ability to resize images and make JPEG thumbnails. Now it's possible to specify for example to make JPEGs for all image files and Zips for all other or make JPEGs for all files and on fail make Zips, or make JPEGs and on fail send original files (remember FallbackMode property? ;) ). So now Image Uploader helps to compress not only images but also any other type of file.
5. Other features are important too and I will try to describe it in my future posts.

Anyway, hope you like the new version of Image Uploader!

 

On these weekends we have migrated to new forum platform - Yet Another Forum (yes, this is an application name :) ). The main benefit for it is that site and forum users are merged now. Single login is used both for online store and forum. Also, this forum does better job when you attach files or insert code snippets.

We have migrated all content and users more or less seamlessly. But for some users we had to reset passwords. So if anyone have difficulties to login, just try to restore the password using appropriate page.