Lose Your Mind Development

According to Microsoft Knowledge Base 946480, the PrivateFontCollection memory corruption problem fix is included in Windows XP PS3. I will be installing the service pack to verify.

No, it was not an April Fools prank. But Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 betas expired yesterday. Launch PA 8.0 and you will get this lovely dialog… (click for the glorious full sized version).

I had hoped to have a new beta before 3/31/08. But I’m not quite ready. I’m currently wearing my Windows Help File hat and testing the font management functions.

But to get us past this dialog, I compiled a new version with a 6/1/08 expiration date. Simply download this and run the setup.exe to overwrite the expired version. Nothing else is new, just the expiration date.

Download link follows —-  prnapp80.080402.zip

New version, soon. I promise. — Bryan

Here are a few more screenshots from Printer’s Apprentice 8.0. I don’t have a date yet for the next beta or formal release. But we are making progress. Comments are always encouraged.

The toolbar running across the top of the screen now has buttons for managing font files and categorizing fonts into groups.

(And I do need to develop a better icon for the font group-related functions. Any icon artists out there?)

The Copy Fonts and Copy to Font Groups buttons are actually “split buttons” controls that have a menu attached below. If you click the button, you will invoke the Copy  Fonts function. if you click the arrow to the right of the button, you can choose the Move Fonts function.

I’m trying to provide toolbar links to many of the functions that are in the right-click context menus.

And here is the Copy to Font Group dialog. You can also invoke Move to Font Group from the toolbar or context menus - which results in almost the exact same dialog box.

Note, if you Move a font that is currently installed, this dialog will also uninstall the font for you. You can’t move a font that is currently installed and in use by Windows!

So… what are we working on this week?

• Font file management functions, such as Copy, Move, Delete and Rename via the context menu.

• Font File Rename works right inside the list view.

• Here is the destination folder dialog for Copy and Move operations.

• And I’m implementing Vista-style TaskDialogs() rather than plain message boxes.

• Are you absolutely sure you want to trash those fonts?

The fourth beta was posted on 2/5/08. There are not a lot of visible changes in this release because most of the coding has been going on behind the scenes. But I’m steadily making progress.

I’ve been trying to get to the font group functions for a while. But in application programming you often have to take care of smaller tasks before you get to attack the big one. It is like a series of small stepping stones.

In Printer’s Apprentice, a font group is simply a folder full of fonts that can be manipulated all at once. For example, you might want to install the entire group for a project. Font groups are represented by a tree view on their own tab.

But displaying the font groups really serves no purpose unless I have code in place to organize fonts into a group. So this has led me to work on file manipulation functions. On the Font Files tab, the Delete/Copy/Move/Rename functions are available from a context menu. I have the Delete code working. And I started work on Copy & Move last night.

Anyone who has coded file manipulation functions knows that the path is dangerous. At any given time access can be denied, CDRs become unreadable and drives run out of space. 

So you need to have robust error checking in place. I can’t have Printer’s Apprentice come down just because a font can’t be moved from one folder to another.

I then started working on improved error trapping and feedback dialogs. The common method for alerting the user is the often-ignored MessageBox(), shown below. When presented with this little gray monster, most users instinctively hammer the OK button or the ESC key. Plus there is hardly any room for anything else besides a few lines.

For Printer’s Apprentice, I coded a new dialog based on the presentation used by Microsoft in the Vista TaskDialog API. I don’t know if users will actually read the displayed information, but it sure beats a stock MessageBox. And if you look closely, there are links to copy and send an email to our support address. This dialog will be integrated anywhere in the code where there is potential for an error to occur.

So in a rather convoluted way, I am working on support for font groups. But I have to lay the foundations down first. Stay tuned. — Bryan

The third public beta was posted this morning. And the email to the beta testers was sent as well.

Complete list of changes can be found here.

Next Steps
Replace ugly MsgBox() calls with Vista-style TaskDialogs
Add additional sample sheets and catalogs (such as “6 Up” from PA7.5)
Copy and move font files
Start work on Font Group functionality

As I start work on the Font Group functions, I will be posting draft screenshots for feedback. So be sure to watch the blog.

If you want to be part of the testing team, let me know. Send an email to helpdesk at loseyourmind dot com. — Bryan

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A new beta went out the door this evening. I’m quite pleased with it. I believe I addressed just almost every issue that was sent in. I do have a report about Type 1 fonts not installing reliably under Vista. So I’m still looking into that one.

The complete list of changes can be found here.

If you want to be part of the testing team, let me know. Send an email to helpdesk at loseyourmind dot com. — Bryan

We have a nice group of beta testers sending in reports. There have been a couple of issues brought up, but nothing seriously major.

I’ve put a lot of work into the font management engine. This is the portion of the code that handles installing and uninstalling fonts. I have added a logging feature to this section of code. When enabled, the logger generates a detailed list of events and any errors that occurred when installing or uninstalling a font.

I did fix a bug in the engine that caused Printer’s Apprentice to hang when finished with a font management function. After fonts are installed, an application needs to notify other applications of the changes via a Win32 SendMessage(WM_FONTCHANGE) function. However, if another application fails to process the message, then the application that sent the message (PA) can hang. This was fixed by swapping in a SendMessageTimeout() function. This enables PA to continue on without waiting for a response from other applications it ends up being much faster.

There are a bunch of other minor fixes, cosmetic tweaks, etc. that I’ve taken care of. All the changes will be detailed on the blog and in the versionhistory.txt file when I get the next beta out. (Week of 1/14/08?)

And finally, here are some screenshots from the newly added Character Set 1 and Character Set 2. These are copies of sample sheets that appear in Printer’s Apprentice 7.5. I think they look pretty good.

The first beta went out last week and so far the feedback has been positive. A couple of bugs has surfaced and have been fixed.

I’m continuing work on the software. I started on font file management features last week. This includes creating and removing directories, moving font files around, etc.

I will be taking a few days off for Christmas. I hope everybody has a great Holiday.

And if you want to sign up for the beta test, send an email to helpdesk at loseyourmind dot com. — Bryan

I released the first Technical Demo / Preview for Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 tonight. If you are interested in beta testing the software, please send an email to helpdesk at loseyourmind dot com. There is always more room for more testers. — Bryan