Loading .gif's

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by Jens Richnow >> Thu, 29 Jun 2000 21:54:00 GMT

Hi.

is there any chance to load a picture into a picture control in JADE. Since the format is not officially supported, would it be possible to load (assign) a gif-type image to the control at run time, possible
using API calls (LoadImage, LoadBitmap...)? Especially animated gifs provide a very good alternative (in terms of size) for displaying animations as compared to video files (often 1 kb as compared to about 1 Mb for the same effect).

Has anybody some experiences with gif-type images in JADE applications.

Cheers

Jens

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by JADE Kid - Ray Hidayat >> Tue, 4 Jul 2000 21:25:43 GMT

No, it doesn't load gif's yet. Try the PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format. It is great for pictures which don't have many colours, because its size can be something like 300 bytes.

--
Ray Hidayat
JADE Kid - 2000
www.jadekids.com

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by Hido Hasimbegovic >> Tue, 4 Jul 2000 20:55:41 GMT

Jens, you'll probably have to find an OCX to do this for you. I don't think it should be too hard finding one.
Ray, how do you propose that PNG is used instead of GIFs, and what exactly do you mean by the size being 300 bytes?


Hido

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by JADE Kid - Ray Hidayat >> Wed, 5 Jul 2000 21:33:01 GMT

Well, just use a program that can convert from one picture type to another. You'll see that a picture without many colours and that isn't very big (I mean not a photo) it will come to around 300 bytes. Try it. It is amazing!

--
Ray Hidayat
JADE Kid - 2000
www.jadekids.com

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by Craig Shearer >> Tue, 4 Jul 2000 23:22:21 GMT

and JADE will probably never support GIFs as they are a licensed format. JADE would have to pay BIG money for the rights to use them. Go for PNG files... they are much nicer.

However, that still doesn't solve your problem with loading existing graphics that a user has in GIF format. For this, I'd suggest that you'd need to use some sort of third-party OCX control the load the file and set its contents on the OCX.

Craig.

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by JADE Kid - Ray Hidayat >> Wed, 5 Jul 2000 21:31:42 GMT

If JADE costs $6600, I'm sure that they can do that.
Even though I got it for free...

--
Ray Hidayat
JADE Kid - 2000
www.jadekids.com

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by JADE Kid - Ray Hidayat >> Wed, 5 Jul 2000 21:34:17 GMT

If it costs big money to support the GIF format, won't these ActiveX controls cost just as much? Maybe more?

--
Ray Hidayat
JADE Kid - 2000
www.jadekids.com

[ConvertFromOldNGs]

by Jens Richnow >> Wed, 5 Jul 2000 23:22:49 GMT

Right,

thanks for all the replies, but perhaps I should have been clearer in what I wanted to achieve with the animated gif (and it is the ANIMATED which really makes the difference). Say, you are are running a perhaps lengthy process about which you have no control (such as downloading e-mails from a mail server). You want to indicate to the user that something is going on (connection, credentials, mail checking, deleting .....), which you probably could to with a small window and changing label captions reflecting the changing states. I could probably just have a rotating hourglass cursor (but hold on: animated cursors and JADE?) to reflect an ongoing process. I thought of an progress bar which just
loops through over and over again (using a 'chunky' progress without percentage given: not possible with JADE?). And in case there is a way
to display the progress bar in this fashion it would put too much recources on the system, looping through a progress bar and running
other methods at the same time. Although I have read the paper about multi-threading in JADE, it still seems to me that true multi-threading (running a number of processes at the same time, e.g., initiating a number of methods either simultaneously or at times other methods are executed) is far beyond JADE. JADE takes almost all system recources for executing ONE method.

Anyway, back to the animated gif. What I did is that I created a
sequence of the different stages of the progress bar (using a VB
progress bar, --> 'chunky') and put them together as an animated gif and a some video formats. The animated gif would be the ideal solution in terms of size and quality (just 1.3 K) as compared with 400+ K of video formats. Putting this dummy progress bar on the small window will solve all my problems....

The cost reasons for supporting gifs are absolutely ridiculess considering how many shareware programs out there use (animated) gif (licenced!) for 10 US$!!!! Don't give me that...

Cheers

Jens

[ConvertFromOldNGs]

by Craig Shearer >> Thu, 6 Jul 2000 0:44:28 GMT

It wouldn't be difficult to build an OCX that would contain a collection of images (say PNG format) and on a timer, loop through its collection of images, thus creating an animation. This would work pretty well in a thin-client environment where the presentation client machine is just twidling its thumbs waiting for the app server to respond.

The challenge is to build it

Craig.

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by Kevin Alcock >> Thu, 6 Jul 2000 1:16:27 GMT

why couldn't you write a Jade custom control to do this?