Cool Captions Features
by-art.com: cool captions: Features

Introduction.

Cool Captions is a slide show type screen saver with 3D text/sprite animations, music and video playback, and an ability to create standalone single file screen savers. While the version 3.0 adds multimedia playback and creation capabilities, the spice of this tool is still in it's animation features. The screen saver competes in several categories such as ss creation tools, slide show, 3D, and multimedia screen savers.

Slide show capabilities.

Cool Captions recognizes JPG, PNG and BMP background images. Users can select images from various folders, organize their order, add animated 3D text captions. Either the whole folder or any number of files can be selected into the play list at the same time. Thumbnail preview windows both in open dialogs and at the file list configuration page are provided. Users may deselect images from the show without removing them from the list. There is no a limit on the number of images, but it will be difficult to arrange a couple of hundreds of items in a small list view window. The file list has a link to the by-art.com gallery page.

As an option, the screen saver may switch off the display of background images, and show a black screen or the desktop contents. Large images may be shrinked to fit the screen. There is no a scale feature available due to the bad quality of up-scaled bitmaps. Small bitmaps are automatically tiled to produce a better visual effect. The shuffle option is present: the play list is shuffled once before the start of the playback so that each image is guaranteed to display before the next loop. Transition effects are present by default and are selected randomly during the playback. Users are not able to configure this feature.

Animation and 3D capabilities.

The screen saver supports 3D motion display of animated objects (sprites). Sprites have a very common format so that users can create their own animations, or use ready sprites. Any BMP or PNG image with vertically stitched frames are automatically recognized by Cool Captions as an animation. Users do not need to specify the number of frames or frame dimensions of a such image. For example, Cool Captions recognizes ShooltzSaver sprites automatically. There are two limitations: the width of a sprite frame should not exceed 320 pixels, and the number of frames should not be less than 5. Sprites in the CC gallery are compressed into a specific subset of MNG but internally are the same vertical slide films. There is no MNG compiler available yet.

Inexperienced users are able to quickly add a personal touch to their copy of the screen saver using single frame masked BMP or PNG images as their own floating logos.

The distinct feature of Cool Captions is it's capability to display true 3D motion of sprites with scaling. Other animated screen savers like ShooltzSaver or Axialis Professional Screen Saver Producer display flat motions only. Users can choose from a set of 10 predefined orbits, and select the number and variety of sprites. A thumbnail motion preview window is available.

Unlike other animation screen savers, Cool Caption fully supports variable transparency of sprites, what significantly reduces the jagged edges effect and allows direct use of animations which have been created by 3D modeling software applications.

3D text captions are a specific kind of animations which use runtime rendered beveled textured font. 3D text has a separate predefined set of motions. Either random selection or a single 3D text motion can be specified by a user. There is no a thumbnail preview window for 3D text motions.

Users may organize animations with the help of the Sprites file list which has the same capabilities as the Image file list: add files/folders with preview, remove items, select/deselect, move up/down, shuffle, open the gallery, and preview.

3D text.

Background images may have individual 3D text captions. The configuration dialog has a special 3D Text page which serves to define parameters of font: the type face, size, bold-italic, color or texture fill, bevel geometry and lighting conditions. The preview sample window is available, which may be used to save the beveled sample text to a PNG file with transparency for use as a WEB page logo (current versions of Internet Explorer do not support alpha feature of PNG format, so it is necessary to convert the file into GIF using paint software. Will it be available in IE6?).

Multimedia capabilities.

Cool Captions supports playback of midi (MID), sound (WAV), music (MP3 etc.) and video (MOV, AVI etc.) files. The number of formats depends on the number of MCI drivers presented at the user's computer. Cool Captions does not carry it's own multimedia codecs due to the size and compatibility reasons. An installation of the latest version of Microsoft Windows Media Player is therefore recommended. Multimedia playback is performed in the full screen mode of the screen saver. The Multimedia file list has a playback button for a quick preview. Video files in the full screen mode are scaled down to obscure no more than 1/4 of the screen area. Files play in a sequence with a 5 second delay between them.

Users may organize files with the help of the Multimedia file list which has the same capabilities as the Image file list: add files/folders (without preview), remove items, select/deselect, move up/down, shuffle.

Create standalone screen savers.

Version 3.0 introduces a capability of creating standalone screen savers. Depending on the current screen saver configuration, selected images, sprites and multimedia files are compressed into a single screen saver file. Users may set the copyright notice, e-mail and home page addresses for the display in the About box of a new screen saver. There is an option to create a self-installable .exe file for distribution. Cool Captions is targeted for inexperienced users mainly, therefore compiled CC screen savers do not have configurable options and do not store information on a third party computer. By the author's decision there is no uninstall option, users are reminded that they may remove the screen saver by deleting the file itself. Please write us if you believe that the full featured Control Panel uninstall capability is necessary for custom CC savers.

Before the creation of a new package, Cool Captions displays the estimated file size of a new screen saver. Some files (MID and BMP) are compressed during the compilation, therefore the resulting size may be slightly less that displayed. The minimal size of the standalone screen saver is 130KB.

The compiled package does not contain the font file but it's name only. The correct typeface is not guaranteed to display correctly on a 3rd party computer.

Due to compatibility reasons the multimedia playback on third party computers can not be guaranteed. There are also numerous copyright issues. Authors do not recommend to include multimedia files into the custom screen saver, but leave that for users to make their own decision.

Other features

Cool Captions configuration sets, including all file lists, screen saver and 3D font settings, can be stored to and loaded from a disk.

 

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