New website

Because of some problems with the old website the whole project is moved to a new location.

Also a lot of my E-mails that were send between 23 november and 4 december are lost. If you did send me some E-mail but didn't got any response, please send it again.

There were some problems with the 1.0.x version with registering the program but that should be fixed also. If you have still problems with registering the 1.0.x version, please send me an E-mail about it.

Fanclubday The Flying Dutch (Dutch startrek fanclub)

For all Dutch visitors of this site:

Op zondag 14 September 2008 organiseert de Nederlandse Startrek fanclub weer haar fanclubdag.

Het Thema van deze dag staat dit jaar in het teken van de ruimtevaart in de 21e eeuw en verder, gezien onze fantastische lokatie:

de Volksterrenwacht van Nijmegen.

Er zullen door de sterrenwacht lezingen worden gehouden over ruimtevaart toen en nu, er zal een prijsvraag zijn en diverse handelaren ontreken natuurlijk niet. Voldoende te zien en te doen en medefans om gezellig over onze favoriete series te praten!

Deze bijeenkomst wordt gehouden in:

Volkssterrenwacht Nijmegen

Krekelstraat 10

6533 RG  Nijmegen

van 12:00 tot 17:00

P.S: Je kan op de flyer klikken voor een grotere versie die je kan printen en kan uitdelen of ophangen om zo reclame te maken voor deze dag.

Voice Recognition and new Vista install

I have installed a new version of Vista on my computer. This because the voice recognition is not working under the dutch versions of vista. Microsoft removed the software to recognize voice control.

After a long evening all software is installed again. The first test of the new vista ultimate under the dutch language was still the same. The voice recognition software (microsoft speech 5.3) was again not working. But after i switched to the english language pack all was working fine. The first tests are working. The control is not yet working but i can start the voice recognition software from the LCARS Terminal VoiceControl module. So now i have to include the commands and then it should work.

This mean that with the new version no more installing of MS agent and other strange old software for the voice controlling of the LCARS Terminal software. Under MS Vista that has voice recognition software included (english and some other languages) then it will work without installing software. Under MS XP the speech 5.1 package from Microsoft must be installed and then it should work also. Ofcorse this will be tested when i have the module ready.

Development Info

As everybody can read on the forum I'm working on a new version. It will be written in visual basic 2008 express instead of visual basic 6. This because a lot of code is very old and is not supported anymore on the new operation systems like xp and vista.

The first parts are in development and are working fine. I have the LCARS Terminal almost rewritten in the new version. It is now based on html themes. So it will be possible to use html as themes. So also flash, movies and other stuff can be used in the layout of future themes. The default theme will still be the LCARS layout as used in the 1.0.x and 2.0.x versions.

The first picture of the new version is on the left. When you press on it, it will open in a new window. I have also included a part of the sourcecode of the left menubar where all programs are launched. As you can see the page is complete written in html. All sound effects are also included via javascript and the links can be used to start internal functions/programs and external programs. When a link starts with lcars: then the program knows that it must execute an internal/external function/program. So now it will be very easy to include more buttons, change the buttons to other functions and more of that. Also almost all kind of layouts are possible in this way. The only restriction at the moment is that the main LCARS Terminal program must use square layouts. What i mean by this is that the desktop window must be a rectangle or square. It is not possible to make it a circle or a shape with non horizontal/vertical lines. This is because of the limitation of the master browser object. It is not yet possible to create strange shapes with it. For popup windows i can be done because that is just one browser. But the main terminal program can use up to 9 windows to create the right layout. But i think that will be enough.

At the moment I'm working on the speech recognition part. But because my system is running MS vista Home Premium Dutch I have a problem that the speech software from MS is not working. In the English version it is working fine but MS deceided to remove the complete speech recognition in the Dutch release. So i have to upgrade to the ultimate version and then i can install the English language pack and then continue on programming. I hope i receive the software soon so i can continue working on the new version.

Because of the new upcomming version i have to see or i can still include the E-mail part in the PADD module because that will be very difficult to rewrite into html / .net framework. Also the version of the frame work is version 3/3.5 so then the support for all windows version below XP will be impossible. But i guess the most users are already using windows XP as basic OS to run the LCARS-Terminal.