Alchemy Mindworks

Having long ago lost count of the number of USB storage devices that litter our offices, we’ve learned how to manage the beasts. The list of these things list includes not only USB flash drives and external hard drives, but toys like iPods, which are also effectively USB storage.

One of the perennial issues surrounding these devices is the assignment of drive letters to them. Windows does this automatically, of course, which is why you’ll probably need to know to manually override its behavior in time.

Continue reading ‘Windows Adjustments: Changing a USB Device’s Drive Letter’ »

Periodically, Windows will wake itself up and upon displaying its desktop, open a message bubble to warn you that there are unused icons on your desktop. Chances are you’re aware of this situation, as Windows will have alerted you to the same observation previously. In some cases, Windows is actually correct in this belief, but its mechanism for determining whether a desktop icon is superfluous to its needs is somewhat flawed – allowing it to stir its wizard and remove the errant icons can be a really bad call.

Continue reading ‘Windows Adjustments: Unused Desktop Icons Bubble’ »

While its sounds like a fragment of dialog from a 1980s science fiction flick shot on a budget in an unnamed eastern European country, alpha channels are actually a profoundly useful feature of graphics… as long as you know what they’re really up to.

Continue reading ‘An Introduction to Alpha-Channel Animations’ »

Many of the Alchemy Mindworks applications – including GIF Construction Set Professional, Graphic Workshop Professional, Animation Workshop, PNG/MNG Construction Set and Presentation Wizard – have internal Paint functions that call Windows Paint. At least, they do if it’s been installed.

Should you click on Paint in one of our applications and discover that nothing much happens – or if the application hangs – you’re probably looking at a total absence of the Windows Paint application.

Continue reading ‘Quest for the Missing Paint’ »

It’s often convenient to force existing animations to have specific fixed dimensions, that is, to matt them within a colored rectangle. This is easily to accomplish in GIF Construction Set Professional, although the process of doing so might not be immediately obvious.

Continue reading ‘Matting Animations in GIF Construction Set’ »

Web page frames having clean rounded corners are fashionable at the moment. While you can arrive at them with considerable work using conventional tools, you can create them effortlessly using Graphic Workshop Professional 3. Most of the tricky aspects of getting all the pixels in these complex web objects to line up correctly fade to inconsequence once you have the procedure by the throat.

Continue reading ‘The Art of the Round Corner Box’ »

The Alchemy Mindworks 3D Effects #1 plugin can create rotating three-dimensional objects with your choice of still graphics affixed to their faces. Adding pictures to these objects is easy, and if you understand what’s going on behind the curtain, your pictures can look sharp and sophisticated.

Continue reading ‘Applying Images to Animated 3D Objects’ »

The banner advertisement for the Alchemy Mindworks Text Effects #4 plugin has received considerable comment since it appeared in the banner rotation at our various web pages – and no small degree of interest in how it was created. The procedure was elegantly simple, but perhaps not immediately obvious. You’ll probably be able to use it for your own banners.

Continue reading ‘How the Text Effects 4 Plugin Banner was Built’ »

Depending upon who you listen to, there may be up to a billion people connected to the world wide web as you read this. Don’t get too excited – they have in excess of 100 million web pages to look at, according to a 2008 report by Domain Tools. If yours in one of them, you’ll need something more than a clever domain of your own to attract the attention of passers-by in cyberspace.

Continue reading ‘The Text Effects #4 Animation Plugin – Dangerous by Design’ »

Attaching images consecutively – with a second graphic stitched to the bottom or one side of a first – is easy in Graphic Workshop, even if Graphic Workshop doesn’t strictly speaking have a function to do it. This “by hand” approach to the problem will allow you to fine-tune the results, and manually adjust the relative dimensions of the pictures involved if you need to.

Continue reading ‘Easy Image Stitching in Graphic Workshop Professional’ »