WinImages is Fast!

• WinImages was written to be fast on a simple Pentium - but, put it on a fast Pentium, and it really runs quickly! In fact, Gene Ireland was so surprised that when he wrote us, among other things he said: "You didn't tell me that this thing is blazing fast"! Well, since he pointed out our error, we're telling you.

• WinImages has custom-written display code for every screen display mode from 32-bit to 1-bit. When you run it in 24-bit mode, for instance, it doesn't pass the job of converting it's bitmaps to 24-bits over to Windows (which is very slow about it.) Instead, custom code designed to do this at maximum speed runs, and as a result, display updates are basically instantaneous on modern machines. Even layered image updates are very fast when there are many layers.

• WinImages area tools are more efficient, requiring fewer steps from the user, as compared to traditional area selection tools. Let's look at the case where you use five applications of an effect at various locations in an image: The only method other graphics software manufacturers give you is "make selection, find command..." four times - that's ten user interface steps, total. WinImages allows "find command, make selection, make selection, make selection, make selection" which requires four fewer steps - a total of six. Plus, added features during area selection make that process faster, too. WinImages utilizes both mouse buttons to give you far more flexibility during initial selection time - that may not seem important, but just wait until you see how fast you can work on an image with these special features available to you. You'll be amazed! And of course, we also provide the ability to make selections the "usual" way, which can be faster in some types of editing situtations, such as where the area is the same, but the effect to applied is different.

• WinImages contains amost all it's own code - very few foreign DLL's are required. We do use a few that contain some code from other folks (Twain, MNG, JPEG), but we have source code for all of these so we can fix them if required, and so WinImages and it's DLL's are entirely - and we do mean entirely - under our control. If it's broken, we can fix it. A pleasant side effect of this is that when good old Microsoft drops bugs on everyone (including themselves), they usually don't affect WinImages, because we're not using Microsoft's buggy code in the first place. Our software contains its own reference suite of routines to do everything, from basic string operations to right on up to complex user interface elements like treeviews. So we're not tied to the latest and greatest "bug-fix" out of Microsoft headquarters. Our software just keeps on working.

• WinImages' executable is much smaller than any competitive product because it's written in pure "C", not "C++". This seems like a techie issue, but really, it's very important to the end-user. C++ has been vastly over-hyped to the developer community. C++ brings with it severe bloat in code size, imports bugs from other people's code in the huge number of other people's "objects" that end up in applications by default (even if you don't want them), and generally gives the consumer a hard time. This is one of the primary reasons why Microsoft's "Word" product is so blatently crash-prone and has so many memory leaks. It's also why the desktop Explorer continues to carry bugs with it one operating system version after another. They don't even know where the bugs are! And... of course, if Microsoft can't keep their C++ code from screwing up their products so badly, obviously, we shouldn't even try. So we don't.

• Because WinImages is such a small program for the power it provides, executable caching in Windows 98 and later keeps the whole thing in memory and on a modern machine, WinImages can completely start up in less than 1/4th of a second, ready for you to work. Once it is running, the user interface helps you along, and then the operators, each hand-coded for speed, make the most of your CPU power and memory. When it comes to speed, WinImages truly rocks!