By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

New SIG Meeting Location Starting this month, the Access and Visual Basic SIGs will meet at the Kate Jackson Community Center at 821 S Rome Avenue. That is just south of Old Hyde Park Village. The move was necessitated by Gateway no longer being able to guarantee a room at a fixed time and date in advance. We are appreciative of Gateway providing a room twice a month over the past several years.

Alpha5, 3D-Album and PhotoVista Virtual Tour As did many of you at our last meeting, I found the software presented intriguing.

Although Alpha5 appears to be a good database program for those not up to beating their heads against the wall to learn how to use Microsoft Access, I had no interest in Alpha 5, since I have indeed beaten my head against the wall more than once in the years that I have been learning Access. Almost anything can be done with Access as regards the presentation and manipulation of data--but you have to have paid your dues in study to know how to do it. Visit our Access SIG if you think you have an interest.

My interest was in the two graphics-oriented programs. 3D-Album is just a cute and sometimes stunning way to present a collection of images. You can use it to display them on your computer, send an album via email to a friend (this method is less than ideal), create a screen saver or put the album on the web. I have created two different albums on the web of the same 16 photos at my site http://www.lamartin.com. Take the link near the bottom of the page to “Virtual Tours and Other Such Experiments”, then select the 3D Displays link.

When you click on a 3D Display for the first time, you will be asked to download a 2 MB plug-in for Internet Explorer (and theoretically for Netscape Navigator if you use that browser--but I haven’t checked this out). This is what actually produces the display. The download is a one time thing. It downloads fairly rapidly on a broadband connection but will take some time on a dial-up connection.

This is where I found my first problem with one of the software packages purchased at the meeting. The download produced a warning that the file had an out-of-date certificate of authenticity (it was six months out of date). It took me several emails to convince the software manufacturer, Micro Research Institute, Inc., that there was a problem. Their first approach was to tell me to ignore the message. The second was to tell me to change my browser setting to not warn about such things. I then suggested that it wasn’t very professional for a software company to offer downloads with expired certificates unless renewing it was something they couldn’t afford. They then completely changed course and said that the problem was their fault and that it would be fixed within the day--and it was. Good for them.

As an aside, I have several ActiveX controls I have created at my site for which you would get the same warning if you tried to download them. Since I am not making any money from the examples at my site, I am not going to pay the $400 per year for a certificate for such things. Of course, everyone trusts that I am who I say I am, so there is really no need for a certificate--is there. In reality, such certificates only guarantee that the software provider is who they say they are. The certificate does not guarantee that the software is virus free or indeed is not a virus itself.

PhotoVista Virtual Tour Maker iSeeMedia has not been as forthcoming in responding to a similar problem I found when I installed their PhotoVista Virtual Tour Maker, which is a very nice program nonetheless. When you start the PhotoVista Virtual Tour Maker software, it wants you to register, but the registration immediately produces an error message when you try to submit the registration. Additionally, when I created a virtual tour to place at my web site that used a Java viewer, the viewer had a yellow button with Zoom written on it. I assume that its purpose is to take you to the software manufacturer’s web site. When you click on it, however, you are sent to a web address that no longer exists at MGI--the previous owner of the software, not iSeeMedia--the current owner. In fact, this software still has MGI written all over it. It installs in an MGI folder on your computer, etc. I went to the iSeeMedia web site and downloaded updates for both the Virtual Tour Maker software and the PhotoVista Panorama, which is part of the Virtual Tour Maker package. However, these updates did nothing to remove all the references to MGI.

It appears to me that iSeeMedia has done nothing to the software since taking it over from MGI. There is a forum at the iSeeMedia site to discuss problems with their software. But I see no evidence of anyone from iSeeMedia participating. Furthermore, they have a form you can fill in at the site so as to report a problem, but it has a mandatory field for your registration number. Recall that I couldn’t register the product, and there is no registration number on the CD. So that does me no good. There appears to be no way to get email support. Dave Whittle, who presented the software to us, said he would relay my concerns to them, but I have heard nothing from that.

I just checked the iSeeMedia site again. They do have something new there. They say that they have a new plug-in viewer. However, that is not what I want. I do not like forcing people to download large, specialized viewers if I can help it (as you had to do for the 3D-Album) That is why I prefer the Java viewer, but there is no update for that. The Java viewer they have is basically two years old., and I am sure that is in the same state that it was when MGI had the software.

All of that said, as indicated above, I like the product. You can see the results at my site at the above-mentioned link. I have put three virtual tours there: A tour of two rooms in a house, a tour around a pond, and a tour of Ft. Blount Park in Bartow, Florida. Be sure to read the instructions before starting so that you will know how to move about.

I used PhotoVista to make a stitch of around 18 - 22 photos for each 360 degree panorama. The photos were taken with my Canon G1 digital camera attached to a tripod .The software did a fairly good job with very little manual adjustment necessary. I then imported this panorama into the PhotoVista Virtual Tour Maker and produced the tours you see on the web.

One thing I discovered about outdoor panoramas is that you want to take them on an overcast day. That way you do not have to deal with the sun shining straight into your camera lens at some point. If you are shooting a 360 degree panorama, then at some point you are going to have to face the sun unless the sky is overcast--or it is high noon. Another thing you have to consider for any panorama is movement of objects. Since each photo needs to overlap the previous one by 25 to 30%, you really need everything to remain the same in those two shots. So moving people or cars can be a problem.

I have not tried the third program in the PhotoVista Virtual Tour suite, PhotoVista 3D Objects. To use that you really need a rotating platform on which you place the object to be photographed from all sides. Seems like we used to have such a thing in the kitchen years ago that held spices and rotated. But that is long gone.

To close, let me give you an example of the sort of thing we do in the VBA SIG. Visual Basic for Applications lets you automate things in any of the Microsoft Office products. Originally you could only do this in Word, Excel and Access, but Microsoft has now expanded this to include PowerPoint, FrontPage and Publisher. This was done in either Office 2000 or Office 2002.

Most of our examples in the SIG have come from programming in Access, Excel and Word, but here is one that I just came up with for Publisher.

Ever since moving this Publisher newsletter document to the Gateway I bought around 1 1/2 years ago, when I open it I get a warning about it having a font--Copperplate--that isn’t on the new computer. I could have loaded the font, but I wanted to find what text used that font. I looked and looked several times but could never produce it. Publisher, unlike Word, does not provide for searches based on formatting like the type of font. So I finally got around to writing some VBA code to accomplish the task. It found the text on page 5 in the Internet Picture of the Month heading. Here is the code:

Dim x As TextRange
Dim i As Integer, j As Integer, k As Integer
Dim s As String
For k = 1 To Application.ActiveDocument.Pages.Count
For j = 1 To Application.ActiveDocument.Pages(k).Shapes.Count
If Application.ActiveDocument.Pages(k).Shapes(j).Type = pbTextFrame Then
For i = 1 To Application.ActiveDocument.Pages(k).Shapes(j).TextFrame.TextRange.Length
If Application.ActiveDocument.Pages(k).Shapes(j).TextFrame.TextRange.Characters(i, 1).Font.Name = "Copperplate" Then
s = s & " " & CStr(k) & " " & Application.ActiveDocument.Pages(k).Shapes(j).TextFrame.TextRange.Characters(i, 1)
Else
End If
Next
Else
End If
Next
Next
MsgBox(s) u