News

Latest program features for Stardraw Control (6/2/2006)

In line with their strategy of continually improving and enhancing even their latest products, Stardraw.com is pleased to announce that a wealth of new features and drivers have been added to their most recent application, Stardraw Control, in recent weeks.

New I/O Architecture - Stardraw Control has been updated to use a fully multi-threaded input/output model. In compiled control applications, read functions, write functions and UI functions occur on separate threads allowing asynchronous bi-directional communications and operations. In practice this makes for snappy UI responsiveness and eliminates wait times while control instructions are issued.

Web Browser UI Control - your control interface can now include web browser controls, bringing the power of the internet to your control application. The web browser control means that you can include any web page, such as local weather reports, news, TV listings, stock tickers etc, or even access IP-enabled devices such as web- or security cameras, directly within your control UI. The applications are limitless.

Email UI Control - your control application can now access any SMTP server and send configurable emails to any email address. You can, for example, configure your control program to monitor a device and send an email if it fails.

Proxy Server Support - full support for internet access through a proxy server has been added so that program and data updates occur seamlessly both in direct and proxy server configurations. Stardraw Control can now connect directly to the internet, or use system proxy settings, or the user can specify a dedicated proxy server URL.

Report Window - accessed through the Actions dialog, the Report window displays a summary of all the actions and events that have been defined in the project. This greatly aids testing and debugging.

MIDI Support - full support for the MIDI protocol has now been added to Stardraw Control. This means that a control program can catch any event generated from a MIDI device, or issue any MIDI command to any MIDI device.

Unlock Codes - you can now generate an unlocked executable by entering an Unlock Code. Codes can be pre-purchased, or might be distributed by manufacturers and other Stardraw Control affiliates. This means that creation of a control program, normally charged at $500, can be even more cost effective.

Enhanced Graphic Button - many features have been added to the Graphic Button which is intended to be the principle UI component. The graphic button supports multiple images which can respond to mouse and click events (e.g. different images for 'default', 'hover', 'pressed' and 'disabled' states). Behaviour of the graphic button has been augmented to include Autorepeat (repetitions of any action or chain of actions at a user-defined interval), Pressed State (allowing you to define whether a button is pressed or not when the form loads) and overall performance is much faster for forms containing multiple or large images as backgrounds.

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