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Graphic Interpretation - Q & A - Scraps and Browsers
by Bruce Thomas

One of the beauties of the Commodore Community is the willingness of users to share information. The Internet provides an excellent avenue to ask your questions and for others to provide answers. I have picked a query from the comp.sys.cbm newsgroup and another one from a mailing list to examine in this issue.

Morph This

This is a terrific question from a user with a common problem. Another newsgroup reader provided the following solution.

(Q) In trying to use geoMorph, I am saving each morphed image to a photo album through the manager.

But: each image I paste to the album becomes image number one. I wanted the third image I pasted in to be image #3 etc. I tried renaming the image that went in third as image #3 but it held its first position.

So unless there is a way of moving positions within the albums, the images go into the album in reverse order (image z will be first and image a will be 26th).

(A) Each photo scrap that is pasted into a photo album is automatically pasted into the photo album as image #1. Best bet is to start with the last image and end with the first image, that way they end up being in proper order, 1,2,3,etc.

A Different Solution

My solution differs from the one above and is one that I came up with many years ago after noticing the Paste behavior of Photo Manager while working on a newsletter project. I e-mailed the following solution to the user who asked the question:

Make sure that you have the first picture you want to put into your album in a Photo Scrap on the disk. Open Photo Manager and create a new Photo Album. Select the Edit menu and Paste. Select the Edit menu and Paste again. Your Photo Album will now say it contains 2 pictures (both copies of your first picture) and you will be looking at Picture 1 of 2. Exit the Photo Manager.

In geoMorph create the next picture in your sequence. Copy it to a Photo Scrap. Enter Photo Manager and go to the dog-eared corner in the lower left of the Photo Manager screen. Click on the lower dog-ear and you will now be looking at picture 2 of 2. Select the Edit menu and choose Paste.

Your second photo will now be in the album and it will be listed as picture 2 of 3. Click the (upper) dog-ear and you will see your picture 1 now shows as picture 3 of 3. Click the Upper Dog-ear again and you will see picture 1 where it should be - as picture 1 of 3.

Each time you create a new photo scrap and enter Photo Manager just click the lower dog-ear and you will be at the last picture in your album (which is the second copy of your first picture). Pasting in while looking at this picture will insert your new scrap into that spot and leave the second copy of your first picture as the last scrap in the album.

Once you have pasted in all of the scraps that you are going to paste into the album just go to the last image and Cut it out. This will remove the second copy of your first picture and all of the rest will be in perfect order.

This process can really make projects easier to set up. A handy helper is Rick Coleman's Photo Mover V3.0 that lets you easily move scraps between albums. AlbumAnimator by Dennis Seitz and geoAnimator by Francis Kostella are two great programs for viewing your Morph creations. The latter even allows the user to create stand-alone animations.

To boldly go

(Q) What is so important about The Wave Web Browser and how will it affect the way I use my Commodore?

(A) This project is important in a number of ways. First off, the hardware requirements mean that you will need to make an investment in the future of your Commodore if your system isn't up to the challenge. While a number of people scoff at adding some of these powerful pieces of equipment to their systems they are an investment that pays off by returning a non-renewable resource to the user. That resource is time and each of the required add-ons (Wheels, SCPU, 4 MB RAM, SwiftLink/Turbo232, and high-speed Modem) makes your time at the keyboard more productive.

Secondly, the fact that this project is a collaborative one means that the programming expertise of the Commodore Community as a whole is able to contribute to the finished product. Some wonderful pieces of software will be merged together to make this project a success.

Thirdly, the final product will be freeware, which means that anyone can use it without cost. Not only that, but the entire source code (programming) for the project will be freely available to anyone who cares to make enhancements. This open-source attitude, meaning the product can take on a life of its own, is also making its mark in the PC world with the highly popular LINUX Operating System.

Finally, probably not the least important change relates to cost. As mentioned, a certain amount of hardware is required to run The Wave and if you don't have it you will have to spend some bucks. We also must consider that our Internet Access costs will change.

I have a text-based account at Edmonton FreeNet that costs me $25 per year. To add PPP dial-up graphics access to my account the cost jumps to $100 per year. Both of these options feature unlimited connection time, which is a good thing, but just the same I am going to start looking for a faster modem than the 14.4 Kbps model that I have at present.

Commodore users can already create web pages with most Word Processors since HTML is just ASCII text (Geoff Sullivan even has HTML tags in a TWS Macro file available for download from his web site - http://www.gis.net/^sunfish/tcr/cbm/cbm.html). Images can be included in GIF and JPEG format and special HTML text formatting commands allow for different size print on the page.

From what I have seen during pre-release testing The Wave will allow Commodore users to see pages on the Internet as others do. I have every confidence that The Wave will become a fully functional, useful, software addition to our Commodore libraries and allow us to go where no Commodore has gone before. This means that the possibilities opened up by a graphical browser will be limited only by your use of the product and the efforts of the programmers who are creating it and the myriad of add-on products for it that will surely follow.

Until next time, enGEOy your Commodore!