think(box)

To forum - we're working on this - please be patient. Granot will give us an update when he's ready.

Granot - I just detailed the two hotkey version to you in email. Free? I'll pay for the "all bells and whistles" version! If I use this in all shows I would feel guilty for not paying! Ooops - your shareware license should allow me to include this with shows given to others in that case. Thanks!

Granot - you said you were puzzled by this: Gwhite, I think I see the reason you in particular want a MUTE key. When you go through the show subsequent times with a customer to select photos (e.g.) and want to say something, you have to temporarily MUTE, or better - temporarily LOWER the volume so you can hear each other. Your solution so far is to just make a muted show. Granot, this sounds very handy for a common situation, where someone watching wants to say something and needs to reduce sound temporarily. Could we have two HOT KEYs? E.g. press CTRL to temporarily bring volume to 0.1 times current setting (toggle back to previous volume level set by VolumeSlider.exe), and ALT to temporarily MUTE sound (toggle back to previous volume level set by VolumeSlider.exe)?

Thanks Granot and cc! I have downloaded both Granot's 70% volume slider and cc's idea and studied them. Granot, this :-) is the mark of a person who truly loves their work: Granot's utility #20, now with 70% volume at exit: Works great. Volume jumps to 50% when I start the tool, and jumps to 70% upon exit. This is much better - thank you! If you find a way to remember original setting at load time that will still be preference, but 70% is a great improvement. Any thoughts on predetermined screen position at startup? I would like to mention that P2E does not support parameter passing when you specify a .EXE file as a "Run application or open file" action, so using a parameter-based mechanism is not preferable. A .INI file with percentage screen coordinates is my preference. Using an origin of top-left screen corner as Igor does in P2E, if I specify position=100,0 in VolumeSlider.ini for x and y position the volume slider would appear at top-right of screen. The .INI file should simply be located in same folder where VolumeSlider.exe file was started, for best convenience. This .INI file should be optional, with screen center default when there is no .INI file. One other note: Could the .INI file also accept a HOT KEY definition to permit MUTE toggle function for when show viewer has to answer a phone call? The sound control from cc can do things like muting sound if you just press and release the ALT key or CTRL key. This would be great in VolumeSlider.exe, through the .INI file where the MUTE HOT KEY is specified. And cc, you have found a nice, hotkey-based control - thanks!: This is great for showmakers and many others. The only "all show" drawback is that this is an installed application, so I can not use it for all shows like Granot's VolumeSlider.

Thanks again Granot! I have done a complete product test of your utility and have posted it here. Look for June 12 reply from me, "think(box)" and then look for this text:

Thanks Al and Granot; Sorry about the WinME error Al. Compatibility list includes ME, but not so I guess: I went to Christian Klukas' original web page and found no updates or other info. His new web page is not fully responsive on the server right now: Christian Klukas' new web pageSo we know the Mute.exe and Setvol.exe utilities are compatible on Win98/SE and WinXP, but not WinME so far. Both Mute.exe and Setvol.exe work fine for me on Win98/SE. I have three buttons that work fine in my show: Volume UP, Volume Down, and Mute/Un-Mute. It's a handy set. I wish to thank you Granot for your alternative volume slider utility. I built it into a test show and evaluated it. Here are my findings for Granot's volume slider utility, tested on Win98/SE: 1. Size is small as Granot says, so you can leave it on screen if you want, and move it as you wish. 2. Starting position at application load is always centered on screen. 3. Red LED-like graphic is actually a nice "Help" screen button. 4. This utiliity is ALWAYS ON TOP when not minimized, as designed. This is very handy in that clicking on buttons in show will not make the volume slider disappear. 5. Since a "Minimize" button is provided you can remove it from your full-screen picture without closing it. 6. You can restore the slider from the taskbar or by using the ALT-TAB key sequence, etc. 7. Control feel is nice, with infinite volume resolution and 0-100% range. 8. Windows' volume slider is not linked, in that if you change the Windows slider, Granot's slider stays at current visible slider setting, even though volume is changing. If you click on Granot's slider the volume returns to his app's setting immediately. This is a characteristic that is really of no consequence or problem. 9. To Mute sound you simply slide the volume control to zero. Later you can slide it back up. 10. The feature that activates intentionally to unmute sound upon exit goes to 100% (max) volume. The max volume upon exit causes my speakers to blast away. I would prefer that the volume level that is in use at time of volume slider application load is "remembered" for return to this level at slider application exit. Granot, would this be very difficult to do? Thanks for checking! By comparison, the Mute.exe and Setvol.exe utilities do not have any "screen graphics" visible. They just modify the volume upon activation by a button in show. Granot's utility has the advantage that if you start it prior to starting a synchronized show, it is usable and on top of show, synchronized or not. No utility can be started from any buttons in a synchronized show, since buttons and linking are disabled. I would like it if Igor gave us the often-requested feature of "Action upon play of a given slide" (no click needed). Especially if Igor provides this feature in synchronized shows, we could activate volume controls and many other things in otherwise uncontrollable shows. An all-thumbs basic user having to figure out how to move Granot's slider, and anyone having their speakers blasted are the only drawbacks keeping Granot's utility from being my ideal choice. If sound could restore upon exit to original volume and we could specify slider screen position the way PTE permits for its Navigation bar, Granot's utility would be a perfect choice for ALL shows. Thanks everyone - this has been a very useful topic for me, and I hope also for many others. We haven't heard from Lee (LCraker), who created this topic. Do you have any feedback on this Lee?

If Granot's app doesn't solve the issue, here's another way have a MUTE function in your P2E shows: Go to this site and click the link to "Mute" freeware. Then click "Download" when the page appears. Click here to go to PC World download page The application Mute.exe is about 318KB in size and is VERY simple. It mutes sound when you run it. Then it restores sound to previous volume level when you run it again. It simply toggles sound on/off. Also check out freeware "SetVol" while you are there. With this application you can make P2E shows that have buttons to increase and decrease sound volume, directly from show. Reply if you need help with SetVol.exe since it is a little different than the Mute.exe application. To prepare your unsynchronized shows to use Mute.exe do this: 1. Put a Button, Hyperlink or clickable graphic or picture in your HOME slide (#1) with the object editor in PTE. 2. In the object editor, select the new object from step 1 and click "Properties". 3. Under "Action on mouse click" select "Run application or open file..." 4. This is important: Under "Enter program name" click in the one-line window for name and type Mute.exe It is important that you do not specify a drive or folder, and that you do not use quotes or apostrophes. 5. Click OK, OK and make your show. Be sure to save to your .pte file after making this change. To prepare your CDs with mutable shows do this: 1. Place both showfile(s) and the Mute.exe freeware application in the same folder on CD. This works if show and Mute.exe are on hard drive too. You do not have to use the CD root (top) folder. Your choice. To use the MUTE function when playing shows that do not have synchronized sound: 1. Just click on the button, link or picture that you defined to run Mute.exe and sound stops. Click on it again and sound resumes. If you have placed this link in screen 1 (home screen, #1) as suggested then you can press the "Home" keyboard key at any time to get back to this muting control. For your synchronized shows the clickable buttons, hyperlinks and pictures are disabled and will not work. To have a mute function do the following: 1. Create a special, one-slide intro show that is called by Autorun.inf file on CD. 2. In that intro show place the mute button, link or picture using object editor. Code as before. 3. Add a button, link or picture that is coded to run your show file, likewise without drive or folder under "Enter program name". Only in this case you can choose "Run application and exit" if you do not want to return to the intro show after main show completes. Note that you must not have music in the intro show if it is to stay running. That show's music will not stop when second show starts. 4. Put your show .EXE file(s), the intro show .EXE file and Mute.exe application all in same folder on CD (works from hard drive too). If you always use the same showfile name then the intro show does not have to be re-created. Else you have to update it only for new show file name. 5. TO USE: When you load CD the intro show starts. Choose whether to mute sound and click the button to start the big show. To toggle between intro show (if you don't exit it) and main show just hold down ALT key, press and release TAB key, and release ALT key. This toggles between most recently current two tasks (an all-Windows versions feature), allowing sound mute control access. DONE

Will Windows Media Player open and play the full, troubled .WAV file without errors on the same system? Does another known-good .WAV file also fail in P2E? Does P2E failure with suspect .WAV file still happen after Windows restart? (Sometimes a failed application will prevent proper operation of a system until restarted).

A touching show James & Jill. Thank you. Joy will be yours soon. After those very long months of not knowing, of hope, a most cute little niece just came into my family's life only two days ago - from Belarus Dreams do come true

Clive, there are no file compressors that will give any more than a few percent reduction in file size. JPEG and MP3 content is already "compressed". You have to reduce the JPEG image quality (re-process your JPEGs) and image pixel size (800x600, or 640x480, or less) to save much space. You can resample your MP3 music at a lower bit rate, like 96Kbps (poor sound quality) to reduce MP3 space (if you know how) or even make the sound monaural to make MP3s take half the space. Both of these methods are really recoding your content (and require recreating show) to take less space, and will take a lot of your time. Then it's even worse if you haven't done this before. To top it off quality may be unacceptable. Are you interested in not wasting your time, keeping your show at present file size and sending it anyway? There are many ways to do this, from simple to tech-heavy (for all forum members' benefit): 1. BEST: Do you and the destination member have AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) or MSN Messenger? Through these app's you can send 100's of Megabytes as fast as your Internet connections can go. Look in help for specific instructions. This is really the best way to share large files. And you don't use email to do it. You and the other member must use the same service for the transfer. AOL and MSN are not compatible with each other for file sharing. 2. GOOD: If you own WinZip version 8.1 or newer: It will split your showfile into 1MB emailable files, or whatever size your email service requires. The member to whom you are sending the multiple 1MB emails must have a Zip V2.0 standard-compatible zip application to unsplit and reassemble your large showfile. In WinZip help look under "Splitting". 3. MORE TECH-HEAVY: There are freeware file splitters all over the world. Try your favorite shareware sites. 4. VERY NICE, BUT VERY TECH-HEAVY: WinZip, Inc. has a "self-extracting Zip" tool (over $50 to buy) that will split ANYTHING into file sizes of your choice in a complete .EXE file set with the software needed to unsplit and unzip built-in to the .EXE file. The other member needs NO zip or other software. Like with P2E they just double-click the .EXE file you made, once all splits have been placed in a single folder.

mannybr2003 - you don't have to minimize anything to get to other applications. Try this!: Windows already provides the simple "button or key to press". If the taskbar does not appear when you move the mouse cursor to bottom edge of your screen, use this alternate method of selecting *any* running task without having to minimize: Hold down the <Alt> key and press the <Tab> key repeatedly until the task you want is highlighted. This is indicated by a square outline box surrounding that task's icon image. For the highlighted task Windows will list the task name as well. Next, release the <Alt> key to select highlighted task. You may return to the (full-screen) P2E show in the same manner.

Oh those mind games that people play. Isn't marketing wonderful? It's a good thing we are all such suckers

Image security is a frequent topic. The bottom line is that anyone with a decent monitor and modest digital snapshot camera can literally take a picture of the slide while on the screen. Then they run it through enhancement software to make it look better. There is no total security Clive has suggested the only truly successful way to thwart theft. Use photo resolution that is high enough for the viewer to enjoy the show, but low enough to make photo an unattractive theft target. One further tip is to use fixed size P2E photo display that is smaller than full-screen size. Low-res pictures look better this way. Many of the posted P2E shows in Beechbrook use this technique. For entertainment and inspiration visit: http://www.beechbrook.com/pte/index.asp

Thanks everyone for this thread! I've defined the left and right mouse buttons many times and I've never noticed that Pause(resume) was an available definition. This is handy because some computers make you go through cumbersome function-key sequences to get to "Pause" keyboard key. My notebook does this. I had been using a P2E navigator bar with only one button, "Pause", in top-right of screen. Not any more! Full-screen photo pausing can be totally unobstructed without cumbersome pause key sequences on notebooks and without P2E navigator bar pause button! If you define one of the mouse buttons with "Pause" and in the same project options advanced tab you check the box "Auto hide mouse cursor after:" and set to 1 second, then the person viewing show can pause an unsynchronized show *and* have the mouse cursor out of the way until mouse is moved. I have created an advanced position bar and topic title navigator that is activated to appear and disappear with a left mouse button click. Navigation functions are never covering up any of the picture during show. Having "Pause" on the right mouse button will be just perfect - along with cursor auto hide. Thanks most of all to Igor for making this possible!

That sounds very handy Alan. I went to check it out and found that the link spelling needs a minor typo fix: http://www.bbdigital.co.uk/ The specific CD with P2E and Photoshop 7 is: http://www.barrybeckham.co.uk/tutorials/tu...udio_visual.htm Thanks!

Thanks Igor - I applaud the change because it will help a lot! But you know from forum posts that many users will do things like using large image pixel sizes and fade/timing/music combinations that will indeed skip even with the improved music handling. You are simply improving the threshold at which people have problems when playing from CD, but everyone will at some time goof. Further, although the proposed change makes playback from CD less stressful, the CPU demand on large images with tight timing is not substantially reduced. All users, from novice to advanced, will benefit from a performance required status! A strong consideration should be that show developers are providing shows to customers and when a show skips it hurts business

Thanks Igor! WMA support seems very low priority. Conversion to MP3 should be suggested to WMA users. I would like to ask for an enhancement since you will now be able to play shows directly from CD, including music tracks. In the PTE software, not P2E, could you do a checking operation for the benefit of show developers as follows?: Scan through the sync show timeline with music or unsync show slide timing with music and determine the maximum READ rate required of CD drive, and list this as status information every time we click "Create"? Given that image processing can be factored in during the scan, can you also determine an estimated minimum CPU MHz required to play show without performance loss or skipping failures? Status information line determined after "Create" could thus be as follows for a demanding show: Min CD-Reader speed for this show: 30X (5-10X is best, this show may fail in playback) Min CPU speed for this show: 1200MHz (200-400MHz is best; this show may fail in playback) Status information line determined after "Create" could thus be as follows for an undemanding show: Min CD-Reader speed for this show: 8X (5-10X is best, this show is OK) Min CPU speed for this show: 300MHz (200-400MHz is best; this show is OK) With this information available the show developer will know they need to make adjustments for successful playback by the general public

Thanks Igor, I prefer option 3 as the default. The full path is visible in both the show image field and the status bar at bottom of screen. The status bar has the most space for very long path+name to fit. In option 3, will you truncate the right side? if the file name alone is very long? E.g. "Starry, starry night..." Option 2 is cluttered and provides too little partial path information. Option 1 is clearly the worst because of image file *name* truncation or elimination. I have adjusted my working method since day one to always move the working directory to root-level when working on it because of this length problem.

What a beautiful show Sam - thank you! Regarding your readme file note: You may be able to improve present scanner results by the following:1. If you must scan to JPEG, scan to MAX JPEG quality and use another tool such as Irfanview, Photoshop etc. to compress to the final higher compression (lowering quality to save space). Bundled scanner software will generally do a poor job at JPEGs of less than top quality, and will make larger file size for a given quality level when compared to compression by better software. 2. Preferably scan to TIFF or BMP if scanner JPEGs are not good enough at even max quality, and then convert using another photo application. 3. Set scanner to maximum dpi setting available when scanning 35mm slides (you probably already did this) and experiment with the scanner software's "sharpness" control. Sometimes results are better with "none", sometimes not. 4. Do any pixel size reduction with Irfanview, Photoshop etc. after scanning to MAX dpi. Max dpi creates a large image size and it is best to reduce with external software. 5. If you have image noise (graininess) that you can't stop by scanner settings, try Neat Image software. You can take a sample of noise in the blue sky and then tell it to process your photo. Neat Image will masterfully remove noise from the entire photo and can process other pics without resampling each pic's noise if from same scanner or camera. Neat Image removes noise without "smoothing" your picture. "Smoothing" a picture, or "blurring", "smart blurring", etc. will all reduce sharpness and "average" the noise, hence reducing it. Neat Image *eliminates* noise and has no effect on sharpness. There is a free version. Get the software at: http://www.neatimage.com/ Thanks again for the very nice show. That introduction and fade into color was masterfullfy done!

Michiele, I may be able to help. By any chance did you attempt to copy files by simply dragging them from CD to hard drive with *left* mouse button? If so, Windows will not copy files, but instead will create shortcuts to them when the file type is .exe, as your shows are. The solution is simple. Just drag the files with the *right* mouse button instead. After you drag files to hard drive location a pop-up menu will appear with the choices "Copy, Move or Cancel". Select "Copy" and you should be all set. You can even get the left mouse button to copy .exe files by pressing and holding down the "Ctrl" key while you do the left-mouse drag and drop. This will copy your .exe files without asking any questions. If this was the problem be sure to describe one of the two methods on CD labeling so that anyone using the CD will know what to do

Jerry (Bubba) and of course cici: Thanks for the info Cici, the "Colours" show posted a while ago is both entertaining and well done. I am curious about the color flower, etc. images used. Did you just choose to make them compact or was it required for show timing to work on any machine? You have some fairly tight timing in the tri-photo view. Jerry, cici - That rather abrupt and surprise ending worked fine on my 400MHz P2, 512MB, and was quite a surprise

It's good that eveything worked out You may want to prevent the same mistake by your show viewers and add a little help text either in the help screen (many do not read "instructions".... ) and/or perhaps on the first slide of show, some short and simple text about saving pictures, not slides.

Thanks Ron - That is very helpful. I expect that 1200dpi will be where low resolution becomes a problem for the six-foot screen. As for scan times, I must be patient in scans, I guess I've found that nothing, even dedicated film scanners will do better than about 1 minute. The auto-feeders help a lot so that you can work on other things while the machine is busy, yet there is a lot of jam trouble. The advice on that is to use a credit card to reduce the slide opening thickness (width) - works very well. But dedicated devices and feeders together are as one user said, "on the wrong side of $1,000". And thanks Guido for the link to Norman Koren's site. Norman has written some very helpful pages, including an excellent gamma and dark level setting tool that may be used with permission in P2E shows to help viewers set their monitor properly (I have a request in for permission now). And Norman provides a link to Petri Kekkonen's site where the slide dust removal feature and scan times are evaluated for the Canon FS4000US: http://spaceweb.oulu.fi/~petri/canon_fs4000us.html Petri has excellent illustrations of dust removal feature, before and after. I am now getting a clear picture that the dedicated units may be the best choice, and of those Nikon is best for quality with Canon and Minolta second best. None seem to have the user interface quality of products made by Sony, and Sony doesn't appear to be in the film digitizing market. Thanks go out to all for their very helpful feedback. Now I have the information I need to make a decision. I can't wait to see the super-quality P2E shows made from the many boxes of family slides.

You're welcome Sid! Here is the reason for bitmap only when saving photo with background: Your .jpg, .gif or other format photo is turned into a bitmap image along with background (combined images) to display on your screen. For P2E to save this combined set of pictures as a .jpg it would have to include a JPEG compression module, and this would add significantly to the show file size, hence it is not done. As Ken said you can convert bitmaps to JPEG externally with free tools like Irfanview or any photo processing tool you already have. The expectation is that generally people will want to "save" picture alone and not with the added background, justifiying the minor inconvenience for the nice added feature.The "Save picture" option is simply taking the original picture file that has simply been stored in the P2E .exe file, and saving it to an external file. There is no conversion or loss of quality, and this is space-efficient in the created showfile. If you really want viewers to be able to save both picture and background as *JPEG* and you know that they aren't skilled enough to do it: You could do it yourself just once for each slide and create a single JPEG file to display full-screen(!) in a new show without further added background. You have the expertise and inconvenience, and the viewers have it easy.

A humorous thread! Instructions? Thanks Ron! Last fall I researched the scanner market for a friend and identified the Epson Perfection 3200 PHOTO scanner as the best, the one I would buy. User reviews rated it best as well. My present scanner is a 3-4 year old HP Scanjet 6200c (1200dpi). Picture scans are of very high quality, but the user interface is frustrating in that it unexplainably locks up for 2-3 minutes, then resumes working. It takes just as long to power down scanner, restart it and reestablish scan settings as it does to just wait it out when it locks. I have found other owners of HP 6200c who say they experience the same. HP offers no help so I just put up with it as I have since this scanner was brand new (just rechecked HP support site, only XP support has been added). The bottom line is that the HP costs too much of my time to operate for color slide scanning in volume. Given that ongoing experience I have considered (during those 2-3 minute waits...) replacing the HP with that really nice Epson that you bought. Since you've used it to scan slides, one of my key concerns is how long it takes and how much trouble it is. The 3200 was rated about 16 seconds for larger scans, but I didn't gather any timing for 35mm slide scans. How does the average time work out for you, as in perhaps the 200 slides example you mentioned? Thanks!