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

We have no contributions from the membership this month for the newsletter other than the minutes from our secretary and the 2004 financial summary from our treasurer. The financial report should have been in last month’s newsletter, except that I forgot to include it.

I have several things that I have been looking into in the computer world, but none is at the point of a full article yet. As I mentioned last month, our web site, http://www.tpcug.org, place third in the web site competition at the recent Florida Association of Computer User Groups meeting. That resulted in a copy of Adobe GoLive CS for the webmaster--yours truly. I had hoped to get deeply enough into it to be able to write an article for this newsletter, but it is so different from Microsoft FrontPage, which I have used for years for web work, that I would have had to drop everything else to find enough time. Perhaps by the next newsletter I will have had time to learn it better.

However, right off the bat, I can tell you that it will not be easy for someone who has not used Adobe products before and is familiar with the FrontPage way of doing things. I have used many Adobe products, but I am having a bit of trouble with it. It appears geared to those who are versed in Adobe’s graphical programs. My hope is not to master it so as to use it to manage web sites, but to use it to create graphically rich web pages, since graphics is what Adobe is all about. Then I can bring those pages into my already existent sites.

Two things of note are that GoLive CS2 is now out, so I no longer have the latest version, and in doing a little research on the product I discovered some discontent among users that database connectivity was dropped from the product starting with the CS version. For me that is no problem since I have never used the database connectivity wizards in FrontPage, preferring to roll my own by using Visual Basic script and Active Server Pages, or by using ASP.Net to interface with a database. So, stay tuned to see if I learn enough about the program to write a review. However, that may be a waste of time, since I recently read that Adobe is to purchase Macromedia, the developer of the Dreamweaver web development program, and that may portend a dropping of GoLive in favor of Dreamweaver.

In a different direction, I have also presented two of my Visual Basic.Net programs at recent SIGs: One written for the Pocket PC which performs a simple slide show; the other written as a desktop application which allows you to add a time stamp on any photo taken with a digital camera, so that when printed the date and/or time would be visible on the print in whatever position you selected. I could go into a bit of detail about how one does such things. In particular, in the time stamp application I needed to retrieve the date and time a digital photo was taken from what is know as the EXIF information in the header of the jpeg file for the photo. By the way, member Merle Nicholson requested the Pocket PC program and member Ron Weinberg requested the time stamp program.

To finish, .I will write briefly about what sort of information goes into the EXIF section of the header. You have camera information, such as Make & Model; you have exposure information, such as Aperture and Shutter speed (listed as Exposure below); and certainly you have the date, which started this programming effort.

Below are the data that I extracted from a photo I took recently. The only thing not put there by the camera when the photo was taken is the Title, which I added using Adobe Photoshop’s File Browser feature.

My Nikon D100 actually creates 59 fields in the header of the image file where for this photo it recorded data in 50 of them. As you can count above, I searched for and extracted only 12 such fields.

VB.Net has methods for extracting this information. However, once it is extracted you then need to know the data type of a particular field to be able to use its information. It turns out that the type could be ASCI, short, rational, long or undefined. To find the data type of a particular field, you need to consult the Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF 2.2) for digital still cameras of the Japan Electronics and Information Technologies Industries Association (JEITA), which I found in English through a Google search at the Kodak site. Isn’t programming useful?u