Saturday, August 30, 2014

FotoSketcher 2.95 is officially released. 100% free as always.

Hi all!

FotoSketcher 2.95 is now officially available for download. As usual, FotoSketcher is 100% free for personal or commercial use.

Head to http://www.fotosketcher.com/download-fotosketcher/ to get either the full version (with setup and uninstall) or the portable version.

Here are the new features and changes in this release:
  • skinned menus for all three themes (tip: press the INS key to cycle through the interface themes)
  • added a new check box to double the size of the manual brush (useful for high resolution images, when the max size was too small)
screenshot: 

  • a couple of bug fixes : 
    • the most important bug fix concerns Windows Vista users who were sometimes getting a cryptic error message in French "Index de liste hors limite (-1)". Hopefully this is now solved.
    • the popup menu was showing incorrectly in the scripts window
  • some corrections to the Korean language files (thanks JaeHyung)

Regarding scripts (tip: press F5 to bring up the scripts window), here is a watercolor script which uses the Painting 9 and Painting 1 effects: http://www.fotosketcher.com/watercolor_script.fss (right-click this link and choose "save the target as...").

Here is an example produced with FotoSketcher 2.95 (Painting 9, then Painting 1 on the sky area, using the manual brush):
Welsh countryside - summer 2013

Have fun!

David
 

10 comments:

David said...

Hi Casey,
Nice script, thanks! Just tested it and it works great. Love your example.
Cheers,
David

Casey said...

I hate to do it - but a possible bug (it wasn't in 290)

When you mouse over the menu items they flicker very badly (like a very slow redraw every time you mouse from one menu item to the next).

Maybe a skinning issue?

David said...

Hi Casey,

That's a strange one. I have not been able to reproduce this problem. Could be a video driver issue...
If anyone has the same problem, please send me an e-mail at contact@fotosketcher.com
If necessary I'll recompile with no menu skinning.

Regards,

David

David said...

Hi Casey,

Just a quick update to let you know that I've finally been able to reproduce the visual flickering by running FotoSketcher 2.95 in Windows Vista in a virtual machine.
Everything was fine on my Windows 8 PC. I think I may have to rewrite the whole menu code as the visual bug seems to be caused by the VCL visual styles in Delphi XE6...

Peter (BC, Canada) said...

No problem on my side. I am on Win 8.1 with a very simple ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT.

The problem might be coming from Vista... Still on Vista, hey! Waiting for Windows 9 :-)

David said...

Thanks for your feedback, Pierre.
Indeed the problem could be due to good old Vista. Anyway, I've got a couple of ideas on how to solve this, so I'll try them in the next few days. At least it is only a visual glitch, not a blocking bug!

Casey said...

I also forgot to mention - Win 7 x64 pro..

Yes - just a rather annoying flicker... someone with epilepsy might spasm from it though, it's about 3 times per second.

Other than that it runs fine.

(What about just having an option to disable the skinned menus? Or auto-detect W7 and under and auto-disable menu skins?)

David said...

Alas, it is not simple to disable skinning of just the menus (or I would need to revert to a previous version of Delphi). However, I have found a workaround. It takes a bit of time as I have to rebuild the menu items from scratch with a new component (called a TActionMainMenuBar, there's a mouthfull!). I tested a prototype and lo... no more flicker :)

Anonymous said...

Looks great David. I recently (well just at one month ago) had to purchase a new computer. Work's been keeping me from playing as well so I just now installed it and was happy to see you just released this update. Thanks again. :)

Lyle

David said...

You're welcome, Lyle! I hope you have fun with the new version :)