PillarSoft

Nothing really earth shaking here, just a tool to flip pix. ShowTime/2 is a 32 bit multi-threaded background changer and slide show tool.

Some of ShowTimes' features include:

• Change OS/2 desktop backgrounds on cue (timer).
• Run a slide show of your bitmaps in a folder.
• Showtime/2 places the bitmap work in a separate thread.
• Set the timer from 1 second to 24 hours in 1 second increments.
• Show bitmaps in order or in random order.
• Run bitmaps in "Normal", "Tiled" or "Scaled" mode. (see notes below)
• Set grid size in "Scaled" mode.
• Run bitmap cycles or shows automatically at startup.
• Drive trees and large listboxes make choosing files easy.
• Save as many different shows as you like.
• Make solitary bitmap changes by double clicking file.
• Change the background color on the Desktop or the slideshow folder.
• Set priority level of program in WPS.

ShowTime/2 was originally meant to run bitmaps that can be "Scaled" to the background. This means that you will want to choose bitmaps that are in a 4:3 ratio or so. The standard 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768 are all a 4:3 ratio. Sizes like 512x384, 400x300 or 160x120 are also the same ratio as well as most scans of photographs in "landscape" mode will "scale" well. Other bitmaps, for example, a scan of a photo in "portrait" mode will appear distorted as they are "stretched to fit the desktop dimensions. So if you use a photo of your mother-in-law in portrait mode she will appear to be *very* wide. :-)

Support has been added for "Tiled" and "Normal" formats after some testing here. It seemed to me before I had even thought about doing this project that I had heard there was a bit of a problem in the past with some bitmaps in one of these two modes (I don't remember which one). In testing here with ShowTime/2 though, I have had no such problems. I hope I had just heard wrong and find that there is no such problem. In the meantime please let us know if anything of this nature crops up. Enjoy!

POTENTIAL PROBLEM

Ever notice the difference in your system speed when you change from a *huge* background bitmap to a smaller one? On a marginal system it is very noticable. Just changing the default Warp bitmap from *.bmp form to a *.jpg makes the file much smaller and the system noticably faster. If you're using one of those 1 meg bitmaps on a small (RAM) system, it may pay to convert it or to use a smaller one.

Besides the performance hit associated with large bitmaps. Aparently OS/2 stores desktop and folder bitmaps in memory (the swapfile) during any session. That wouldn't be a major problem except that the swapfile never seems to release any of them. If you are viewing slides, for example, the swapfile will store them so it doesn't have to access the disk again to view them the next time around. If you continue to view different bitmaps the swapfile will continue to add them and grow thinking they may be needed in the future. Not a big deal for most people as they shutdown daily and the swapfile is resized but for people like me that don't shut down their systems, this is could present a problem. It may mean rebooting every once in a while to allow the swapper to resize itself.

While doing other things I have let 5 bitmaps cycle for just over a week with no change to my original swapfile size. Once your bitmaps have been loaded for the first time, your memory requirements (swapfile) should not change.

If this becomes a problem for you, you may not want to use this utility.

IN THE FUTURE?

These items may or may not be addressed in the future as I have bigger fish to fry right now. No promises, I'm just acknowledging a couple of things that I would see as useful. * Add an actual graphics window for viewing slideshows which, in turn, would allow more control over memory releases at program end. * Duh... I've added some things already and can't think of anything else off hand. I really haven't played with graphics that much in the past so I am interested in hearing what you would like to see in ShowTime/2.