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.

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.

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.

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.

Today I found very interesting article The business Value of Social Netwoking Applications.

This paper discusses the main features of enterprise social networks. One of the main author's ideas is that these integrated social network applications bring new value to the enterprise by linking individuals to each other and providing relevant content and tools across the organization. And this networking can extend beyond the firewall to engage partners and customers in the dialog. Then author shows the typical types and benefits of enterprise social networks. Strictly speaking social networks can be involved in the most of company business processes:

• Sales
• Marketing
• Development
• And so on

In spite of this article is sponsored by HiveLive – the company which promotes its own solution for enterprise social network – it is useful to read it. This paper gives the understanding why companies use social networks and forecasts common tendencies on this market.

At the Max 2007 developer conference Adobe product manager Geoff Baum gave a demo of Photoshop Express, the Flash-based image editor that runs inside a Web browser: http://www.news.com/Adobe-flashes-more-looks-at-online-Photoshop-Express/8301-10784_3-9790168-7.html?part=dht . This press-release says that PhotoshopExpress will targeted to low-end market to compete with free desktop photo editors. This product has the following functionality:

• red eye removal
• thumbnail generation
• varoius photo effects like sepia
• interactive undo/redo
• color correction
• and so on

This press-release http://www.news.com/Adobe-to-take-Photoshop-online/2100-7345_3-6163015.html says that the product will be free, Adobe is going to monetize it using online advertising.