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"I've always liked e-mail sigs. I used them at University to amuse my friends,
insert song lyrics or tag enormous,
multi-coloured, flashing, ASCII Art Unicorns onto the end of mails to irritate lecturers.
I wrote this program because I manage several fairly popular websites and tend to get quite a hefty amount of e-mail.
It soon become apparent that, unless I chose a stack of fairly mundane sigs, a lot of the signatures I used would have little
or no relevance to the recipient.
At the time I had tried several random sig generators but none of them supported the profiles that would allow me to quickly change from a sig suitable for a friend, to one relevant to a query regarding one of my websites.
Since I wrote PawPrints I have seen some generators which do have this facility, but I've still yet to see one that allows such easy switching between different
profiles (I don't want to run 5 instances of the same program just to have 5 profiles for example).
Once I had my profiles working it gradually
became apparent that there were more practical uses for PawPrints than I had
realised. Read the Marketing Ideas
section to see what I mean.
For those who are interested, the program is written in VB6 and the core functionality took about two evenings to write.
Making it user friendly (I hope!) and tidying it up to release quality took quite a bit longer though.
I've also added new features along the way and
will keep doing so as long as it doesn't add to the program size significantly.
I hope you like this program, if you find it useful please consider registering.
Any cool signature files
would also be appreciated as I will put them on the website for others to download.
Finally, if you have
discovered a particularly innovative way of using PawPrints, please get in touch!"
/\dam
Acknowledgements
Kind thanks go to the following people, it is a cliche but
without their help I seriously doubt I would ever have released this program.
Tobias J Lobster: Encouragement, criticism and beta-testing from day one.
Nathan Lawrence: Win2000 testing and hacking beyond the call of duty.
Cherry Locke, Damo, Glen and Mr. Mouseburger: beta-testing.
This project uses Mattias Sjögren's Active Desktop VB Compatible type library to change your Windows wallpaper when in Active Desktop mode.
Thanks Mattias for making this library freely available!
Mattias' website is at This project uses Mattias Sjögren's Active Desktop VB Compatible type library to change your Windows wallpaper when in Active Desktop mode.
Thanks Mattias for making this library freely available!
Mattias' website is at http://www.msjogren.net
Related Links
About the Author - My homepages.
Celerity Design - Home to my Internet and Programming projects.
Program History
v1.3.6 - 3rd March 2002
- experimental picture overlay function for new wallpaper. If selected, two pictures from the wallpaper list will be chosen and one will be shrunk and overlaid in the bottom righthand corner of the other image.
If this feature is popular I will enhance it in future versions with more options.
- stripped out a whole hidden page of options that will never be used and were just wasting resources.
- Microsoft Calendar control removed from the distribution package as it wasn't being used! This saves a few Kb when you download the installation files *:-)
- answers to the riddles now cunningly included with the installation files, thus providing encouragement to get the latest version ;-)
- all references to the website address changed to the new site (www.pawprints.celerity.co.uk).
- rubbish "overlay signature on wallpaper" option removed as it just didn't look good!
- new version numbering (major, minor and build)
- wallpaper changing now works if Windows is in Active Desktop mode.
v1.30 - Feb 2002
- Hotkey for "copy current sig to clipboard added"
- Hotkey for "next sig"
- Preferences moved to a separate screen to the main console
- "reload wallpaper at 'x' time" option added for people who leave
their computers on for days at a time but still want new wallpaper every day.
- Icons added for "browse" and "edit" file buttons
- System Tray menu reordered to put less frequently used options at the top (eg
"About PawPrints")
- Signature preview window slightly widened to view sigs that are 76 characters
wide
- Changes to the sig update frequency now take effect immediately, as do
virtually all other settings on the new preferences screen.
- Option to remove all wallpaper entries that point to a graphic that does not
exist.
- Multiple instances of PawPrints now unload themselves cleanly.
- Random wallpaper will now re-choose if the same picture as last time was chosen
(guaranteed new pic every day!).
- System tray icon now only needs a single click, not a double one, to open the
main window.
- Quotes may now be displayed on wallpaper images (not working brilliantly)
- New popup menu item, Wallpaper->New wallpaper
v1.24 - 08/02/2001
(NOTE: this version was the first "mass" release of PawPrints)
- small bug fixed for sigs with a blank header file
- paste buttons added to encryption windows
- icons added for encryption copy, paste and clear buttons
- minor memory efficiency improvement for wallpaper
- bug fixed with the signature file editor screen ("save as..." was
broken)
- default sig path option now handles invalid paths better
v1.23 - 23/01/2001
- option to stretch or shrink wallpaper images in order to fit onto the screen
(now you don't need to resize the images on your harddisk in order for PawPrints
to display them correctly!)
- wallpaper list shows how many files there are to randomly choose from
- wallpaper list width increased in size so longer path names can be seen
v1.22 - 28/10/2000
- updated Help file
- added "Add dashes to sig" feature
- added "Select current wallpaper" feature
- now show sig output path on "Signature" tab
- more error checking
v1.21 - 26/09/2000
(NOTE: this version was the first publicised release of PawPrints)
- slight tweak to registered user keys
- added "Register" option to main screen's menu
- reduced program size by approx 30kb by "tidying up" routines!
v1.20 - 20/09/2000
- Added a "Hide Splash Screen for registered users"
- Wallpaper preview now shows size and displayed colour depth of picture
v1.19 - 11/09/2000
- Fixed silly bug where registered users had a maximum of zero wallpaper
files
v1.18 - 10/09/2000
- If user selected just one file for the wallpaper PawPrints got confused...
- More error trapping on Wallpaper change routine
- Now remembers which path was last used for wallpaper searching
- Shareware limit put on max number of wallpaper files in list
- Flicker on wallpaper previewer removed
v1.17 - 08/09/2000
(First official beta release)
- Added Wallpaper scheduler at request from Mr. Mouseburger
Feb 2000 - Graphics redrawn
May 1999 - First Beta written
Known Issues
Corrupted GIF files may crash PawPrints
To reproduce this behaviour (not recommended obviously!) add a GIF you believe to be corrupted to your wallpaper list and click it to generate a thumbnail. Your mouse pointer will turn into an hourglass and you will have to kill PawPrints via the Windows task manager.
This is a known issue with Visual Basic 6 and as yet I have not found a workaround for it other than not to use corrupted GIF's in my wallpaper list!
Note that you will have to open your wallpaper.lst file in a text editor and manually remove the corrupted graphic from the list.
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