• eXposer now adds the documents it opens or saves to the systems recent docments list.
• fixed some translation bugs, some labels were inconsitent and some were even accidentally swapped with the wrong controls.
• fixed a bug that caused denoising frames in the Capture module to not work most of the times.

• the Recent Files entries in the Open menu have their Tracker icons again (as in 1.9.0).
• the external editor programs (for images and sounds) can now be set in the program settings and are specified via MIME signature. The icon of the preferred program can be dropped on the text control.

• fixed a bug in eXposers audio node, that caused a complete system lockup on some computers with certain soundcards installed.
• non-existent files are no longer added to eXposer's recent files menu.

• the Render Settings menu item moved to the Settings menu.

• fixed a bug in eXposers audio node, that caused a complete system lockup on some computers with certain soundcards installed.
• non-existent files are no longer added to eXposer's recent files menu.

• the Render Settings menu item moved to the Settings menu.

• fixed a bug that occured sometimes and lost the render settings
• significantly decreased launch time by tracking down a certain bug that didn't cause damage otherwise. However this bug could cause another problem when the render settings where lost - it would reset the render size to 1x1 pixels, and rendering would fail for no apparent reason.
• fixed a potential problem, where concurrent saving and/or loading of XML files (X-Sheet documents and various program settings) could result in a crash and data loss.
• fixed a bug where pressing "Back" in the Capture window reverted to the wrong frame if the "Step" value was greater than 1. The capture history was also remembered wrongly in the x-sheet file in this case.
• Ingo fixed many memory leaks.
• if overlays are already in use by another application, eXposer now falls back to using normal bitmaps for fullscreen display.

• when the rendering of time code is turned on, it is now visible in the preview of the render status window.
• implemented the recent files menu myself. the BeOS implementation had a few disadventages. I guess my implementation does too, but they are probably less obvious.
• an x-sheet window requesting something to be loaded will show a spinning barber pole, when something is already loading elsewhere. Previously, there was no visible feedback at all, that loading would start eventually.
• moved settings menu items from "Edit" menu into a separate menu "Settings". this is where the language is picked as well.
• eXposer now remembers if bubble help was enabled.
• wheel scrolling is working on the view over which the mouse pointer is hovering. previously, it acted on the focused view only. should be more convinient now.
• drastic changes to keyboard navigation: no matter what view has keyboard focus, the playback shortcuts will now always work.
• rewrote some GUI components to allow for on the fly language switching. the look of menu fields has changed to having fixed size menu fields everywhere. I think it somehow looks more clean.
• if eXposer's icon is doubleclicked, though the program is already running, it opens a new document instead of just doing nothing.
• if the Capture window starts and stops the video according to its active status (Automatic mode), it now prevents the video from halting when it is showing the Device Settings panel. (otherwise you would be doing changes there and not see the effect immediately.)

• localization. Enlish and German are available and can be switched on the fly.
• the color space for rendering is now selectable in the RenderSettings panel. the additional colorspaces are only supported by the RAW codec (as of now), but they are useful there, when you want to save some disk bandwidth and file size. For example, the YCbCr color space uses only half the bandwidth of 32 bit RGB, while having almost the same quality. The 24 bit RGB format has no quality loss at all, while saving one quarter the bandwidth and file size.

• fixed a bug that occured sometimes and lost the render settings
• significantly decreased launch time by tracking down a certain bug that didn't cause damage otherwise. However this bug could cause another problem when the render settings where lost - it would reset the render size to 1x1 pixels, and rendering would fail for no apparent reason.
• fixed a potential problem, where concurrent saving and/or loading of XML files (X-Sheet documents and various program settings) could result in a crash and data loss.
• fixed a bug where pressing "Back" in the Capture window reverted to the wrong frame if the "Step" value was greater than 1. The capture history was also remembered wrongly in the x-sheet file in this case.
• Ingo fixed many memory leaks.
• if overlays are already in use by another application, eXposer now falls back to using normal bitmaps for fullscreen display.

• when the rendering of time code is turned on, it is now visible in the preview of the render status window.
• implemented the recent files menu myself. the BeOS implementation had a few disadventages. I guess my implementation does too, but they are probably less obvious.
• an x-sheet window requesting something to be loaded will show a spinning barber pole, when something is already loading elsewhere. Previously, there was no visible feedback at all, that loading would start eventually.
• moved settings menu items from "Edit" menu into a separate menu "Settings". this is where the language is picked as well.
• eXposer now remembers if bubble help was enabled.
• wheel scrolling is working on the view over which the mouse pointer is hovering. previously, it acted on the focused view only. should be more convinient now.
• drastic changes to keyboard navigation: no matter what view has keyboard focus, the playback shortcuts will now always work.
• rewrote some GUI components to allow for on the fly language switching. the look of menu fields has changed to having fixed size menu fields everywhere. I think it somehow looks more clean.
• if eXposer's icon is doubleclicked, though the program is already running, it opens a new document instead of just doing nothing.
• if the Capture window starts and stops the video according to its active status (Automatic mode), it now prevents the video from halting when it is showing the Device Settings panel. (otherwise you would be doing changes there and not see the effect immediately.)

• localization. Enlish and German are available and can be switched on the fly.
• the color space for rendering is now selectable in the RenderSettings panel. the additional colorspaces are only supported by the RAW codec (as of now), but they are useful there, when you want to save some disk bandwidth and file size. For example, the YCbCr color space uses only half the bandwidth of 32 bit RGB, while having almost the same quality. The 24 bit RGB format has no quality loss at all, while saving one quarter the bandwidth and file size.

• spotted quite a large memory leak in renderer when rendering white special frames.
• special white frames are now fully white when rendering in full color mode.
• solved problem with Render Settings window taking you to the wrong workspace when it was showing on that one before.
• hopefully fixed a crashing bug in relation with naming the undo/redo menu items

• Render Settings menu entry will not be disabled anymore when the settings are showing. because they might be hidden underneath other windows, it is more convenient to have the menu entry enabled at all times.
• relaxed the conditions for dropping frames a bit to work arround a problem on very fast computers
• added option in Global Settings to enable/disable syncing the animation to the monitors vertical retrace
• added compiler options for better optimization

• added "Automatic" mode (for lack of a better name) to Video menu in Capture window. When active, it stops and restarts the video feed whenever the window looses focus and becomes the active window again. It's just a convinience when you work in the X-Sheet window but leave the Capture window open, now it doesn't waste precious CPU.
• added Pause button to Render Job and Export Bitmap Sequence windows
• added support for overlay bitmaps in BDirectWindow full screen mode. If your grafixs driver supports overlays (currently B_YCbCr422 only!), that should be the best option for viewing full screen. The switch to full screen is almost instantaniouns and the animation is synced to the monitor refresh!
  In Global Settings, activate BDirectWindow, use resolution same as workspace and scale animation to fit the screen.
• significant speed up in fullscreen toggle when the fullscreen resolution is the same as workspace and the mode is BDirectWindow.

• fixed bug in capture module when denoising was off. the color filter was applied twice.
• fixed flipping horizontally/vertically when denoising.
• fixed bug in drag'n'drop code for replacing items with the dragged ones. if the items were dropped right on the beginning of an item, that item was not properly removed and reappeared the next time the x-sheet was loaded with a duration of one frame. this could mess up the timing of the animation considerably.

• moved "About" menu item to Help menu and added "Close" item to File menu.
• render job does not show date of finish time anymore if it's the same day.
• improved copy and paste. if the selection is contiguous, it can now be replaced by the items in the clipboard by pasting.
• added a "Retry" button to the alert the render job shows when something goes wrong. for example, this allows for making some space on a full volume and conveniently continue rendering.
• improved the keyboard control for the item duration a lot. the delay for applying the change as final is now interupted when the selection changes. among other conveniences it means you can now work much quicker.
• improved the color filter slider in the capture module. it now features little handles to adjust the values. clicking besides any handle will move the closest handle one step towards the click. the old behaviour was too insensitive.
• improved the mp3 playback, but we're not quite there yet.
• updated "About" information.

• added progress report to status bar (in case something takes a little time).
• added ability to render a time code string on top of the video when exporting to a media file.

• small fixes here and there.
• the two new buttons "Preview Size" and "Capture Size" in the Export Bitmap Sequence panel now actually work. completely forgot about those.... they were supposed to adjust the bitmap size in the panel to the respective size of the x-sheets settings, which they now do.
• fixed some memory leaks.
• fixed loading of settings if denoising was off in Capture module.
• a stupid bug prevented eXposer from using the Raw Video codec to render an animation.
• the specified copyright string is now properly written to rendered files.
• fixed wrong guestimated finish time when rendering the audio track of a media file.
• when changing the frame rate of an animation, sound was being played back with the old frame rate, meaning the visual position in the sound was different from the actual position being played.
• FireWire functionality was lost somewhere along the way. buying a BeOS compatible card, and having access to a first-class camera allowed me to experiment with DV and the process should be smoother now than it used to be even when it did work...
• fixed a small glitch when quitting eXposer when the X-Sheet was not saved. if you chose to save it from the warning dialog, but then canceled the file dialog, eXposer would not quit, as expected. however, it would quit after saving the x-sheet the next time.
• items having been renamed in the source media list, did not get updated with the new name in the x-sheet.

• thanks to Ingo, we now have a PowerPC version! there is no assembler optimized playback, like there is MMX support for x86, so don't raise your eyebrows at the performance. eXposer has been tested on a PPC604e at 240MHz. preview resolution has to be pretty low for smooth playback. the rest seems alright. the Capture module has not been tested due to lack of hardware, but we will further investigate. please get in contact with us about any problems you encounter.
• three buttons have been added to the Render Settings panel. you can now confirm, cancel or revert the dialogs contents.
• improved performance in Capture module.
• improved RenderJob window. cleaned up the information it is showing.
• sound items can now be any duration in the x-sheet. the limitation to the actual duration of the sound is removed, which should be more convenient.
• improved some error dialogs and added some new ones
• rewrote rendering engine to support more pixel formats. it is probably a bit slower now, but in the future, eXposer should offer rendering other color spaces than 32 bits per pixel only. the raw video encoder for example really writes 32 bits instead of 24 only, even though eXposer transports no information in the alpha channel. i tested this, and indeed you save quite some bandwidth feeding it 24 bit data. most other codecs don't take 24 bits as input, only the indeo5 rtm codec does, so until i figure out a smooth way to deal with this in the interface, the limit to 32 bits per pixel is still in place.
• minor changes and some updates to the documentation. there is a lot of work to be done on that front yet...
• since eXposer saves references to source media in its project files, it is always a problem if you move the source files to a new location in your file system, which includes renaming one of the parent folders. however, if the source media is within a subfolder or in the same folder as the x-sheet file, eXposer handles renaming or moving of any of the parent folders much better now, in fact, the user shouldn't even notice. this makes it much easier, to just zip up a project and send it to someone else or to change the folder structure in which a project is located.
• updated libwarpsharp to hopefully perform as expected on PPC. Please email me if you encounter problems.

• the eXposer distribution now contains a tool called "blend", which can be used to generated a sequence of blended bitmaps from two source images. see "eXposer/Tools/Command Line" for more details. This tool has a couple of limitations, namely it does not blend colors optimally, it has the same weekness seen in many programs, even in PhotoShop: blending a medium red into a light green will have a darker brown as intermediate step. the second limitation is simply that it cannot blend a sequences of source images into a sequence of dest images, only two still images can be blended. both of these limitations will be adressed in the future. i hope to find the time to code a graphical "Animators Army Knife" type of tool that combines the functionality of the current command line tools.

• fixed sometimes broken display of sound files.
• fixed playback of mono sound files.
• fixed playback of sound files with sample format other than 16 bit signed integer.
• put bubble help texts on every control in the new Export Bitmap Sequence panel.
• minor speed improvements
• removed small bug that prevented loading of image files by dropping them on the x-sheet. it was supposed to be possible to load images, sound or other x-sheets by dragging them from Tracker and dropping them anywhere on the window, not only on the source media containers. however, dropping them on the x-sheet did not work. i corrected this, though the files do not get inserted into the x-sheet itself.
• eXposer now survives a media_server restart.
• the info area underneath the x-sheet produces no more ugly grafix.

• speed up in playback routine. if the animation is composed of images with a duration of two frames each, playback uses almost 50% less CPU. if it is composed of images with one frame duration each, there is no speed up at all.
• the XML documents eXposer saves now keep accuracy of floating point values to five digits after the decimal point (was two only, which could cause problems).
• improved GUI layout in the Capture module.
• changed the info view underneath the x-sheet a bit: it displays the selection duration or the selection span duration (which is different if the selection is not contiguous), depending on what is more interesting.
  additionally, it now displays the total duration of the x-sheet and by clicking the info view, you can switch between display of durations in frames or seconds.
• additionally to deleting items with the delete key, you can now delete levels with that key as well. what you delete depends on what was clicked last. like if you click a level and select it, you will delete it when pressing the delete key right after the click. if you click into the x-sheet, the delete key will focus its destructive powers on that again.
• the capture module now connects to the video devices default format in case the requested format produced a Bad Media Format error.
• sounds edited in ColdCut (launched from within eXposer) will now properly reload in eXposer when saved in ColdCut.
• using the All and Unused buttons to select items in a source media list view will give keyboard focus to the list view.
• improved error report when something goes wrong in some parts of the application.
• improved resource usage. settings window and duration panel are not running the whole time, only when needed. additionally, their position on screen is remembered in the document when saved or in the default settings/templates.
• made sure that no window is ever popping up off screen.
• cleaned up GUI, especially in many panels.

• none this time.

• you can now click the mouse button to return from full screen to window mode for the new BWindowScreen mode (only worked in BDirectWindow mode before).
• fixed scrubbing through the animation when the x-sheet was in follow mode. it sometimes jumped an unexpected number of frames.
• rendering the white special frame was not reproducing the correct aspect ratio of the animation. For example, if you rendered a movie with 4:3 format, eXposer rendered completely white frames, even though the animation might have had an aspect ratio of 1.85:1.
• when you clicked into the frames column to set the start or end frame for the playback range, the center that made the click either set the start or end frame, was offset. so you were setting the endframe much more likely than the start frame, because the area for the end frame was much larger. now it's even as it should be.
• sometimes (always?) the startframe for the playback range was not set correctly when openening an x-sheet that had the startframe on something else than the first frame.
• fixed some crashing bugs when loading the sound track from a media file (happend mostly with movie files only). some codecs return a length of the track, that's just not true. eXposer does not crash anymore and loads all of the sound track until the end.
• moving items in the same level was buggy when the new position of the items was under their current position. (meaning you moved items down, to a later position). in combination with undo and redo, eXposer would become so confused about this whole issue, it could even crash!

• some changes to controlling playback:
  on the buttons, you can use the right mouse button now. The buttons that start playback (either forward or backward) from the start or endframe, pressing the right mouse button will result in starting playback or changing the direction at the current frame. for the playback/pause button, it will result in toggling the playback direction. for the step buttons, it will cause stepping four frames at a time instead of one. you can also press the shift key while you click on the step buttons to move faster.
  keyboard control has changed too: besides a new underlying technique to repeat the stepping when you keep holding down the left or right arrow key (smoother), you can press the shift key to step double as fast. when you release the shift key, it will go slower again. additionally, the cursor keys now double as a fast forward and fast backward feature: when you keep holding the shift key down and press the same step key more than once, each time you will move faster, until you move 16 frames at a time (16 times normal playback speed) and then you will move one frame at a time again. as soon as you press a step key without holding down the shift key, the normal speed is set back. also, when you switch the direction while still holding down the shift key, you will keep the current speed, the speed only changes when you press the same step key more than once.
• audio buffer size isn't fixed anymore, eXposer now accepts a suggestion from the media server. maybe this fixes audio hickups on some systems.
• the source media list views no longer ignore the second and third mouse buttons in the column headers.
• if something goes wrong rendering to a media file, eXposer now shows an error alert instead of just quitting the rendering job. the error was printed to the terminal, as is still the case with many other errors that can happen. :-\
• cleaned up GUI, especially in the Capture Window. Also fixed some problems with some of the custom GUI classes that eXposer uses. exchanged default BeOS sliders in the Capture Window for the new space saving ones we did.

• export bitmap sequence is finally there. the config panel for this feature is quite bloated, though I feel all of the features it provides come in handy at one point in time. but it definitely needs some clean up. the biggest feature that the bitmap sequence export provides is warpsharp scaling of the resulting images. it might be confusing at first why you have to set the size of the images and additionally a scaling factor to use warpscaling. why not just the size? well, that's because of how the mixing of different levels works: eXposer loads each bitmap at a given frame and makes sure they all have the same size before mixing them together. bilinear interpolation is used for this. if it used warpsharping for each bitmap at each frame, results would take much too long and would not even look satisfactory. it is much better to only sharp the final image. ideally, all your captured images would have the same size, which you would enter in the size field (if they don't have the same size, just enter the biggest size you've got). then, you give the warpsharp option a scaling factor that determines the final size of the output bitmaps.
  the other settings are mostly for convenience. the FileName Generation settings should give you quite some flexibility for all cases. the Startframe option is there, so that you can render different scenes into the same folder and have the numbers continue correctly.
  the General settings provide some interesting options for duplicated frames. those happen if the duration of an item in a level is more than one frame. you can then for example render this item as one bitmap and links to this bitmap so that the numbering and the files are contiguous without wasting harddisk space and render time.
  the warpsharp settings themselves are almost selfexplanatory, except for Lambda and Mu. don't ask me why they are called this way, the defaults are good for a scaling factor of 2.667, which produces 2k resultion (cinema quality) bitmaps from originally PAL sized capture frames (768 to 2048)!

• some mono audio files sound completely broken and/or are displayed broken.
• mp3 audio files sound less broken than mono files, but nevertheless they sound broken too.
• when rendering the white special item in non-preview mode, the white will be no full white, but an almost white gray.

this update includes... (sorry for the tech terms here and there)

• render job used to crash if rendering less than 3 frames
• full screen mode was not indicating dropped frames
• fixed a nasty crash when dealing with sound items in the x-sheet. the drawing routine was buggy when scaling up.
• fixed wrong default duration of sounds dropped into empty part of the x-sheet to create a new sound level there.

• render settings window completely rewritten
  • all media file formats and all codecs are visible at all times
  • file format precedes codec choices
  • (un)available codecs depend on file format and current settings like image size
  • the presets are now independant from the current settings
• introduced gui object to input frame dimensions and changed all settings windows to use it
• got rid of the feature where eXposer displayed the two source item lists besides each other if there was enough room.
• full screen mode now uses the least possible resolution to display the animation as big as possible (read that again - it makes sense :-)
• "empty" cell does not display black icon anymore to better suit it's ... uhm ... emptiness
• x-sheet follows current frame if playback is paused when in follow mode
• improved startup speed by validating the keyfile in an extra thread
• changed auto scrolling of the x-sheet a bit:
  it used to annoy the user by not scrolling when you accidentally left the x-sheet region and moved the mouse back in to continue scrolling. it only does that now on its right side (ie. it does not start scrolling to the right at once when you drag something from the source media containers and enter the x-sheet from the right side).
• changed the drag'n'drop behaviour of the x-sheet somewhat drastically. it now takes frames as drop positions instead of positions inbetween already existing items. the old mode is still available by pressing the command key while dragging. this should make it a lot easier to insert items at any position in the x-sheet. if you drop items onto an existing item, that item will be split in two and the new items will be inserted inbetween.

• additionally to what is said above, you can also overwrite existing items in the x-sheet with the ones you drop. you can switch into the overwriting mode by holding down your control key.

  note on the above:
  the mapping of "control" and "command" key depend on your Menu preference settings. when you prefer "CTL as Shortcut Key", then the "control" key is the one labeled "Alt" on your keyboard. your "command" key is then the key labeled "Ctrl". if you have the setting "ALT as Shortcut Key" then it's the other way arround!

• eXposer weights the red, green and blue components not equally anymore when converting images to gray scale. now the right proportions are used according to the actual luminance of those components.

• pressing 'f' will toggle the x-sheet's follow mode (x-sheet needs to have keyboard focus)
• source media list views now remember their layout and sorting settings
• eXposer displays a "Loading..." splash screen to give better visual feedback when x-sheet documents are doubleclicked.
• A new fullscreen mode utilizes the BWindowScreen direct graphics board interface. This is actually a deprecated API and some newer graphics board drivers do not support it. In that case eXposer "falls back" to using the newer BDirectWindow API. The new mode synchronizes to the vertical retrace much better in that it uses offscreen rendering and page flipping.
• inserting items into the x-sheet from the source media containers by using the cut/copy and paste shortcuts now works. however, you cannot paste source items into a source item container (ie. from one document into another one, you have to drag those items into the x-sheet of the other document directly - as before).
• you can now doubleclick images in the x-sheet and in the source media container. the paricular image will be shown for about 1.5 seconds in the preview. additionally, if you doubleclick an item in the x-sheet, it will be selected and shown in the source media container. this should make locating and/or identifying particular frames much easier.
• introduced a global settings dialog: you can define
  • if and how eXposer caches the loaded bitmaps
  • the visual quality of the sound items (horizontal resolution)
  • if you want eye-candy drag'n'drop or rather (fast performance) dotted rectangles
  • the full screen mode, resolution and if to scale the animation to fit the screen (BDirectWindow full screen mode only).
• to make the drag'n'drop quality consistent, the "beautiful" drag'n'drop mode is now available for source items as well.
• eXposer can now cache the loaded bitmaps in BFS attributes, which can greatly reduce the clutter in your folders. you can pick the method of caching in the new global settings panel.

• cursor navigation is not on par with the changes in regard to drag'n'drop. the cursor can still only be inbetween items, not at any frame.
• the new BWindowScreen full screen mode is always limited to 60Hz, which can be suboptimal: the monitor refresh rate should depend on the speed of your movie to guaranty the smoothest possible playback. we're looking into this. To work arround this limitation, you can install Hertz from BeBits. This is a graphics driver wrapper that let's you configure the refresh rate for the various full screen resolutions.
• eXposer still does not survive a media_server crash (or restart)
• the little info area underneath the x-sheet can produce some ugly graphics if the x-sheet is not wide enough
• eXposer's documentation is still at the 1.0 level :-\