Standard vs. Pro

Aurigma Inc. announces an anniversary version of Graphics Mill for .NET, the popular SDK for the developers of image processing solutions. Version 5.0 marks a new milestone in the product life cycle: Graphics Mill is now offered in two flavors, Standard and Pro. This allows the developers to choose the optimal tool for precisely addressing the goals in an economically efficient manner. Now the developers of basic imaging solutions do not need to pay for expert Pro version functionality, having the Standard package contain all necessary imaging features. Normally, Standard version proves sufficient for such solutions as image editing web applications, image viewers, photo galleries and catalogs, etc. More demanding customers, however, would rather choose to buy the Pro version that includes all the expert features needed to develop such serious products as preprint preparation solutions, document management systems, satellite photo processing applications, etc. Graphics Mill Pro has native support for x64 platforms that allows for addressing more than 2 gigabytes of RAM per process for imaging needs.

Also the Pro version has enhanced support for multi-processor and multi-core systems, detecting the amount of CPUs/cores and accordingly optimizing imaging computations.

Other prominent Graphics Mill Pro features include support for Adobe Color Management Module and 16 bits per channel for images, real-time color space conversion, etc.

Graphics Mill code is native .NET (ASP.NET) which delivers valuable advantages for the developer.

One of the greatest improvements in version 5.0 is the introduction of Red-Eye Removal Add-on into Graphics Mill SDK. Therefore, there is no need now to purchase this add-on separately from Graphics Mill. Now the Graphics Mill SDK includes everything necessary to develop photo imaging solutions, including red-eye removal tool. Red-Eye Removal Add-on makes the entire process as easy as possible: it features a unique semi-automatic mode that only requires selecting the necessary face – and the natural eye tint is automatically restored. The process is split up into steps and features undo operation.

Other add-ons are included into Graphics Mill, depending on the package type: AVI Processor and Media Processor are available both with Graphics Mill Standard and Graphics Mill Pro, while Advanced PSD Add-on is only limited to Graphics Mill Pro.

Advanced PSD Add-on.

There is no doubt PSD format is immensely popular with artists engaged in graphic and web design. Very often a customer gets the final result (and sometimes even the mockups) in a PSD file. This allows for making minor changes without resorting to the designer expertise. However, sometimes there is a pressing need to streamline PSD file processing, inserting some custom content on-the-fly. The most typical example of such usage can be an online business card editor.

Objective: generate a business card from the person’s name and position input via a web form. Assets: business card PSD template that includes text and raster layers as well as the person name and position (and possibly a photo).

Solution: Advanced PSD Add-on reads the template and merges PSD graphics with custom personal data such as name and position (as rasterized text), personal photo, etc. The data can be input through a web form or be retrieved from a database – at developer discretion. The final image can be saved into a file for further printing.

More complex examples include discount cards, brochures and booklets with custom regional and cultural data, etc.

AVI Processor Add-on and Media Processor Add-on.

The advent of broadband connections brought video processing online. AVI Processor Add-on allows for AVI format manipulation: retrieving frames and soundtracks and saving them to files, adding frames and soundtracks from files and much more.

Providing metadata processing and multimedia format support, Media Processor Add-on makes a handy addition to AVI Processor.

Imaging Controls

To fully reveal Graphics Mill potential in web and desktop applications, a WinForms control set and an AJAX control set for ASP.NET 2.0 are included into the SDK.

WinForms controls include multilayer controls, containers for manipulating vector and raster objects, zoom and pan controls, thumbnail view control and many more.

AJAX controls for ASP.NET 2.0 are specifically intended for providing smooth online image editing experience even for slow Internet connections.

Graphics Mill is a comprehensive development tool for building imaging solutions of varying complexity. A more detailed Graphics Mill feature list is well beyond the limits of this brief article, while a complete understanding of Graphics Mill capabilities can be achieved by reading the extensive SDK documentation.

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.

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.

Few days ago my colleague Fedor added a short blog post about ASP.NET wrapper control for our product Image Uploader. In fact this control starts the real implementation of our initiative we call Aurigma Forge. I would like to tell about it more detailed. Alex mentioned it earlier but I think it is a high time to give more information about it.

What is Aurigma Forge?

In short this is a series of open-source projects based on our products - Image Uploader and Graphics Mill. We publish these projects on our website and everyone can download them, use, modify, and of course share them with others. At the first step, we will develop them actively ourselves, but we highly encourage everyone to join us. 

How it works? 

It works very simple. For each product line we have a subforum on our forums called Community Projects. Everyone who want to submit a project just create a post with source code and some information about it (how to use it, etc). Other people who are interested to take part in this project just post replies and share with their modifications if necessary.

Currently there is the only one such subforum in Image Uploader block, but we plan to add Graphics Mill community project subforum in the near future.

Initially we planned to deploy source code repository like on sourceforge.net (yes, they inspired the initiative name :) ). But then we thought that it would complicate things. If projects become popular and there will be a lot of contributors, we will definitely make it available. But until then we decided to keep things simpler.

What kind of projects will be launched? 

You may wonder what kind of projects it can be. For now they are:

• Image Uploader related
  • ASP.NET wrapper control which radically simplifies Image Uploader usage for ASP.NET developers.
  • Plugins for different CMS systems like WordPress, DotNetNuke, Cyahoga, Joomla, etc. They will be more or less ready-to-use photo galleries. It may be interpreted as resurrection of Media Gallery product line with new contemporary vision.
• Graphics Mill related
  • Editor for photo gifts (mugs, t-shorts, etc)
  • Real-life app for business card editing (based on Advanced PSD addon)
  • Most of current demo apps - we hope for your feedback so that we could understand what to improve there.

If you have some ideas on other projects do not hesitate to post a comment! Any other feedback is welcome as well.

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!

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.

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).