Robert Meek wrote: >Subject: RE: Upgrade to Delphi 2006? > >Probably not. If you've got a system setup and working perfectly >for such a selective area of endeavor and your imaging libraries work well >with it there's nothing in BDS 2006 to really entice you unless you want to >explore NET.
I wonder what's in NET that might be useful when I only need a minimal user interface, menus, toolbar, MDI and a few standard or home-made dialog boxes which I often create via the Windows API calls and bypass the VCL entirely. >BTW...What libraries are you using for imaging? I've been >using ImageLib Combo Pak since D7 myself with great success and it compiled >over for use in 2006 without a single hiccup! The ONLY thing I don't like >about it is that I have to distribute a runtime DLL with my applications >that use it. After a disaster with the abandonment of his user base by the author of the excellent PGraphic library which I used with Delphi 3 and 4 but which offered .dcu's only, I bought ImageLib for D5 and used it until D7 was announced. Because it did not have many of the features I need, was sometimes unstable, plus the need Robert mentions to append their DLL to all installations and the fact that source code was not available or extendable, means that I removed all traces of ImageLib from my code after D7 appeared. I now use Imageen VCL with source code from: www.hicomponents.com They ask 149 for the first VCL source code version including 1 year of updates, then 35 a year for updates. The compiled version is only 49. There are also .NET and ActiveX versions, but since source code was my main interest, I know little about them. Imageen's VCL has clear hooks for user written extensions both for exotic file formats and for additional processing algorithms. Imagelib's web pages do not disclose their pricing and offer a telephone number accessible in the USA and Canada for sales enquiries. There is no mention of source code except for a sample application package called SkyDoc. The HiComponents suite supports many more file formats than those in the Imagelib list on their web page. For serious scientific image processing with high dynamic range, 48 bit (3x16 bit) and 32bit floating point per pixel are also available plus many of the RAW formats for a variety of digital cameras. For who need to deal with very large images, there is full support for memory mapped image files. My users have processed images with more than 1 GB on 2 GB systems with minimal disk activity. There are also free image libraries for Delphi (G32 comes to mind) with more limited capabilities. They can be found on SourceForge or with a Google search. If one is willing to make one's own DLL with a C++ compiler, then there are a staggering number of image packages available without charge from the Internet including the very efficient Intel computer vision library and the VXL library. If one wants to read and process hundreds of exotic image file formats and write many of them, then the free GFL SDK from the author of XnView is what I use. I don't think that the above paragraph covers the subject, but it should give you some idea as to what is available either free or at very low cost. Irwin Scollar _______________________________________________ Delphi mailing list -> [email protected] http://www.elists.org/mailman/listinfo/delphi
