PictureBox is done, and now big images redraw just as fast as small images so adjusting brightness and contrast occurs in real time. Basically, from the outside it now works just as well as it did at the end of last year. Yay!
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The new picturebox is nearly finished. Just need to add in one more thing which will greatly increase the drawing speed for large images.
FXCop compliance is just about done so the code is nice and tight.
As a bonus it’s forced me to add the framework for localization. Once the program is far enough along it’ll be easy to add other languages.
Enabled XP styles, so the program looks all nice and fancy.
To do next:
Port the conversion code.
Selection of an area of the image – Will probably add it into the new PictureBox control.
Come up with a better way for the user to change brightness/contrast values. Probably writing a custom version of the vertical scroll bars to add the current value and display it with some nice graphics.
Removal of FormText and redesign of the main form to add the converted text onto a new tab.
A couple of years after abandoning the ASCII Generator I’m back working on a new image to text converter. The old version still works, but it’s so big, bloated and ugly that I’m no longer able to work on it (and I don’t even have a copy of C++Builder any more). A few months ago I finally was able to retrieve my old jmsoftware.co.uk domain name, and purchased some web space in a really nice deal from Hytek Hosting and moved the old site over.
After abandoning another project I was working on (don’t ask), I decided to go back to my roots and see how feasible it would be to port the ASCGEN over, and the answer was ‘not very’. But… I did run some tests and not only managed to rewrite the conversion engine in C#, but it was faster and smaller.
So, I decided to rewrite the ASCII Generator in Microsoft Visual C#.NET. The main reasons for this are that the development time is fast, and I need to learn it. The main drawback is that you’ll need the .NET Framework installed (one day it’ll come as standard in Windows and this won’t be an issue), but this will be a one time ~20Mb install and then the exe files will be tiny. I’m not going to just replicate the old program (which grew into a really weird text editor), this will be a slimmed down SDI application with just the important features.
This will be a development journal only, so don’t expect any live journal style attention whoring. I’ll get around to fixing the design of this blog soon.
The first version of the program will not be released until it’s ready, and it produces a better output then the old program.