[moki]

Rochester, NY -- October 17th, 2005 -- Ambrosia Software, Inc. announced today the release of EasyEnvelopes 1.0.1. This minor revision to the free envelope printing widget for MacOS X Tiger (10.4) may be downloaded here:

http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/easyenvelopes/



EasyEnvelopes 1.0.1 features the following changes/enhancements:

-- Added the ability to minimize the widget by clicking on the postmark; this saves Dashboard screen space when EasyEnvelopes is not in use

-- Fixed a number of bugs where EasyEnvelopes would not properly recognize/use addresses from Address Book that were entered using older versions of Address Book

-- EasyEnvelopes widget is now a "Universal Binary", meaning it is native for both PowerPC and Intel

-- Enhanced the Japanese envelope printing support, making the envelopes printed by EasyEnvelopes properly formatting in both horizontal and vertical Japanese formats

-- Added a Traditional Chinese localization and customize Chinese envelope printing support

-- Added buffer space around return and mailing addresses so that ornate fonts are no longer clipped

-- Added localizations for Swedish, Dutch, and German

-- Other bug fixes and enhancements

You can use EasyEnvelopes to quickly print a one-off envelope, or utilize its tight integration with Address Book which allows you to quickly find a person's address to print an envelope for. It handles USPS bar codes for both 5 and 9 digit bar codes, and boasts many time-saving nicities.

EasyEnvelopes works with any country's addressing format, and is fully international-friendly and localizable. It lets you control the size of your envelope, the formatting for the return address and mailing address, and much more. Print envelopes the quick and easy way with EasyEnvelopes!

Ambrosia Software, Inc. - publisher of award winning programs for the Macintosh and Windows - distributes a full line of utility, productivity, and anti-productivity (game) software through the Internet as shareware. Unregistered versions of Ambrosia's products on CD can be obtained at Ambrosia web site, http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/ or by calling Ambrosia's order center at 585.325.1910

[JKT]

The ability to minimise is extremely welcome - is this easy to do and if so, why don't other widgets make more use of it?

EasyEnvelopes is excellent btw! However, I am experiencing one bug with it (which was also present in the 1.0 release, fwiw), though this may be due to my printer driver...

When choosing paper type, any pop-up menus will not function (the menu will appear, but nothing can be selected):



I can work around this by choosing to Preview the envelope first then using that to make my selections prior to printing.

HP OfficeJet G85, driver v. 7.3.1

[moki]

Originally Posted by JKT

The ability to minimise is extremely welcome - is this easy to do and if so, why don't other widgets make more use of it?

It wasn't easy to do -- we had to do an awful lot of work to make it happen actually.

EasyEnvelopes is excellent btw! However, I am experiencing one bug with it (which was also present in the 1.0 release, fwiw), though this may be due to my printer driver...

When choosing paper type, any pop-up menus will not function (the menu will appear, but nothing can be selected):



I can work around this by choosing to Preview the envelope first then using that to make my selections prior to printing.

HP OfficeJet G85, driver v. 7.3.1

Hrm. Must be some issue with the custom printer driver from HP. We'll see if we can look into this.

[JKT]

Originally Posted by moki

It wasn't easy to do -- we had to do an awful lot of work to make it happen actually.

Damn

Will you be letting other developers know how as it is probably one of the most useful additions to many widgets that could be made...

Originally Posted by moki

Hrm. Must be some issue with the custom printer driver from HP. We'll see if we can look into this.

Well, no big problem as I can work around it, but just so you knows for other people who suffer the same issue...

[moki]

Originally Posted by JKT

Damn

Will you be letting other developers know how as it is probably one of the most useful additions to many widgets that could be made...

The right solution is for Apple to provide functionality like this -- a standard minimize control for widgets. I realize their philosophy is that you shouldn't make a widget that's big enough to need minimization... or that you should just open widgets as you need them from the bar...

...but in practice, it ends up being that being able to minimize widgets would be really useful in a lot of situations.

Hold down the Option key, and a little minimize button appears on the widget, perhaps in the upper-right corner. Click it and the widget shrinks to perhaps 20% of its original size. Then you can move or drag it around... and clicking on it expands it. Something like this:

http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/...s/eew_mini.mov

Whether Apple will do it or not... who knows?

What we do is take a snapshot of what the widget looks like, then switch the main widget view to another DIV that just contains that image, and resize the whole widget canvas in a timer. When it has reached its minimized size, we run the graphic through a high-quality CoreImage scaler, apply a sharpen filter on it, and use that image to represent the widget.

To scale it back up, we just do the reverse. If you hold down the shift key, it will do it slowly too.

[JKT]

Originally Posted by moki

The right solution is for Apple to provide functionality like this -- a standard minimize control for widgets. I realize their philosophy is that you shouldn't make a widget that's big enough to need minimization... or that you should just open widgets as you need them from the bar...

...but in practice, it ends up being that being able to minimize widgets would be really useful in a lot of situations.

<snip>

Whether Apple will do it or not... who knows?

Yup, you're right - it should be something that Apple offers the ability to do. It would be extremely useful for e.g. the Dashboard manager widget (which I have to open/close if I ever need it as it takes up far too much space otherwise), and for e.g. games widgets which also occupy too much space when you aren't using them. Opening/closing wouldn't be so much of an issue if the widgets actually remembered the state they were previously in when you re-opened them, but you have to go through resizing and setting them back to the way they were every time which just isn't convenient enough to make it worthwhile for a lot of them.

[moki]

Originally Posted by JKT

Yup, you're right - it should be something that Apple offers the ability to do. It would be extremely useful for e.g. the Dashboard manager widget (which I have to open/close if I ever need it as it takes up far too much space otherwise), and for e.g. games widgets which also occupy too much space when you aren't using them. Opening/closing wouldn't be so much of an issue if the widgets actually remembered the state they were previously in when you re-opened them, but you have to go through resizing and setting them back to the way they were every time which just isn't convenient enough to make it worthwhile for a lot of them.

Submit it as a feature request... if enough people do it, Apple might listen. Ya never know...

[moki]

Originally Posted by JKT

The ability to minimise is extremely welcome - is this easy to do and if so, why don't other widgets make more use of it?

EasyEnvelopes is excellent btw! However, I am experiencing one bug with it (which was also present in the 1.0 release, fwiw), though this may be due to my printer driver...

When choosing paper type, any pop-up menus will not function (the menu will appear, but nothing can be selected):



I can work around this by choosing to Preview the envelope first then using that to make my selections prior to printing.

HP OfficeJet G85, driver v. 7.3.1

We think we've fixed this but, but since we don't have that driver software to test it with, we can't be sure. Can we get a beta version to you to test? You can reach me at: [email protected]

Thanks!

[Stradlater]

Minimizing is nice, but it forgets it was minimized on restart. A minor thing, surely, but a fix would be welcome.

[moki]

Originally Posted by Stradlater

Minimizing is nice, but it forgets it was minimized on restart. A minor thing, surely, but a fix would be welcome.

Yeah, that's another thing we added in the upcoming 1.0.2 version... if you'd like to be on the beta list, shoot me an email at: [email protected]

If there was support for the minimizing feature in the OS, we'd get stuff like retaining the state on restart for free.