This is the second general release of GIF Slideshow — an application designed to allow you to quickly view folders or disks full of GIF, TIFF, MacPaint and PICT pictures.
This version now has “online” documention. Press Command-? to open the help menu.
Rebuilding the desktop
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If:
• you previously were using version 1.1 of GIF Slideshow; or
• the “drag and drop” capabilities of GIF Slideshow do not work under System 7; or
• the application does not have a custom icon
then you will probably need to rebuild your desktop. To do this, restart your Mac, holding down the Command and Option keys.
Getting started quickly
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Under System 7, “drag and drop” the icons for disks, CDROMs, folders, or individual GIF, TIFF, MacPaint or PICT files onto the GIF Slideshow icon.
Under System 6, double-click the GIF Slideshow application, and then use “Scan folder” (Command-S) to scan folders containing pictures.
You should see a progress box showing the number of pictures found, and then the first one will be automatically displayed. Click the mouse, or press “space”, “return” or “enter” to proceed to the next picture. Press Command-period or “esc” to stop viewing the pictures. Press Command-Q to exit the application.
You can toggle automatic advancing of pictures by pressing Command-A.
You can toggle random sequencing of pictures by pressing Command-R.
Read the help screens for further details.
ShareWare fee: $US 20
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Please send fee to:
Nick Gammon
PO Box 124
Ivanhoe VIC 3079
AUSTRALIA
If your Mac “hangs” while using GIF Slideshow
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Experience has shown that some earlier versions of CDROM drivers supplied with some CDROM drives do not recover properly from read errors, and cause the Mac to “hang”. This is not a bug in GIF Slideshow, but is more noticeable when using this program because of the large number of reads that it does to the CDROM. If you are having such problems I suggest you contact the dealer who sold you the CDROM drive and ask if there is a more up-to-date driver available for your drive. (The “driver” is the file or files that you copy to the System folder which allows the Mac to communicate with your particular brand of CDROM).
Messages
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Messages can be sent to Nick Gammon on CompuServe® at address: 100033,1340
Release history
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Version 1.0 — 7th November 1993
1. Version 1.0 released to a handful of local testers in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Based on their comments a few changes and additions were made to version 1.1, as described below.
Version 1.1 — 21st November 1993
1. A few wording errors in the dialog boxes and documentation were corrected.
2. Auto-advance disabled if only one file being viewed (so it doesn't disappear suddenly!).
3. “Help” button added to “About” box. Also, “help” menu item added to “Options” menu, plus support for “Help” key on keyboard, and Command-?. Any of these bring up a small help dialog box designed to help with basic program operation.
4. If user’s Mac not currently set to 256 colours when program starts, GIF Slideshow now allows them to change to 256 colours if desired.
5. Option to save a GIF picture in TIFF format added to “Write as…” menu item (Command-W). This is so that GIF pictures can be saved in TIFF format, which is more widely supported by desktop publishing and word processing programs.
Version 1.2 — 17th February 1994
1. Opening a “tag” file is now about 7 times as fast as in version 1.1, due to various efficiency improvements. For example, the “GIFS Galore” CDROM tag file now opens in 14 seconds compared to 1 minute and 40 seconds in version 1.1.
2. If you have spent more than 15 seconds scanning a disk or CDROM for pictures, and have not chosen to save the current picture sequence as a tag file, you are now prompted to do so when stopping the slide show. This is for the benefit of users who may have found creating tag files confusing, or for those who simply forget to do so.
3. Alert boxes that have “Yes” or “No” buttons now permit you to type “Y” or “N” on the keyboard to accept those alternatives.
4. A “welcome” screen is automatically displayed the first time the program is run.
5. The ability to search for pictures by name (or partial name) has been added (see help screen: “Finding a picture by name or number” for more details).
6. Some TIFF files are now supported, specifically: greyscale and palette colour, which have either no compression, LZW compression or PackBits compression. Further TIFF support will be added in future releases. In particular, GIF Slideshow can now read TIFF files created by it using the “save GIF picture as …” menu option.
7. Attempts have been made to improve Autodesk Animator animations, although there is still room for improvement. If possible, “.FLI” files are read into memory in their entirety, and then processed from memory. This can improve animation speed. Also, errors in animation files no longer require a program abort.
8. Documentation has been moved from separate word processor files to online help screens. Users that prefer printed documentation can copy the help screens and paste them into a blank word processor document, and then print them.
9. Whether or not the menu bar is hidden during picture displays is now an option (Command-M to toggle it). If the menu bar is visible it will crop (hide) the portion of the picture it covers.
10. GIF Slideshow can now operate in the background, providing an impressive (if somewhat memory intensive!) backdrop of changing backgrounds to your other applications. We suggest you set the delay between frame advances to a high figure (say 30 seconds or more) or your other applications will be frequently interrupted by GIF Slideshow as it decodes each new picture. If you need to access your desktop, click on the picture to bring GIF Slideshow to the front, and then select “Hide picture” (Command-H).
11. You can now optionally show pictures larger than the screen at full size, and use the mouse or keyboard to scroll around and see the various parts of the picture (option-drag with the mouse to scroll, or use the arrow keys on the keyboard).
12. Various “memory leak” problems fixed — previously stopping one picture sequence and starting another did not release memory used by the first sequence.
13. Various “preferences” and “information” options moved from the menu bar to dialog boxes. This makes the menus less cluttered, allows more logical command-key equivalences, and makes it easier to see what the current preferences are. Press Comand-J to see slideshow preferences, Command-K to see general preferences, Command-I to control what information is displayed at the bottom of each picture, and Command-U to see what file types will be processed when scanning folders and volumes.
14. An option to “fix black pixels” was added in an attempt to correct pictures which were incorrectly saved with erroneous palette entries for some colours.
15. The “GIF Slideshow prefs” file is now saved in the System/Preferences folder rather than the folder containing GIF Slideshow.
16. An option to open an individual picture was added (Command-O).
17. Looping and automatic advance are disabled if only one picture is being viewed.
18. Various frequently-used actions (such as switching between manual and automatic advance) have been added to the “function keys” available on extended keyboards (for example, F5 switches to manual advance). Unlike most of the other command-key equivalents which “toggle” actions, most of the function key actions are not toggles, which means you do not have to remember the current program state before changing it.
19. An ability to dither pictures which are scaled has been added. This can particularly improve pictures which are shrunk to less than 100% (because the original is larger than the screen). Dithered pictures tend to not have vertical and horizontal lines through them. However dithering can be quite slow, and is recommended to be turned off, unless you either: a) don’t mind waiting; or b) have a very fast Mac.
20. The program options “automatic advance”, “loop” and “random” have been placed into an “options” dialog box (accessible from the Options menu, or by pressing Command-J), in addition to appearing under the Slideshow menu. Some users may find looking at this dialog box easier than using the mouse to pull down the Slideshow menu, particularly when in the middle of viewing pictures.
21. When going to a picture by name or number, it is no longer necessary to wait while the program displays the next picture (the one it had already read ahead to save time). When changing the picture sequence like this, you now see the “loading first picture” window again, while the program repositions to the correct place in the picture sequence.
22. Recognition for MacPaint pictures, and PICT files was added.
23. Various bug fixes and improvements to dialog boxes were made.
