About Bells and Whistles Software

Bells and Whistles Software is a company dedicated to producing programs large and small that are interesting to us and which we believe will be useful to others.  Whenever possible these programs will be free or very reasonably priced.

Our current releases are:

Nanji Desu Ka - A program that displays the time in Japanese and English

WGIF - A GIF picture display program

Future releases include:

ToWave - A program to convert foreign sound files to Windows 3.1 .WAV format

Graffiti - A wallpaper variety program with a mess o' options

Hiragana Flash - A flashcard program to learn Japanese Hiragana


Contents
WGIF 1.1a

WGIF is a program you can use to view pictures created in the GIF format created by the CompuServe online service.

To learn how to use Help, press F1.

Commands

File Menu Commands

Options Menu Commands

Help Menu Commands

Glossary

Tips

Revision History

About Bells and Whistles Software


Glossary

dithering

freeware

GIF

public domain software

shareware


dithering

Is a way to trade off resolution and/or clarity in a picture for an appearance of more colors.  WGIF uses dithering in an attempt to make pictures with large numbers of colors (e.g. 256) look better on displays with fewer colors (e.g. a basic VGA card with 16 colors under Windows).


freeware

Is software which has no fee associated with using it.  This is NOT the same as public domain software.


GIF (pronounced jif)

Is a Graphics Interchange Format created by CompuServe Inc. as a means of transferring pictures among a variety of microcomputers in a device independent manner and with significant compression of the images to reduce their size.


public domain software

Is software which has no owner and is available for you to 'do as thou wilt' with.  You can sell it, include it with your own software, etc.


shareware

Is software which can be tried out before you pay for it.  Most shareware has a specific trial period associated with it and after that trial period is over you must either pay the author for the software or cease using the software.


File Menu Commands

New

If this command is displayed in a light gray color then it cannot be performed because you do not have a GIF file displayed at this time.  If you do have a GIF file displayed and you select this command, the screen will be cleared and the GIF file will be dumped from memory.

Open...

Brings up a standard Windows file selection dialog box.  Find the GIF that you want to display and select it.  After selecting a file WGIF will attempt to load and display that file.

Reload

This command is normally displayed in a light gray color which indicates that it cannot be performed.  However, whenever you change an option which would change the appearance of a currently displayed picture then you can use this command to reload the same picture that was last loaded and display it with the new option(s).

Currently, the only way to make this command available is to change the dithering method used when displaying a picture (see Dithering).

Exit

Saves your current option selections and leaves the program.


Options Menu Commands

Dithering

This option shows a small arrow out to the right of it to indicate that it has a sub-menu with various dithering choices on it.  The only two options at this time are None, which performs no dithering, and Ordered which performs a very high speed form of dithering with mediocre visual quality.  The option with a check mark beside it is the currently selected dithering method.

If you have Windows running in 256 colors then you should leave dithering set to None, if you only have 16 colors then you should try Ordered dithering.

Note:  Changing this option will not affect any currently displayed picture.  It affects the next picture Opened or Reloaded.  If you want to see a currently displayed picture with another dithering method, select the method and then select Reload from the File menu.

Decode To Screen

If this option is selected (as indicated with a checkmark to the left of it) then WGIF will display the lines of the GIF file as it decodes them.  If any of the lines that are displayed this way are destroyed (for example, by moving another window over them) then they will not be redrawn until the entire GIF has been decoded.

Minimize On Decoding

If you would rather the program just got out of your way while it decodes that big GIF file then this option is for you.  It will automatically minimize WGIF's window when it starts decoding a GIF file and you can tell when the program is done with the decoding process because the name of the GIF file will appear in the icon's caption.


Help Menu Commands

Contents

Brings up the contents page of this help file.

Glossary

Brings up a glossary page that defines a variety of terms that you may not be familiar with.  If you encounter a word in the help file that is strange to you, see if this page has a definition.

How To Use Help

Brings up a special help file that is devoted to explaining how to use the Microsoft Windows 3.1 help program.  If you are having problems running help:

1: Select the Exit command from the File menu now.

2: Select the How To Use Help command from the Help menu in WGIF.

About WGIF...

Displays a dialog box that tells you the version number of the WGIF that you are running and various legal swill that I have to put in my program to protect myself.


Revision History

1.0a	First released version.

1.0b	Fixed bugs that caused scroll bars to appear at inappropriate times and with inappropriate scroll ranges.  All the bugs fixed were related to minimizing and maximizing the window.

The problem with running multiple copies of WGIF seems to have gone away when I changed compilers from Zortech C++ to Borland C++.

Added an alternate icon that you can choose to display in Program Manager.

I managed to shrink its size on disk by a few K.

1.1a	Added drag and drop support for Windows 3.1.

Started using the common dialog box for selecting a file to open.

Added online help for Windows 3.1.


Tips

Using WGIF with File Manager

If you would like to set up File Manager to use WGIF for automatic display of GIF files then you will need to consult your Windows documentation on the subject of "Associating Documents with an Application" (p. 135 in my copy of the Windows User's Guide).  Select a file ending with .GIF and type in the path to WGIF in the dialog box that File Manager offers for the association.

Using WGIF with OLE

If you have set up File Manager to use WGIF as described above then you can perform a drag and drop of a GIF file from File Manager to an OLE client application (like Write, Microsoft Word, Ami Pro, and more to come).  A copy of the file will be embedded in the open document of the OLE client and the icon for WGIF will normally appear in the document.  When you double click on that icon WGIF will run and will load the picture.

Note:  When I said embedded, I meant embedded.  A 189K GIF file that is added to a Write file in this way will expand the size of that Write file by an extra 189K.  This can be very handy because all you need to hand to somebody else is the Write file and you don't have to remember all the pictures to give them as well, all they need to have is a copy of WGIF and your document with the embedded pictures and they can look at your illustrations.  It can also make a document too large to fit on a single disk if you go overboard with it.

Using WGIF with OLE (Advanced OLE Users Only)

Object Packager is a program which you may not have used yet but it is an extremely powerful way to use OLE with programs that were not written to be OLE servers (like WGIF).  Run Object Packager (it's in your Accessories group under Program Manager).  Then select Command Line from the Edit menu and enter a command line that you would like to run when this package's icon is double clicked.  An example might be "WGIF ZOE.GIF", this would run WGIF when the icon is double clicked upon and WGIF will attempt to load the file ZOE.GIF from the current directory.  Now you need to click on the Insert Icon button and find an icon that you like, you may even choose to Browse and locate and insert WGIF's icon for the package.  You can now select Copy Package from the Edit menu and you will have a package that you can paste into any OLE client application.  This method of using WGIF does not embed the GIF file into the OLE client's file, instead the small command line package will be embedded.  That means that any GIF files will need to be copied along with the file that uses them.  WGIF will issue an error message if it cannot find a file when it is told to load that file specifically on its command line.

Note:  Obviously, this method of using OLE is very susceptable to problems with paths.  If all the files aren't in the same directory or if you have explicit paths on the command line (i.e. "C:\GIF\ZOE.GIF") and the files aren't in the specified directory then you are going to have errors.  If you can get away with a size expansion of the OLE client's file then the first method of using OLE is definitely the easier.