SmoothText 1.1.8

[WildBill]

Version 0.5.3 is now posted, with a minor bugfix.

That's amazing that it works on XP, though I have to wonder why anyone would want to use it on XP since it already has ClearType. Neat, though, anyway.

Edited January 20, 2009 by WildBill

[Colonel O'Neill]

Awesomeness. My Taskbar is replaced by ObjectBar, so it's all good.

Too bad TClock3 fails to work on my computer... It walks the tightrope and usually falls off.

[WildBill]

I've fixed a major bug in TClock3 tonight and I'm running it right now. Hopefully I'll be able to release a new version soon, but I first have to port a lot of SmoothText bugfixes back to it and fix some other issues.

[Colonel O'Neill]

You could always seperate the TClock3 and SmoothText aspects.

Or distribute them together but run them as seperate programs?

[WildBill]

Version 0.5.4 is posted, which has some nice fixes and internal improvements.

There are both benefits and drawbacks to having skinning in TClock3 and antialiasing in SmoothText. I'm a little on the fence as to whether they should be combined. At any rate, TClock3 development is continuing; I'm currently cleaning up a LOT of code, and then I have to nail down a few more bugs.

[WildBill]

Gah. I introduced a bug in calculating text height in version 0.5.4, so here is version 0.5.5. Sorry about that.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Everything's A-Okay.

A while back I had an exception error involving TextHook.dll, didn't bother to keep it. The thing is, the whole program stayed running and didn't crash.

Looks almost exactly like XP's ClearType, excellent work!

[WildBill]

I'm testing 0.5.6 right now. Maybe I'll release it tomorrow. I ran across some thread contention issues in 0.5.5 and had to redesign some parts of it (nothing that should cause a crash, but it wasn't strictly correct).

[WildBill]

Version 0.5.6 is posted, which should be more reliable.

[WildBill]

Sorry for the rapid update to version 0.5.7, but this was too good not to share. The unbounded nature of the text-size cache was causing real performance issues. I've implemented an LRU caching scheme and a cache limit of 512 strings. The result is a performance boost from the cache (as long as you don't go over it) but also a limit to the impact of using it. Overall, performance should be much better in normal use.

[WildBill]

All day I had planned to work on TClock3, but it turned out that I had to work on SmoothText first

Version 0.5.8 is posted, and in some ways it's a huge improvement. I'm getting blazing speed in Firefox now

[WildBill]

I really, really hate obscure bugs

Version 0.5.9 is posted, which fixes a really hard-to-find bug in the caching code that was causing the cache to become corrupted.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Bleh. Something in 0.5.9 made Times New Roman look like it gained a couple pixels of width. It looks nothing like the original font. Not present in 0.5.7. Speed-ups are noticeable with 0.5.9.

The SmoothText list box text reverts to non-smoothed when clicked (certain conditions) and don't return to smoothed until it is hovered over.

The checkmark option doesn't unhook all processes... It's be nice if toggling smoothing was as easy as clicking the tray icon.

Great improvements but at the moment I am sticking to 0.5.7 because the wide Times New Roman makes my head spin with all of the documents I have to write for school.

EDIT: Never mind, I forgot to restart Word. Times New Roman looks normal now.

Edited February 4, 2009 by Colonel O'Neill

[WildBill]

That's great. I definitely need testers, LOL

Please let me know if you run into any issues. I've made some more slight optimizations for 0.6.0 (and simplified some code), but I'd like to sit on it for at least a few days to see if any issues crop up before I release it.

[WildBill]

Version 0.6.0 is now posted. I've really tried to hyper-optimize the caching to try to maximize speed, and I've made a couple of small improvements.

Enjoy...

Edited February 8, 2009 by WildBill