animated gifs?

[greatbrit]

Is there any way to display animated gifs (or actully an animated
anything) within a paradox 10 form? If not, any workarounds? I'm
trying to display banner type ads like you'd see on a web site.

Thanks,
Paul

[A. I. Breveleri]

There is no native Paradox control to display animated GIFs.
In fact, there is no native Paradox control to display
graphics in any format other than BMP.

The two possible approaches thus become: embedding an OCX
control in your form, or constructing an animation in Paradox.

Embedding an OCX control would work best. I don't know of any
such controls but I cannot believe none exist. Someone else
will chime in here.

Constructing an animation in Paradox is not difficult. The
basic trick is to create one BMP with all the frames
concatenated vertically, displayed in a graphic object only as
high as one frame, and use the Scroll property to successively
expose the frames with a timer event.

The problem with this approach is that for anything more than
a few small banners, the form becomes enormous.

-Al.

[Dennis Santoro]

You can do it if you shift to the web OCX and have your users interact
with Pdox through a browser.

Denn Santoro
President
Resource Development Associates
http://www.RDAWorldWide.Com
375 High Street
Rochester, MA 02770
(508) 295-7350
and
Waldweg 5
83512 Reitmehring
Germany
08071 924271
Providing solutions to health care, business, governments and
non-profits since 1982

[greatbrit]

"A. I. Breveleri" wrote:

> ...Embedding an OCX control would work best. I don't know of any

> such controls but I cannot believe none exist. Someone else

> will chime in here....

Thanks Al, unfortunately creating my own isn't an option, so it looks
like OCX is the way to go.

Dennis, unfortunately I can't count on people even having a web browser
for this application (they certainly won't have an internet connection)
so I don't think I can go to web OCX.

So, anyone have any OCX controls (or can point me in the right
direction) that could help me create banner type ads (animated gifs,
flash, etc.)?

Thanks very much for any advice.

Paul

[Dennis Santoro]

You telling me you have an OS without a web browser? My that must be
ancient. (Can you say windows 3.11).

And they don't need an internet connection. You can run the browser on the
local machine or on a machine on the LAN. Same difference for the browser
as long as you know how to point to it.

Denn Santoro
President
Resource Development Associates
http://www.RDAWorldWide.Com
375 High Street
Rochester, MA 02770
(508) 295-7350
and
Waldweg 5
83512 Reitmehring
Germany
08071 924271
Providing solutions to health care, business, governments and non-profits
since 1982

[greatbrit]

Hi Dennis,

I'm so entrenched with Netscape, I forgot all about that *other* one. What
I'm doing is writing an application that will sit on the most basic of
machines (cheap, no other software installed), the PC will be running only my
application, but yes, you're right, they will probably have IE installed
automatically.

OK, so back to the plot, I will have a PC plugged into a giant monitor screen,
displaying information for hours at a time. Now what I want is to display
animations (flash, animated gifs, whatever) *simultaneously* (while my other
stuff is going on above) in a box at the bottom, about 1/6 of screen height
and the width of the screen.

So is there a way to imbed a web based OCX into just that box while the rest
of my application is running above it?

Thanks,
Paul

Dennis Santoro wrote:

> You telling me you have an OS without a web browser? My that must be
> ancient. (Can you say windows 3.11).
>
> And they don't need an internet connection. You can run the browser on the
> local machine or on a machine on the LAN. Same difference for the browser
> as long as you know how to point to it.
>

[Liz]

Paul,

I've heard of web browser OCXs, but I don't know any - hopefully
someone will come along and educate us.

On the other hand, I don't know what's involved with creating
flash presentations and whatnot, but creating an animated graphic
in a Paradox graphic field is not much harder than creating an
animated gif - if you like, I'll post the code and a description
of the steps.

Regards,

Liz
---
http://www.paradoxcommunity.com/
http://www.aros.net/~law/

[Tom Krieg]

Liz,

I'd also be grateful for the code you mentioned. I'm testing a P*****x-i
application at the moment and would love to have flash type animations
display when my app starts up.

TIA

Tom Krieg

Liz <l...@paradoxcommunity.com> wrote in message
news:3BD5FB4D...@paradoxcommunity.com...

[greatbrit]

Hi Liz,

Thanks for the code offer, yes, thanks, I'd like that. Al (in this thread) also
mentioned about making animated graphics, it sounds like something I could use for
other projects, but for this particular application I am actually hoping to use
existing animated gifs, flash, etc. but don't yet have a clue how to do it. I'm
also hoping for some OCX education, not the least of which is finding out what the
'O', the 'C', and the 'X' stand for :)

Paul

[Jeff Shoaf]

"X" is jargon for "Control", "O" stands for "OLE", and "C" stands for
"Custom", so "OCX" = "OLE Custom Control". They're descendants of Visual
Basic's VBX's (OK, Visual Basic Controls) that use Windows OLE2
capabilities.

"greatbrit" <pwes...@pacbell.net> wrote in message
news:3BD61C45...@pacbell.net...

[Liz]

Paul,

The gif can be taken into an editing program and each image of
said gif separated into a separate graphic (that's all animated
gifs are - a bunch of graphics displaying in a loop).

No clue how to dupe flash or anything else. And I do think an
OCX or two that would do this (and work in 'the db') would be
nice.

I'll post the code tomorrow (it's at work).

Liz

[Dennis Santoro]

Well, if you don't have to have total control over it I would say you can have
your ap start a second paradox session which runs the web OCX (comes with Pdox)
and then start the local browser. The web OCX can default to a page so you default
it to your page with an animation loop. I think the only real trick would be
sizing and positioning the browser. Might need some of Pascal's api call stuff for
that. Of course then the user could simply minimize the window. But lets face it,
most of that stuff gets ignored anyway. When was the last time you actually read a
banner add (or even noticed WHAT it was advertising). Humans get pretty quickly
trained to tune out irrelevant stimuli or we would not have survived so long...

Denn Santoro
President
Resource Development Associates
http://www.RDAWorldWide.Com
375 High Street
Rochester, MA 02770
(508) 295-7350
and
Waldweg 5
83512 Reitmehring
Germany
08071 924271
Providing solutions to health care, business, governments and non-profits since
1982

[Anders Jonsson]

>
> OK, so back to the plot, I will have a PC plugged into a giant
monitor screen,
> displaying information for hours at a time. Now what I want
is to display
> animations (flash, animated gifs, whatever) *simultaneously*
(while my other
> stuff is going on above) in a box at the bottom, about 1/6 of
screen height
> and the width of the screen.
>

An alternative could be to make the Paradox app take 5/6 of your
screen and then in the remaining area you run AcdSee, Internet
Explorer or some other program to show your animated GIF.

Anders

[Michel Claveau]

Hi,

 

My site contain OCX, form sample & code, with table's storage and play of Animated gifs.

 

(for Pdox-9, explanations in French)

 

On the site, choose 

        [Informatique] 

            [Paradox] 

                [(mini)-applications]

 

 

@-salutations

--
Michel Claveau 
mél. : m...@mclaveau.com
site :  http://mclaveau.com

[Liz]

OK, all, here's the technique I used:

1. Make/get all the individual frames of your graphic and save
each as a separate file.

2. Put one unbound graphics field on the form for each graphic,
paste the desired graphic in and name the fields such that
they're numbered g1, g2, etc. Make these not visible by default.

3. Group the fields together and then stack them on top of each
other.

4. In the group's var, declare a uiobject var and a smallInt
var. The uiobject var will attach to the graphic of interest,
the smallInt is to specify which graphic box is current.

5. In the group's open event, set the 'current' var to 1, attach
the uio to the first box and make it visible and set the timer
for whatever interval seems to work best (in my example, 150
milliseconds worked well).

6. In the group's timer event, increment (or reset if at last)
the 'current' var, set the uio invisible, attach it to the next
uio and set that visible (i do that part with
delayScreenUpdates() so you don't see flickering).

7. In the group's close, set the uio invisible (so it's ready
when you open the form again).

You can download a sample form (26K) from my website - follow the
miscellaneous links link and then the one that references
downloads mentioned on the newsgroups, or, go here:

http://www.aros.net/~law/misc/pdox/links.htm

It's the top link.

[greatbrit]

First off, thanks to everyone for some very creative solutions, which I
would have tried if Michel hadn't come along when he did... :)

Michel, merci beaucoup, il est parfait, fantastique, exactement ce que
je recherchais, merci merci merci!!!

Michel's code let's me run my animated gifs within a box within a form,
he even has his gifs stored in a table (which I hadn't thought about
yet), perfect for what I want as I can cycle through them as needed.

WOW, this forum just amazes me, thanks again to everyone!

Paul

[greatbrit]

Thanks very much Liz, this will be very useful for when I make my own
animations.

Paul

Liz wrote:

> OK, all, here's the technique I used:...