When we released a new website, there is one more thing happened besides to new releases - we have discontinued our product Photo Editor. You still can download and use this product. However you should not purchase a separate license for it. Just purchase Graphics Mill license, and feel free to use Photo Editor on your website. It can be interpreted as if we added all Photo Editor controls to Graphics Mill SDK. 

So, if you have Graphics Mill and try to build an online photo editing interface, feel free to try Photo Editor first. I believe you will save a tons of hours... 

A few weeks ago we released new version of Graphics Mill – 5.5. Looking through the what’s new list, everybody finds out that the major change in the product is a new module called AJAX Vector Objects. I'd say that this is a good module. A very useful one.

Using this module you can easily add functionality to your application allowing for combining images, text and shapes or annotating images interactively. Your users will add images, shapes and text to an image; rotate, resize and move objects using mouse or keyboard, hide and show objects. Finally, the control is able to save combined images, shapes and text strings for future use, to continue editing or to render them to a destination image. You can store an image for preview purposes or submit it for printing.

Here's a screenshot of a simple user interface implemented using the AJAX Vector Objects.

Now let us go through two cases where such functionality would be helpful.

Almost everybody who is working in the field of image processing came across a problem of creating some sort of an interactive designer. Reason may vary. For example, if you are creating a site allowing your customers to order photo products for printing (like T-shirts, caps, puzzles, etc), you would love to have an interactive online designer that would allow for creating these products on your site. The idea behind this is quite simple: your customer comes to your site, chooses a product to order and then interactively customizes the looks – adds an image, text captions and so on.

Another field of application for the new module can be the preflight tools. Suppose you have a web to print solution that allows for ordering prints online. On the final stage, i.e. before printing, the customer should approve design. This way, AJAX Vector Objects can be used to create a solution for annotating designs: customers open the tool and interactively pinpoint specific details to be changed and write how they'd like them to be changed.

Of course, AJAX Vector Objects usage scenarios are not limited to the two above ones. I just suggested two usage cases that are well-known in the field of image processing. If you need some sort of an editor or an annotating tool, AJAX Vector Objects will provide you with the required functionality.

Last week we released new Graphics Mill 5.1. It was minor release containing bug fixes. The most important are:

• Several problems with support of TIFF format;
• Problems with color management engine lead to displaying error popup;
• Problem with deleting of temporary files;
• Improvement of speed of image formats codecs;
• The problem with reading of PSD frames.

We came to decision to release this minor version because some of the issues listed before were critical for our customers. So we just took the version 5 branch of source code, roll out the fixes from the current development version and walked through the tests to be sure that everything was okay.

Nevertheless the team is working on new functionality that will be included into the new version of the product.

On these weekends we have released Graphics Mill 5.0. We have already wrote about main changes in this version before, but let me outline

• Post about new features (by Dmitry)
• Post about new licensing policy (by me)

In addition to it, you can find the following information about new release:

• Full change list.
• New pricing and licensing (note, SDK license has different meaning than Windows Forms Developer, and Server Deployment license has different meaning than old Server license).
  
• Download page.
• Std vs. Pro comparison chart. 

For existing customers we offer special upgrade offer:

• If you purchased Graphics Mill after April 2, 2008, you get free upgrade to Std or Pro (on your choice). Note, this is time limited offer - to get a free version, you should contact sales@aurigma.com before June 3, 2008.
  
• If you purchased Graphics Mill before April 2, 2008, you can purchase new version for 60% of the license price (however you need to keep new licensing model).

Any feedback about new version is welcome. 

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.

Awhile ago some of our customers contacted our technical support and reported the problem with BitmapViewer control (Graphics Mill 4.5 and earlier, both AJAX and Web controls). The problem was in that BitmapViewer did not display images on production sites but worked normally on development environment. If you tried to download one of these images manually from site, it gave error 404. It looks like the following:

Yesterday we duplicated the issue. The key condition to get this problem was to use publish feature of Visual Studio. If you post your web site manually, it works fine.

Now we try to solve the problem and we do our best to include the update into the next release Graphics Mill. At this time the workaround is available with the current version of Graphics Mill (4.5 or earlier). For more information you can read in our Graphics Mill FAQ.

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.

Long gone are the times when 64 bit memory addressing was the prerogative of Itanium, SPARC, RISC processors, PowerPC, etc. Now almost every desktop PC is built on the x86-64 architecture, let alone servers. x64 has become cheap, opening new horizons for a variety of applications. Surely, those who already run (or are about to run) x64 platforms have long-term thinking: taking the pains to migrate to x64 today will pay off manifold in the long run.

Migrating to x64 becomes an especially sensible issue when it comes to image processing. If you haven’t dealt with anything larger than 5000x5000 pixels, you would not probably be reading this article. Otherwise, you might witness your applications throw ‘out of memory’ errors from time to time – and think about lifting the 2-Gb-per-process curse. Install more memory (if necessary) and switch to x64 platform – it’s often just as simple as that. This was essentially the main idea behind porting Graphics Mill to x64 here at Aurigma.

However, the (often seemingly) cumbersome and costly nature of migrating to x64 is often the key factor in saying ‘no’ to the natural solution to the problem. So, developers are forced to find roundabouts for ‘out of memory’ troubles. Some of those ‘remedies’ are highly performance taxing and are fraught with development and debugging implications. These often outweigh the possible benefits. Also, the added development\debugging cost would often exceed the cost of migration of an entire farm to x64.

On the other hand, more and more applications and services are ported to x64 and some are native x64 – and those are no longer limited to scientific computing and complex mathematical modeling tasks. In fact, x64 for servers has become an industry standard for quite a while. So, if having a legacy 32 bit application prevents you from switching your IIS permanently to 64 bit, I would reply with a marketer-standard call to action: ‘Think big – go x64!’, or even more pesky – ‘Enlarge your address space now!’.

So, what are the costs of saying bye-bye to ‘out of mem’? For Graphics Mill for .NET, it means replacing a couple of DLLs in the API. If you ask me, I would say it’s certainly worth a try at the least. Eventually, it’s up to you to decide whether to ‘stay x86 and reinvent the page file’ or ‘harness the brute raw power of x64’ (I think I’ll can those two for future use).

From the first version of Graphics Mill for .NET our customers report our technical support department with “out of memory” problem. The problem arises when somebody tries to handle images of large size. And the most annoying moment that errors take places sometimes, it means that the application worked with the file yesterday but today you get “out of memory” when you try to open it.

Mainly this issue is based on the limitation of Windows architecture. It is well known that 32bit Windows provides a process with 2 GB of address space only. 2GB of memory per process is not so much for image processing. Say we need to load RGB image of 10000x7500 pixels. It requires about 225MB of memory – and it is almost 1/8 of available memory for a process. Moreover the address space is always fragmented. And it is not guaranteed that memory manager will find a memory block of enough size. As a result we will get “out of memory” problem.

Microsoft has released x64 family of operation systems which are good way to get rid of memory limitation problem. All previous versions of Graphics Mill work on these operating systems perfectly because Microsoft included backward compatibility with 32bit code. But to get all advantages of operating system and support more than 2GB of memory, we needed to adopt source code and recompile Graphics Mill with 64bit option of C++ compiler. Now we are on the finish line. 64bit version of Graphics Mill passes the major part of unit tests and we are ready to give Graphics Mill x64 publicity.

Graphics Mill x64 is available as beta version. The new beta would certainly be of interest to developers of memory critical solutions, such as high-demand pre-print preparation and document imaging systems. To download Graphics Mill x64 Beta you need to sign up for beta testing program on our site in beta testing section.

Graphics Mill x64 Beta requires the following:

• If you have Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 which includes II7.0, you need to make sure that you have the optional "IIS 6 Management Compatibility" option installed within IIS7 before installing Graphics Mill x64.
• You need to install Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable Package (x64). You can download it from Microsoft site.

We appreciate any feedback concerning the functionality and runtime of Graphics Mill x64. Relevant reports and requests will be considered and answered with highest priority.