FITS4Win2

[EddieT]

Hello to all,
After many months of working on it, I'd like to announce a new tool for Windows 7 and Vista users who work with FITS images.

FITS4Win2 integrates FITS images and image metadata into the core of windows Image and property systems, making FITS more of a natively supported image type like TIF, BMP or JPG.

The functionality that it provides is really quite amazing and completely changes the way FITS images are perceived throughout the windows environment.

You can read all about it here http://astroshed.com/fits4win2/fits4win2doc.htm

Feel free to ask if you need more info.

All the best

Eddie Trimarchi
http://astroshed.com

[mithrandir]

Eddie, the image links on the page are all file://......

Andrew

[EddieT]

Hi Andrew,
The page is not working for you ?

Which browser are you using ?

Thanks

Eddie

[h0ughy]

doesnt work for me either - IE8

[EddieT]

Ok, As usually all works for me.
I'll look into it and see what I can find...

[EddieT]

Can you try a refresh ?
What actually happens ?
Thanks for your help

[mithrandir]

Firefox - one version Linux and another on XP. IE8 on XP.

The text loads, not the images and I guess some other bits too.

A couple of examples from the HEAD
href="file:///D:\Online-v2\fits4win2\fits4win2doc_files\fil elist.xml"
href="file:///D:\Online-v2\fits4win2\fits4win2doc_files\edi tdata.mso"

and images

src="file:///D:\Online-v2\fits4win2\fits4win2doc_files\ima ge001.jpg"
src="file:///D:\Online-v2\fits4win2\fits4win2doc_files\ima ge003.png"

[jjjnettie]

I'm using Chrome and I have text but no images.
Cheers Eddie, great to see you've been keeping yourself busy.

[tlgerdes]

Again, all text, no images.

It appears as though the image links are abosolute, not relative. Ie it is looking for the image file on D: drive of my computer, as that is what is coded in the page, rather than your website.

[EddieT]

Hi Guys, many apologies!
As some of you noticed, the images were linked with explicit paths on my hard drive.

Although I had two people in two countries go through the entire software purchase/installation/registration process, *including* using the online manual as a final test, neither mentioned that the page had no pictures visible!

It should be all ok now.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Eddie

[Exfso]

All working fine on my XP Pro machine....

[mithrandir]

I can't see how it can work Peter.

I've flushed the cache, tried another laptop, and finally wget'ed the page and can see problems with the links. eg:

src=".\fits4win2doc_files\image001.jpg"

Those are the wrong slashes, and they don't work in Firefox or IE8.
------------
IE8 has now decided it can load the images. Linux Firefox still won't do it and I've flushed that cache several times.

[EddieT]

Hi Andrew.

I'm not sure how all this happened. The doc was working fiine up until the last update before I posted to IIS. My beta testers report that it did load correctly then.

For some reason, Word put all explicit paths in with backslashes and everything went south and naturally it all kept working for me.

Not sure what the deal with IE8 is, the backslashes work for me on three machines using IE8 and others using IE8 have reported that the page loads correctly.

But having said all of that, I have now replaced the backslashes with forward slashes. Please tell me it loads correctly ! :)

Needless to say I will be a lot more careful before uploading another document update. I may actually reformat it all with pure HTML and remove MS Words html bloat and other ideosyncracies.

[EddieT]

I've just installed firefox on an an independant machine and tried the doc, it all works fine now so here's hoping the problems are gone!

[mithrandir]

Hi Eddie.

Word has been known to put wrong links into HTML for a long time. I've never used it for markup.
IE is shall we say lacksidasical about syntax. M$ seems to think "\" equals "/". HTML standards require "/". "\" escapes special and non-printing characters. Using M$ and standards in the same document has to be an oxymoron.
Yes it works now in Firefox.
Tidy (http://tidy.sourceforge.net/) picks up most less-than-ideal HTML and tries to correct it, or tells you off if it can't.

Andrew

[EddieT]

Thanks Andrew,
I usually write my html with a text editor and always use forward slashes as a matter of course.

I used Word this time, because I just bought Office 2010 and assumed all the problems I had with older Word versions would be sorted. How wrong I was!

One of the other disadvantages of using Word is that it bloats the html with so much superfluous junk, that doing manual fixups to the Word html is something best avoided.

I reckon I can easily get identical functionality in a file a quarter the size by writing it manually and that 's what I will end up doing.

For now though, the doc will remain untouched !

Thanks for your help.

[Bassnut]

Works fine on my i7/win7, and my what treat :D.

Being able to see a stretched FIT anywhere in windows is very handy indeed. I have hundreds of them, now I dont have to fire up another app just to have a peek before selecting to continue a project.

And where its a huge time saver, is after an imaging run, you can straight away view and dump the bad ones in windows explorer before painfully opening dozens of duds in say CCDstack and then deleting/excuding them one by one.

Top work Eddie, a great effort :thumbsup:.

[EddieT]

Hi Fred!

That's great to hear mate, you're benefitting from it exactly as was intended!

I have literally thousands of FITS images going back to 1997 and a lot of the time, you try and put as much info in the filename as possible so you don't have to jump through hoops when sorting through them.

But there have been several occasions where I forget to change the filename and/or the save-to folder after switching objects. Finding these is now a breeze as you can instantly see when the object name and filename or folder don't match.

Also have a bunch where an early Maxim DL foible created images with one pixel less than full width. And in some occasions where the darks were saved this way too. Now very easy to find and organise.

And.. it works for many FITS images that just won't load in standard FITS viewers like CCDStack. Like any professional images that have more than 2 dimensions, but still have an image in the first two dimensions. I have a bunch of NOAO, STS and even professional radio telescope images like this.

Fully tested so that F4W2 is compatible. If you're into that sort of thing, that is!

Thanks for the feedback mate, it's always good to hear from a happy customer ! Don...I mean Fred...:)