Alchemy Mindworks

The Alchemy Mindworks web site takes a lot of hits, and it enjoys a favorable ranking in the popular search engines – such as Google, Bing and so on – because of its popularity.

Pages with links from mindworkshop.com will also benefit from our search engine ranking. The logic behind search engine ranking would probably make your socks explode if you really understood it.

To this end, we’re periodically approached by the owners of other web sites to add them to the Sponsored Links section of our home page. If you have a page that you’d like to improve the ranking of, we can do the same for you.

Continue reading ‘Sponsored Links at mindworkshop.com’ »

System security – keeping your computer adequately defended against viruses, malware and other barbarians at the gate – is a complex and oftentimes bedeviling problem. Too little security will find you part of a botnet, or providing your credit card information to every hacker in Afghanistan. Too much security will make your computer excessively paranoid, to the point of your not getting anything useful done with it.

You can render your system wholly impervious to infection by software viruses by the simple expedient of switching it off and leaving it that way – but this is hardly a workable resolution to the issue for most of us.

If you use Norton Antivirus to defend your computer against the machinations of cybercretins, you may have encountered a particularly intractable issue upon installing new software or updates, such as the ones made available for our products. Norton might alert you to a threat it refers to as WS.Reputation.1 when you download the installers in question… and then delete or quarantine your downloads.

Continue reading ‘The Norton / Symantec WS.Reputation.1 False Positive’ »

Most of the Alchemy Mindworks applications are updated several times a year. A few of the more active ones – Graphic Workshop, GIF Construction Set, PNG MNG Construction Set and so on – have seen upgrades once a month.

Users of these products have at times inquired whether it’s necessary to install all the updates, and how important these updates really are to the functioning of the great cosmic clockwork that drives the universe as we know it.

Continue reading ‘A Word About Updates’ »

Upgrade your hard drive to a larger device without re-installing Windows or any of your applications – we too were shocked when this worked.

With the benefit of flawless hindsight, some of the computers at the offices of Alchemy Mindworks might have been configured with slightly larger hard drives when they were originally purchased. What seemed like enough storage to encompass the sum of human knowledge with room left over for a modest library of MP3s a few years ago has grown increasingly claustrophobic with time.

Continue reading ‘Windows Adjustments: The Incredible Expanding Hard Drive’ »

Users of Graphic Workshop Professional 4 who downloaded the patch 12 update during the 2010 black Friday weekend and commencement of the gorging season may encounter a fairly subtle problem with it.

It would have to be subtle – the obvious ones are easy to spot.

This release of Graphic Workshop Professional changes the way the application manages temporary files. Specifically, it places them in a dedicated temporary file folder in its common application data area.

Continue reading ‘Graphic Workshop Professional 4 Patch 12 Temporary File Issue’ »

The process of installing updates to Alchemy Mindworks’ version 4 applications is somewhat more involved than was the case for their ancestors. While doing so will unquestionably entail more clicking than users of our products may be used to – for which we’re suitably contrite – you can minimize the additional work required if you understand what the little man behind the curtain is up to.

Earlier releases of our software used a custom installer that we wrote, and as such, that we were able to nuance into being a fairly effortless installation experience. It was typically done with an installation so quickly as to make describing its activities as an “experience” just this side of pretentious.

Continue reading ‘Version 4 Updates in 30 Seconds’ »

The transition from 16-bit Windows software to 32-bit Windows software over a decade ago was an event that future archeologists will no doubt write papers about and bore people at parties with until they all make up excuses about having forgotten to hypnotize their ferrets and leave. Admittedly, archeologists get excited about the damnedest things.

It’s been our experience that neither archeologists nor most of the people who use Windows software actually know why 32-bit applications are preferable. This is arguably as it should be – well-written software should allow its users to do whatever they bought the beast for and never concern themselves with that’s going on under the hood.

Continue reading ‘Is There a 64-Bit Version?’ »

We’ve become aware of an issue that may affect your future receipt of the Alchemy Mindworks E-mail Update List, replies from our support staff, order confirmations and most other e-mail communication from us. It could also affect your receipt of e-mail from other on-line merchants you do business with, your physician, your bank and possibly your great-aunt Blothelda.

You’ve got to wonder who thinks this stuff up…

Continue reading ‘About Your E-mail…’ »

While you can create sophisticated banners and other complex animations using Alchemy Mindworks’ Animation Workshop – and nothing else – adding animated objects to Animation Workshop will unquestionably drop it into hyperspace. Alchemy Mindworks offers a suite of inexpensive, easy-to-master tools to build animations.

Animation Workshop will import animations from a number of popular formats. The two you’re most likely to get involved with are GIF and MNG. While conceptually similar, it’s important to understand the distinction between them.

Continue reading ‘Building Animation Objects for Animation Workshop’ »

The hard drive in your computer is easily its most valuable component – although its worth probably can’t be measured entirely by the damage it did to your credit card. Installing Windows, and subsequently installing all the applications that will run under Windows, can take days.

While you can back up important files on your hard drive, there’s no way to back up an entire Windows hard drive in a form that would allow you to subsequently restore it and get back on line immediately, should your current hard drive get nuked by a virus, or wiped accidentally, or just die.

Continue reading ‘Windows Adjustments: Back Up your Windows Installation’ »