Jan, that was my plan all along - to be able to override and customize the About menu item in SysMenu. Its a great way to build a quick and dirty About box (to be sure) ... In terms of whether its allowable and all the crap ... of course its allowable ... Kixforms is freeware ... it always (and forever) will be free. Its a "tool" - like a hammer is a "tool" ... and when one sees a beautiful house, who stops to really ask what kind of hammer was used. The credit really goes to the Carpenter, the one that skillfully used the hammer. Being able to see "the house that was built" is all the credit or thanks that I'll ever need.

I not into that "give credit" "must show credit" "need to have credit" type legal beagle stuff ... I even don't have any of that "this is freeware, use at you own risk, I'm not responsible for this and that type jargon" in there (should I ?) ... We're all adults here and the terms and conditions attached to "Freeware" are fairly well known in our industry, no ?

But (isn't there always a but?) ... that leads me to Redbacks suggestion ... about support for GIF's and Animated GIF's and JPEGS, etc ...

Windows has native (builtin, free) support for only the BMP file format, and for animation, the AVI file format. I could (easily) incorporate a new control that supported AVI files ... but the question begs ... is that a good, commonly used file format to support. I like JPGS better then BMP's any day of the week.

But here's the real issue: to the best of my knowledge, GIFS & JPEGS and some other formats are proprietory technologies. They were developed by third party vendors and entail licensing (money) issues. They are included with Visual Basic because we PAY for Visual Studio, and I guess MS has a licensing agreement with these vendors.

Since Kixforms will always be free. I'm in a bit of bind for two reasons:

1) Obviously, I don't want to pay for or enter into any kind of licensing aggreement for GIFS and JPEGS.

2) I really don't want to add any huge runtime library requirement into Kixforms (embedded inside the DLL or standalone, like the VB runtimes).

So where does that leave us ... well, what I am doing is looking closely at the Freeware aspects of these file formats. What that means (I think) is that under certain circumstances, I can incorporate JPEGS and GIFS into Forms, but I will have to do so under Open Source and GPL licensing (whatever all that means) ... I've already started looking into it and it seems promising.

So bottom line answer is ... if I can find the code, and incorporate it freely (free) into forms, these features will happen. My "gut feeling" at this point is that it will happen.

-Shawn

[ 26. August 2002, 18:42: Message edited by: Shawn ]