Yesterday, Rick Brewster announced that the final release of Paint.NET 3.5 is now available for download.

Download: Paint.NET 3.5

I had blogged about one of the initial beta releases of Paint.NET 3.5 back in August. Paint.NET 3.5 utilizes DirectWrite in Windows 7 to render text (instead of GDI). As I wrote back in August, DirectWrite is one of the new additions to the DirectX family of APIs in Windows 7 and enables better readability, adds support for a large variety of languages and scripts, and in conjunction with Direct2D provides superior rendering performance for Windows applications.

You’ll notice that with the final release of Paint.NET 3.5 – it brings some new UI changes to the application. This “refreshed” UI takes advantage of Aero in Windows 7 (and in Windows Vista). I happen to be a huge fan of the updated UI.

If you’re looking for a free and powerful application for editing graphics, give Paint.NET 3.5 a try! For a complete list of changes in Paint.NET 3.5 (since 3.36) – see Rick’s blog post.

Windows 7 will change the ways you interact with your PC. How you ask? Windows Touch.

Touch refers to the way Windows lets you interact directly with a computer using a finger. Compared to using a mouse, keyboard, or pen, touch can be much more engaging, natural, and convenient.

The Windows Touch technology in Windows 7 is an evolution of the technology that is rooted in Windows Vista. In Windows Vista, single-touch input improved the interaction when using the pen stylus and the mouse of earlier Tablet PC platforms. With Windows 7, users can directly manipulate their computer environment through multitouch for the first time. Users can use a variety of gestures directly on their computer screen to move data, including:

• Touch, or mouse-such as behavior: tap, double-tap, right-click, drag, and select.
• Touch gestures- such as Flicks (navigational and editing).
• Multitouch gestures-- such as zooming in, zooming out, panning, and rotating.

A Windows 7 PC powered by NVIDIA GPUs will deliver faster, more engaging Windows Touch experiences. NVIDIA GPUs are well known for accelerating 3D interfaces. The Windows 7 Aero desktop, now designed using the DirectX 10 API and designed for Windows Touch, is no exception. From the new taskbar previews to Aero Peek, Flip, Snap, and Shake, NVIDIA GPU provides a snappy 3D experience. Windows 7 also uses the GPU to reduce memory consumption by half by eliminating the need to keep a second copy of each window in system memory. This frees up system memory for other applications and keeps your PC responsive.

Multi-touch capability was designed into the core of Windows 7 and is a perfect fit for the new highly visual GPU-accelerated applications like Cooliris and Super Loiloscope. Cooliris lets you browse the web in 3D and now with the addition of Windows Touch, the experience becomes even more immersive. With Super Loiloscope you can have fun creating videos and applying effects with the touch of your finger.

Touch input does not replace the keyboard and mouse, it enhances them. Touch is a natural and intuitive way to interact with you PC when you are doing common computing tasks such as:

• Web browsing
• Interacting with photos
• Playing games
• Organizing music and video (creating playlists, sorting media, and organizing content)
• Reading and sorting e-mail
• Using documents
• Managing a Windows workspace

As you can see, your Windows 7 Touch experience will be faster, smoother, and more immersive with an NVIDIA GPU in your PC.

Just in case you’ve missed it (where have you been?), today is the day the first PCs with Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system and VISION Technology from AMD hit the shelf. Yeah!

Many of us have been looking forward to this day for quite a while. I’ve blogged about the synergy between AMD technology and Windows 7 on a number of occasions before. I’ve talked about how AMD’s latest graphics cards are the only graphics cards on the market to fully support the DirectX 11 API, the API released with Windows 7. And that’s a big deal, because it will enable richer visual experiences and speed up other tasks like converting video files for playback on a portable media player.

I’ve also discussed the importance of a complete PC experience, where hardware and software interact seamlessly so that everything “just works.” With greater usability and an increasingly intuitive interface in Windows 7, your PC works the way you want it to, faster and easier.

I’ve been lucky to be a beta tester for Windows 7, and have personally benefited from a couple of the improvements in particular.

For example with Windows 7, you can drag video to enabled portable media players and transcode the clip automatically. If you’re searching for a file, Windows 7’s integrated search function helps you find what you’re looking for faster than before, even when you only remember a phrase or snippet of what you’re looking for.

And now the wait is over. Today is a culmination of a long effort by Microsoft, and with their new OS, consumers can enjoy a better computing experience right now. Windows 7 is a winner.

This is also a day where consumers can experience VISION technology from AMD – technology which we announced last month. Developed with the goal of enriching users’ digital lives, VISION also helps simplify the PC buying process, by aligning PC models with the ways consumers use their systems. Depending on whether you just want to watch videos and view photos, or create and edit HD movies, VISION helps you easily identify the PC that’s right for you. At a time when consumers have more options than ever, we understand that choice alone does not provide value. The right choice provides value, and VISION helps buyers make the right choice.

From product development to point of purchase, AMD and Microsoft have worked together to ensure a painless decision process and intuitive user experience.

And with Windows 7 on VISION, everyone WINs.

Nigel Dessau
Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at AMD

His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.

Update: Added section on the special case of the ‘Games’ folder and how to setup PNG Start screen icons there.
Update: As of August 10, 2009, the requirement for the PNG Start Screen icons has changed from requiring three to one (90x90) PNG icon. This post has been updated to reflect this change. You can satisfy this requirement via the static setup described below.

If you’ve seen the any of the plethora of Windows Mobile 6.5 screen shots, likely you’d agree that it looks much better than previous versions. A component of this ‘face lift’, is support for PNG files in the Window Mobile 6.5 Start screen. Including a nicely rendered PNG file as your application icon is important to ensure the highest quality user experience across different devices.

If you plan to distribute your application via Windows Marketplace for Mobile (and I don’t know why you wouldn’t) the requirements document requires that you use a 90 x 90 Start screen icon for your application. This post will cover how to use PNG files as icons in the Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional Start screen. For information on creating PNG icons, see my previous post on Creating Custom Icons for Windows Mobile 6.5. The sample code I will be referring to in this post can be found here.

Contents:

Start Screen: Resolution / DPI and Icon Size
Registry Keys
Setup: Static or Dynamic
Cached Icons
Games Shortcuts Folder

Start Screen: Resolution / DPI and Icon Size

The Start Screen is one of the huge improvements in Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional. This replaces the Start Menu in previous versions. The improvements include: enhanced touch screen navigation (tap, tap and hold, pan, and flick) and more options for organizing and presenting Start menu items.

If you are an experienced Windows Mobile developer, you know that depending on the DPI and resolution of the device, the shell extracts the appropriately sized icon from the EXE for display in the Start screen. Windows Mobile 6.5 still supports this; however now it also supports the display of PNG file icons. The shell does not automatically select the size of the PNG icon based on the device DPI. This dynamic selection of the icon is done in a setup dll. (See dynamic setup below.) However, if you do not want to provide a separate PNG file for each DPI, you can provide one (90x90) and the shell will scale down the icon as necessary, depending on the DPI of the device. (In fact, this is the Marketplace requirement.) The table below illustrates the DPI / resolution and icon size relationship. 

Registry Keys

To have the Start screen use a PNG file instead of an icon embedded in the EXE, you need to provide the following registry entries:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Security\Shell\StartInfo\Start\Phone.lnk]
"Icon"="\Application Data\My App\newphoneicon.png"

Here are the definitions of the value pair settings:

Setup

In the next two sections, I’ll walk through two deployment scenarios, static and dynamic.

Static Setup:

You can specify the registry key as part of your CAB file configuration. Per the Marketplace requirements, I will use a 90 x 90 PNG file as the Start screen icon. In my Smart Device CAB project, I have added the following registry key:

Note: This registry key supports ‘CE strings’ and .INF file strings. Above %InstallDir% maps to the ‘\Program Files\SMS Intercept’ directory.

My CAB file also includes the (90x90) AppIcon.png and a shortcut of the same name as the registry key above (SMS Intercept.lnk). See below:

Dynamic Setup:

Detecting DPI:

Another way to configure the Start screen icon is dynamically: copying the appropriately sized PNG file based on the DPI of the device. We will use a setup dll to detect the DPI, and copy the appropriate PNG. You may know that WCELOAD (the EXE that process the CAB file) or a DLL that is loaded into its process, will return the same DPI (96) no matter the actual DPI of the device. To workaround this, we launch a very small helper EXE that quickly exits, without UI, and returns the DPI. The SDK sample ResDLL uses this technique as well as demonstrates how to install DPI specific resource DLLs. Here is the code used to detect the DPI:

int WINAPI WinMain( HINSTANCE hInstance,
                    HINSTANCE hPrevInstance,
                    LPTSTR    lpCmdLine,
                    int       nCmdShow)
{
    HDC hdc = ::GetDC(NULL);
    INT ans = ::GetDeviceCaps(hdc, LOGPIXELSX);
    ::ReleaseDC(NULL, hdc);
    return ans;
}

Copy DPI specific files:

Our dynamic CAB file contains four png files:
        45.png
        60.png
        90.png
        AppIcon.png

Based on the DPI detected, we copy the appropriate PNG file to the filename AppIcon.png. AppIcon.png is included in the CAB as a fallback in case our DPI detect logic fails. The unused icons and the DPI detect EXE are deleted.

Here is a code snippet from the sample setup dll (SetupDPI) implementing this:

wsprintf(szFile,_T("%s\\%s"), pszInstallDir, _T("\\GetRealDPI.EXE"));
// Launch DPI Detector
::CreateProcess(szFile, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, 0, NULL, NULL, NULL, &pi);
::WaitForSingleObject(pi.hProcess, 10000);
// DPI is returned in exit code of detector app
::GetExitCodeProcess(pi.hProcess, &nSystemDPI);
::CloseHandle(pi.hProcess);
::DeleteFile(szFile);

// Based on DPI, copy xx.png to AppIcon.png and delete unused files
wsprintf(szOutFile,_T("%s\\%s"), pszInstallDir, szTargetFilename);
for (INT i=0;i<ARRAYSIZE(DPI_Icon);i++) {
    wsprintf(szFile,_T("%s\\%s"), pszInstallDir, DPI_Icon[i].lpstrIconSize);
    if (DPI_Icon[i].DPI==nSystemDPI) {
        ::CopyFile(szFile, szOutFile, FALSE);
    } 
    ::DeleteFile(szFile);
}

Create Shortcut:

As mentioned, we do the post-processing of the files after the CAB is installed (in the Install_Exit function). That is, because the icon image in the Start screen is created when the shortcut is created (see the cached icons section below), we need to create the shortcut in the setup dll instead of in the CAB file as was done in the static CAB sample. Otherwise, the Start screen will use an icon extracted from the EXE instead of the PNG file. Here is the language independent code that creates the shortcut:

// Build lnk filename
PTCHAR pAppDir = wcsrchr(pszInstallDir, '\\');
TCHAR szShortcutPath[MAX_PATH];
// CSIDL_PROGRAMS == \Windows\Start Menu\Programs
SHGetSpecialFolderPath(hwndParent, szShortcutPath, CSIDL_PROGRAMS , false); 
wsprintf(szFile,_T("%s%s%s"), szShortcutPath, pAppDir, _T(".lnk"));

// Build exe filename
// CSIDL_PROGRAM_FILES == \Program Files
SHGetSpecialFolderPath(hwndParent, szShortcutPath, CSIDL_PROGRAM_FILES  , false); 
wsprintf(szOutFile,_T("\"%s%s%s%s\""), 
     szShortcutPath, pAppDir, pAppDir, _T(".exe"));

SHCreateShortcut(szFile, szOutFile);

Cached Icons

During development, you will likely want to change the PNG file as you experiment will different artwork. You will notice that if you overwrite the PNG file, the Start screen will not use the new image. This is because when the Start screen shortcut is created, the icon image is cached by the shell. Thereafter for better performance, the shell retrieves the image from the cache. The cache is rebuilt a boot time. Here is one possible workaround:

1. Delete the shortcut
2. Rename (or copy) target EXE name. For example, rename hello.exe to hello1.exe
3. Recreate shortcut pointing to new EXE name.

Here is provisioning XML that does this. You can run this using RapiConfig.exe:

<wap-provisioningdoc>
<characteristic type="FileOperation">
  <!-- Delete Shortcut -->
  <characteristic type="%CE11%\SMS Intercept.lnk" translation="install">
    <characteristic type="Delete">
    <parm name="ForceDelete"/>
    </characteristic>
  </characteristic>

<!-- Copy EXE name to new EXE -->
    <characteristic type="%CE1%\sms Intercept\sms Intercept1.exe" 
          translation="install">
    <characteristic type="Copy">
    <parm name="Source" value="%CE1%\sms Intercept\sms Intercept.exe" 
          translation="install"/>
    </characteristic>
  </characteristic>

<!-- Create new shortcut pointing to new EXE name -->
    <characteristic type="%CE11%" translation="install">
    <characteristic type="MakeDir" /> 
      <characteristic type="SMS Intercept.lnk" translation="install">
        <characteristic type="Shortcut">
        <parm name="Source" value="%CE1%\sms Intercept\sms Intercept1.exe" 
              translation="install" /> 
        </characteristic>
      </characteristic>
    </characteristic>
</characteristic>
</wap-provisioningdoc>

Games Shortcuts Folder

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Security\Shell\StartInfo\Start\Games\Phone.lnk]
"Icon"="\Application Data\My App\newphoneicon.png"

// Set this to true to create shortcut and 
// registry key in the localized 'Games' Folder
BOOL g_bCreateInGamesFolder=FALSE;

Conclusion

You should now understand how to configure your CAB file projects to include PNG files as icons in the Windows Mobile 6.5 Start screen.

For a list of frequently asked questions on this topic see here: Start Screen PNG Icon FAQ

Game developers can really improve gaming requirements this time around as suitable interface devices have become more advanced and appealing today. With that in mind, 3Dconnexion introduces the SpacePilot PRO to provide easier access to the power of professional 3D applications, fewer interruptions in the design workflow, and superior comfort.

Specifically, the SpacePilot PRO features a new color LCD Workflow Assistant, second-generation QuickView Navigation technology, Intelligent Function keys, and an improved design for enhanced comfort and control. With better assistance and graphic, you can expect better graphic rendering and output based on the new tools available in the market today such as that of this one by 3Dconnexion.

“3Dconnexion’s 3D mice have rewritten the rules on the way design engineers and professionals interact with 3D environments,” said Dieter Neujahr, president of 3Dconnexion. “Our new SpacePilot PRO builds on our market-leading industry experience, delivering the most powerful 3D mouse we’ve ever made. It enables increased performance that ultimately results in better designs, created in less time.”

Source

If you are a gamer, you will notice that through the years, each video card advances by the day. The reason behind this is not really for bragging rights but more of satisfying the demand for gaming requirements set forth by game developers for the resolution requirements to fully enjoy a worthy entertaining game.

Many of the desktop computers purchased in the past two years can still play games fairly well with even the chance of running at higher resolution provided they get a video card upgrade.

Graphics or video cards have made some outstanding performance gains the the past year that allow them to play games at higher resolutions and detail than ever before. With monitor prices dropping for larger 24-inch displays with their 1920×1200 resolutions, gamers will probably find older PCs having a harder time keeping up frame rates or even playing at these resolutions.

Thankfully, it is very easy to upgrade a computer’s graphics cards. If you are looking to give your system a boost in the 3D graphics arena, check out my selections for the best performance graphics cards if you are looking for higher resolutions or my best budget 3D graphics cards if you are looking to do some upgrades but spend a bit less.

Source