Just want to follow up Dmitry's post Graphics Mill 5.0: Coming Soon. The upcoming Graphics Mill release will introduce not just new features, but new licensing policy. This is what I would like to tell in this post about.

Briefly speaking, there are two essential changes:

1. Graphics Mill will be splitted into Std and Pro editions.
2. Licensing policy becomes closer to industry standards. 
   

Std and Pro editions

When we analyzed how our customers are using Graphics Mill we have realized that some of advanced features we proud of are useful not for all of our customers. Most of features which make Graphics Mill unique are especially important for customer who build applications for printing business. But these features are not really important for those who develop other kind of applications. Why such customer should purchase unnecessary functionality?

That's why we decided to create two editions:

• Std edition will include all features necessary for general purpose imaging applications. For example:
  • Basic imaging functionality (image resize, crop, rotate, etc).
  • Support of common image formats like JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, etc.
  • Visual controls (both for Windows and Web development).
  • Text rendering (including multiline and formatted text), as well as other drawing features.
  • All addons except of Advanced PSD.
    
• Pro edition will include features of Std edition + print business specific functionality, namely:
  • PDF output.
  • Multi-channel and multipage TIFF support.
  • Color management (ICC profiles, etc)
  • CMYK color space and extended pixel formats (16 bits per channel)
  • x64 version
  • OpenMP-powered resize (parallel computations).
  • Advanced PSD addon

As you can notice, we decided to include addons in editions to make things simpler.

Licensing model changes

Our current licensing may seem to be not very consistent. It defines different rules for Windows and Web applications, and may be a bit unclear if you compare it with competitors. This licensing model is a kind of legacy, and it is a time to follow the same rules as other imaging libraries vendors do.

The main thing we did - we separated a right to develop application using Graphics Mill (so-called SDK license) and a right to run application with Graphics Mill in production environment (so-called deployment license). So now the licensing model looks as follows.

• To include Graphics Mill into application of any type you should purchase SDK license (which is licensed per developer).
• To distribute application you should have an appropriate number of deployment licenses:
  • If this is an end-user desktop Windows application, royalty-free deployment license is included into SDK.
  • If this is a web application, deployment license should be purchased per each server.
  • If this is a kiosk application (i.e. target computer is accessible in a public place by multiple people), special deployment licensing is required.

So these are the main changes in licensing model of Graphics Mill. If anything is unclear, feel free to post a comment. I will be happy to clarify all your questions.

Long time passed since our last Graphics Mill 4.5 release. All this time Graphics Mill team was working over new version of the product. Unfortunately the new version is late for about a month but it is not wasted time. The team spent this time to refactor the code, complete the implementation of several important features and fix some problems. We hope that new Graphics Mill 5.0 is the exact imaging software our customers were waiting for and it will meet their expectations. It is high time to tell what our new Graphics Mill 5.0 is.

Now Graphics Mill supports x64 platform. It is long-awaited feature for our customers. Now you should not compile your application in backward compatibility mode and run it using WOW64. Especially it is important for the guys who develop web-based applications and host them on 64-bit version of IIS. Before there was no option to use Graphics Mill in such kind of services except to switch IIS to 32-bit mode. It means that all web applications on the server had to be running in 32-bit mode.

It is not a secret that modern computers have multi-core processors. And software vendors tend to develop software that able to utilize these hardware resources. Especially it is important for imaging software because this class of operations requires a lot of computing resources. We did the first step in this direction. Now Graphics Mill supports multi-core calculations for resize and interpolation algorithms. And you need to do nothing to start to support multi-core platforms in your application with Graphics Mill. It analyzes the platform during start-up of application and does calculations in the most effective way.

We did some work to improve text rendering support in Graphics Mill 4.5. Upcoming Graphics Mill 5.0 will make the step in this direction too. New Graphics Mill can render formatted text now. It means that you can mark your text up with special XML-like syntax. It will allow you to render portions of multi-line text with different justification, font and color settings. This feature will provide the customers who develop pre-print solutions with flexible text-rendering tool.

Now Graphics Mill supports extra channels for TIFF format. We know that ordinary image formats support well-defined set of channels. For example, if we have RGB JPEG image we know that it contains 3 channels: red, green and blue. But according to TIFF specification this format can contain unlimited amount of channels in addition to basic ones. And these extra channels are used to store some specific color information. And Graphics Mill is able to handle them now.

Now Graphics Mill supports Adobe color management engine. Now you are able to switch color management engine between lCMS and Adobe CMM. It is important for those customers who care about quality of color management in their software.

Red Eye Removal transformation moved to Graphics Mill assembly. Now it is not add-on and you do not need to pay additional money to use this functionality in your software. Now it is included to Graphics Mill license.

Also the upcoming Graphics Mill 5.0 contains a lot of minor improvements and bug fixes. We hope you will like new version.

This post is insired by a pretty sad event. Alex Makhov, one of oldest Aurigma team members, leaves our company today. He brought up our main product Image Uploader from awkward $50-worth ActiveX control version 1.0 to current powerful solution used by many major Web 2.0 players. He did a great job, but he had to move to another city due some family circumstances. So me personally and all Aurigma team wish him good luck with his new life and thank him for all years he spent with us.

But life goes on, and Image Uploader is still actively evolving. Our CTO Dmitry will take care on this project since now. We have a lot of great plans for this product and Alex's leave will not break them. I will be glad to share these plans in my future posts. ;-)

That's all for now. Stay tuned!