Lose Your Mind Development

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.