volker

I would appreciate such a feature, too. In timeline mode, the waveform-button only works when there is sound assigned to the overall show. It would be great if it was active when there is no sound assigned to the overall show - but to any picture and when clicking that waveform button, the waveforms starting at the individual pictures are displayed. This would help all who need to work with precise timing to picture. I think the case where music is assigned to the overall show and to individual pictures as well would needs not to be perfectly handled in a next version, for a first improvement it would be sufficient to only display the music assigned to the overall show. Volker

Hello, I sometimes have a German and an English version of a PictureToExe Project, the only difference is that the text objects are either in German or in English. A suggestion for a new feature of an upcoming version would be that one could optionally add more languages to a project (default is one language and nothing of the present function would change) and enter translations for texts, where no translation is given, the first language's text is taken. When generating the exe, one had to choose for which language to make the .exe (or pte could make per default multipe files, eg. "<ProjectName>_lang1.exe", "<ProjectName>_lang2.exe" etc. This is a low priority suggestion, it's quite comfortable to make a copy of the .pte project file and change the texts in that copy - only when changing animations etc. later, it's a bit clumsy to do that in both versions... Rgds, Volker

Hello, I have all my PictureToExe projects on a 8GB USB flash drive as I like to have my pictures mobile on that nice little USB drive, I named the drive "PteUSB". As it seems to me, PictureToExe saves all path names with fixed drive letters (E:\PteProjects\....) in the project files. Now, as long as the USB drive is always the first drive I connect, it will always be mounted as drive E: and everything is fine. But if I had attached another USB stick, my USB CD-ROM etc. before my projects USB drive, it receives another drive letter (F: or G:). If Pte 5.5 had an optional checkbox "use drive name for projects" this would be very convenient, then the paths in the project files would be "PteUSB:\PteProjects\...." instead of "E:\PteProjects\....". It's not a high priority request, I can just eject the other ISB drives and the conect the projects USB drive and it will get E: again. Regards, Volker

Hello, As my dad has got an old laptop, I use PicturesToExe 4.49 to create a "simple" version of a new show with simple effects. After creating the .exe from 4.49, I copy the project file, rename the copy to the new extension ".pte5" and I assigned Windows to open ".pte5" type files with the 5.1 version of PictureToExe (tipp: if you want to do that, too, rename pte.exe in its version 5 folder pte51.exe as Windows might not open the right .exe if you give to booth extensions the same .exe name, usually Windows will open both with the latest .exe associated). Then I do a "polished" version with effects etc. in PictursToExe 5.1, it converts the 4.49 project copy to 5.1 and I have the framework of the show already there. Now, some of you may say, why doesn't he only create the show in 5.1 - as the version5 .exe will also run on any old laptop as it falls back to simple graphic display routines when old hardware is found and some of the fancier stuff will just not display (e.g. some of the animations). Well, you are right, Igor did a really reallly great job to make 5.1 exes also run on old laptops (with little RAM, poor graphics support etc) but I had several shows where the result on my dad's old laptoop looked very bad, some 5.1 features are being executed but they are so slow that it looks bad and I don't want to design animations by always having in mind how to design them that they look okay if some things are not done etc. also black screens one has to skip are not always nice. The way I described it is best for me, the "simple" version is basically pictures with simple fade effects some texts some music and that's it. It's also almost no additional work for me to do it that way, arranging basic pictures adding music - that's what I had to do anyway when I started in 5.1 directly. So I have two project files of each show, a v4_<showname>.pte and a v5_showname.pte5 (and a v4_<showname>.exe and a v5_<showname>.exe) in my project folders, the .pte opens with 4.49. There is a little problem left: Pte5.1 opens the .pte5 file correctly (as I assigned .pte5 file extensions to it) but when I save the show, Pte5.1 renames the project to v5_<showname>.pte when saving - even though it was started with v5_<showname>.pte5. Of coures, when I double-click that project later, 4.49 will start with it and bring an error message (as 4.49 can not handle a 5.1 project file) so I always have to rename it back to .pte5 after an edit session in pte 5.1. Suggestion: If pte5.5 could just remember the file extension it was called with (in my case .pte5) it would be great if it would keept that filename when saving. As pte found a legal project file, in my opinion, why not keep the filename including the extension, as the file was before... I described a bit why I would appreciate that little enhancement, if nobody else had a good reason why the renaming - as implemented now - is helpful, I would suggest this change for 5.5 Regards, Volker

Hello, not a solution but an idea. Fill the last black slide with a black picture and add another black slide. The black picture is to trigger an external program (animation > on mouse click > run another program) now you just need to google for a tool that decreases the volume of windows slowly to zero thus fading the music which is still playing. However, I don't know such a tool - just an idea...

Hello, I'm just a rookie with PTE and maybe I tend do a bit too much with animation (it can be a good point - don't do it just because it can be done) maybe I can add another aspect to the pan/zoom discussion. *panorama pictures* - when showing them, pan/zoom can really make sense. I usually show the full panorama at the beginning (showing a small stripe in the middle, big black areas on bottom & top of the screen) and pause for at least 5 seconds, then I move to the left-side of the panorama while zooming it to full screen hight, then pausing again. Then I slowly move to the right side of the panorama, pausing again when the end is reached. I do not dare to suggest an «interactive zoom mode» to Igor where an "over-sized" picture is displayed cropped to the screen size and the viewer can zoom in/out by pressing + or - keys and move the part shown using the arrow keys :-) so the user could decide himself which part to see and where to zoom until time is up and the next slide is shown ;-) in my slide shows I decide as author of the show as described above which pan/zoom is best for showing my panoramas... when there is any motion in the panorama (a river, traffic on a street going in a specific direction) I would generally recommend to follow that direction ... Rgds, Volker

Hello, I also have Excel 2003 SP2 and it works well for me! Volker

Hello, I use a tiny tool called "NoSleep.exe" that allows to tweak around the Screensaver. I used it under NT and now under Win XP, only when I give a presentation from my laptop. There may be many other tools like it. It's practical as in many professional environments the screensaver is bundeled with re-login via smartcard to prevent unauthorized people use the PC when the logged-on user goes away for longer and often you don't have the right to disable the Windows screen saver for that (good) reason (security). But when you give a presentation and don't press a key etc (e.g. answering a longer question) the screensaver disturbs your presentation and the audience sees the re-logon dialogue. Not too professional. The tool is here http://www.geocities.com/helmi79/software/software.html description is "NoSleep! (19 KB) allows you to temporarily deactivate the screen saver and any standby feature directly from the system tray. NoSleep! is minimal in size, yet provides remote control capabilities, a full (un)installation routine and - as a bonus feature - Swatch Internet Time." I use an older version without internet time option and I don't know how the tool actually works, maybe it simulates a short "SHIFT key pressed" or something to Windows. That tool works nicely so I do not see an urgent need for that new feature, however, maybe it would be an convenient option for future PTE versions if you could tell a PTE project to "override" the screen saver while the show runs, as a further feature possibly for <x> minutes so you could e.g. run a looping presentation in the display of your shop for let's say 5 hours then allow the screen- saver to dark the screen etc. Just an idea, I would say very low importance. Volker

Hello, just another idea, sounds easy but maybe isn't, I tested in v5 beta 11 adding animated .gif image would it be possible without too much programming to display the picture's inherent animation when showing it? Rgds, Volker (sorry for posting this in the wrong section at first, Ken, maybe someone can delete my original post)

The space key works fine to pause sorry I reported an error here which is not there. But assigning mouse buttons to "next slide" / "previous slide" is not working yet (maybe beta 11?). When in pause mode (either by pressing pause navigation button or space) then klicking on "next slide button" or "previous button" or "home button" puts that on a kind of internal stack, nothing is done but when you release the pause key the last "stacked" command is executed. I would rather suggest that "home", "next slide" or "previous" slide automatically ends pause mode and does what the user wanted right away.

Excellent work! I rebuilt the project I mentioned with the zooming and then moving over a very large panorama picture with beta 10 and the camera movement is much much smoother, I'm really impressed! I found something little: The space key for pausing seems not to work. I also assigned "previous slide" to the left mouse button, "next slide" to the right mouse button - but it has no effekt. Maybe with mouse control you only meant when using the "add navigation bar" stuff. Volker

Yes, thanks, that was the reason. My mistake was not to think in terms of video RAM, the file size (6MB) looked totally harmless. Now I reduced the image to 16000x2000 (resulting in 125 MB in video memory) and then it works. For older machines with 64MB video memory, this would be still too much. At least one could still work with overlapping pieces of the whole picture (and no effect between these pieces) and maybe a small pause. Volker

Hello, I created a Show that contains only one picture. This picture (.jpg) is 6MB and has 18245 x 2415 pixels (New York City Skyline, Hudson in front, a panorama combined from multiple photos using Photo Stitch software). My Show has got two keypoints, first the whole picture is shown fullscreen, then I zoom into it (2nd) and then I move the camera along the skyline (3rd). It looks pefekt in the visual editor, when I move the little blue arrow I see exaclty the hahaviour that I want. But both when pressing "Preview" or from a generated .exe only a black screen is produced during the whole show. Maybe it's just because of the sheer size of that one picture, on the other hand the resulting .exe (also about 6MB) is not that big. Anyways, I just wanted to report the issue here.

Absolutely, Al - I did by no means want to ask for any additional features that could delay V.5 - maybe a hard-coded "right mouse button = next slide, space bar = pause" (pause = wait for another space bar hit or right mouse button before going to the next slide) for the next beta 9 would not be too much work and help Nick for the moment.. Volker

Hello, I don't have a solution here but maybe I can help to kick brainstorming by giving my experience with Microsoft Powerpoint with the manual slide control.. A feature for navigation that I sometimes use in MS Powerpoint is typing a slide number and then pressing enter. The key sequence "2", "9", "Enter" would jump to slide number 29. Maybe this would be a nice feature for a future PTE version. In powerpoint, as far as I know, slides not shown yet would start with their first animations while slides already shown would be presented in the "final" state of the animation sequence. This seems meaningful, when somebody in the audience asks "could we just see again that slide where you showed..." and the "end" state is what you expect when going back. (A great trick would be if you could indicate if you want the full animation or just the final state, eg when using the numerical keypad the final state is navigated to, when using the normal number keys the animation starts over again). When PTE slides are closely in sync with audio, it's maybe difficult to define the appropriate behaviour what audio should do when such "jumps" are made. (Maybe, if the jump leaps over the end of a playing song, the music could fade out and the new song could fade in. Maybe jumping should not influence presently playing music at all) Such a "got to slide x" navigation could correspond exactly to how PTE behaves with interactive buttons that contain a "go to slide X" instruction. If such a navigation would be solved in general, the behaviour of "next slide" / "previous slide" is merely calculating which is the next or the previous slide and executing this as a regular (but just small) "jump". Volker