|
Skyline's imaging solutions help Royal Canadian Mounted Police identify victims and wreckage from Swissair Flight 111 disaster. Read SkyLine's Press Release or read the in-depth article, "Imaging Takes on the Swissair Disaster" by Larry Drinkwater.
Top 10 Multimedia Development Components
and Libraries for Windows: SkyLine Tools Imaging
and Corporate Suite 5
Review by James Durham, Independent Multimedia Consultant
February 2001 - IBM Website
Category: High-level imaging powerhouse and video components. - ActiveX and VCL. Works with: Visual C++, Visual Basic, Borland Delphi and C++ Builder.
Summary: The combination of SkyLine's Corporate Suite and VideoLib Pro is a great way to get much of the functionality of LEADTOOLS' and AccuSoft's products at a lower price point. Corporate Suite's features effectively cover most of high-level ground as its worthy competitors. It has extensive image format support, image acquisition and processing, thumbnail features, plus useful multimedia components. Not only does it have good annotation capabilities, but with the integration of VideoLib Pro you can add video capture features, making video conferencing applications feasible.
Once of the nice bonuses of this package stems from its origin as a top-notch VCL product for Borland Delphi and C++ Builder. This has lent itself to tighter integration with Borland development environments not enjoyed by most of its competitors.
ImageLib Corporate Suite Active X
Review by John Clark Craig
"At the core of SkyLine Tools Imaging's Corporate Suite Active X is a gem of an image manipulation engine. The full suite can do just about everything imaginable to a graphics image, and the manipulations are fast and efficient... you very well might find this tool a good choice for your own graphics and image-handling applications development. Unlike some competitors' products, distribution of this custom control within your applications is royalty-free. "
"Other notable features include seamless integration with TWAIN-compliant scanners, cameras, and OCR software; powerful image manipulations such as zoom, stretch, shrink, flip, rotate, crop, brighten, and darken; edge detection; contrast adjustment; thumbnail generation; rubberband selection rectangle; and many types of annotations. I liked how the descriptions of the properties, methods, and events for the manipulations were organized for easy access" (in the online help). The "short code snippets in the help file were informative, and I got up to speed fairly quickly by experimenting with them."
"This custom control uses TIFF as its default image format, although it also supports many standard formats, including JPEG, PNG, GIF, PCX, BMP, ICO, WMF, CMS, SCM, IMG, TGA, Kodak Photo-CD, and EPS."
"The product also includes a useful full-featured application called SkyDocImage. This program demonstrates many of ILDocOcx.ocx's features much better than the smaller examples."
Useful Resources
"SkyLine has a great newsgroup on the Internet where the owners answer questions and correspond with customers in a refreshingly open dialog. It appears SkyLine values users' suggestions and makes every attempt to add requested features as soon as it can. Messages in the newsgroup indicate that fixes for some of the problems I encountered are on the way, or might even be fixed by the time you read this."
"The core functionality of this product is well-designed, resulting in fast and efficient image manipulations."
John Clark Craig is the author of 17 books on personal computing, including titles from Microsoft Press covering all versions of Microsoft Visual Basic for Windows, Microsoft Visual Basic for MS-DOS, Microsoft QuickBasic, and Microsoft QuickC. He lives with his family in Castle Rock, Colo. His software and electronics design company is Craig Software, and you can reach him at JohnCraig@msn.com.
ImageLib Soars Above the Competition
Review by Dana Dill, Legal Eagle
Here at Legal Eagle we are looking at developing our own software products to use both in-house and to distribute to our clients. I am a programmer and took on the task of developing the applications that we need. One of the tools that I needed was an Imaging Library that would meet the entire requirement I needed to have in my application. Before I started testing various imaging products, I had the following critera set for each product that I looked at. In order for me to use the product, it HAD to meet ALL my requirements! Here are the requirements:
1. Had to be easy to use and implement.
2. The Library/OCX/ActiveX/VCL had to be flexible to use.
3. Displaying of Images had to instant.
4. Speed of rotating Images had to be very fast!
5. Annotations that are easy to call. (Redacting/Notes/Arrows)
6. Annotations could be permanent or treated as an overlay.
7. Library installs easy and can start developing applications quickly.
8. Performance of Images within my application had to work well with a
database application.
9. Had to have Scale to Grey features and it had to make my images clear.
I have done a lot of testing with your Corp Suite 3.0 product and have tested it against your competition using Delphi 3 on a computer with a Pentium 200 processor. Your product was the clear winner! Here are the products I tested against yours and a brief explantion why I did not use them.
1. Diamond Head Software - ImageBasic
I tested their ActiveX components. The trial version that I ran was very limited to what I could test. The biggest problem I had with them was the price of their products. It seemed that I had to pay for a lot of different products under the Diamond Head name. It also was not very easy to install and I could do no real development quickly. It also lacked flexibility.
2. Lead Technologies - LeadTools
I had high hopes for this product. I talked to them at great length at the AIIM show in New York last year and since they were North Carolina based (I live in South Carolina) I thought this would probably be the product I would use. BUT, when I tried to use the product in an application it CRASHED my system. It crashed it badly! I had to reinstall my Delphi 3 from backup it messed me up so bad. This happened twice. After the first time I thought I would give it one more try, but it did the same thing again. No I did not call their tech support because one of my criteria was ease of use.... I did not want to wrestle with a product! LeadTools CD's went in the trash with much pleasure.
3. Cornerstone - Active X for scanning and OCR
This was a nice product. I tested the speed of OCR and it was accurate and fast. My images displayed quickly and rotation was quick. The problem with this product was once again price. They wanted my right and left arm and then a royalty for using their product. I also found the "Scale to Grey" to really be "No Scale to Grey". Scaled to Grey images looked no different then the not Scaled to Grey images. This product was also targeting the Visual Basic crowd and I develop in Delphi.
4. Imagination Software - Active X
Found this product overall slow. The demo of their product was slow when I imported my own images. The OCR features were extremely slow. Some documents would take up to 2 minutes to OCR. The product also had an old Windows 3.1 look to it. Image rotation was not satisfactory and their annotations were awkward to use. Limited flexibility also.
5. Accusoft - Image Gear
This was a joke. Only info I could get from them was a limited demo off their web site. Their personnel were also rude to talk to at the AIIM Show. Was off my list very quickly.
6. Luxent Software - Lightlib (VCL for Delphi)
This was your biggest competition for me. I found this product easy to install, The sample demos were impressive, and it was easy to use and to implement into my programs. This product was so good that I did some side by side comparisons against your product. I wrote an application special for this. The application displayed the same image on the screen and I would run test on them at the same time. LightLib really fell on it face next to ImageLib. Display speeds were about the same, but rotations were drastically different. LightLib would take between 5 and 10 seconds to rotate 90 degrees. Your product is less than 1 second. Flipping an image was the same. I also could not get the annotation features to work at all with LightLib. It also lacked the flexibility I wanted.
7. SkyLine Tools - ImageLib Corporate Suite
Then there was your product! I looked at ImageLib before some of these other products and to be quite honest, I would have looked at others if I thought they had a chance to be better then ImageLib. I found no better Imaging library on the market. I found your product super easy to install. Within the first hour after I downloaded your product off your web site I had a call from your sales department asking if all was ok. This was nice.
It loaded into my VCL with no problem. I first loaded your sample application that showed off all your features. I loaded the Project file, compiled it without any surprises and was able to look at all the features it offered. The best part was I had all the code to your demo and I quickly printed it all out and started testing your components. I was so amazed at how quickly I could develop applications. I was so impressed that I showed a co-worked how I could write a program in 5 minutes and 2 lines of code that would display images and do some manipulation of those images. It was Great!!!
Visual Developer Magazine Raves about ImageLib Corporate Suite! "An excellent imaging development toolkit for Delphi and C++Builder." by John Pearson from the Jan/Feb 1999 issue of Visual Developer Magazine.
From Delphi Informant Magazine (Sept. 1998):
Bill Todd writes: "One problem with adding imaging capabilites to an application is that users frequently want more features added. With ImageLib, your users will be hard pressed to define a feature that you can't provide quickly and easily. ImageLib gives you everything you need to build industrial strength document scanning and management systems. You can distribute applications created with ImageLib royalty-free, which makes it an excellent tool for creating commercial, as well as custom applications. ImageLib is a very powerful, complete, mature and well-documented product."
"To showcase its document management capabilities, ImageLib [Corporate Suite] comes with a complete document scanning and manipulation program, called SkyDocImage, written in Delphi. You can distribute this program royalty free and for an extra fee, you can get the source code. If you need to do document management, the source code is well worth the cost since you will probably have half of your application already written for you."
"As far as we're concerned every Delphi developer should own this great set of components...."
-- Paul Bonner, Windows Sources Magazine
"There's no question this library of graphics and multimedia components is worth its price based on its advertised fetures, but the little things Delphi developers will discover make the product even more difficult to resist."
-- Douglas Horn, Delphi Informant Magazine
ImageLib Corporate Suite
Review by Jim Hunter, Diamond Computing
I would like to start out by saying that I wanted to approach this review from the point of a true beginner. I took a current application that tracked a plant collection, and add the ability to scan photos directly from the program, modify them, then add them into a database inside the program for easy retrieval and viewing. These are all features that are available in ImageLib Corporate Suite. It also comes with more special effects than you can jiggle, curl, blur, or motion a stick at (these are some of the effects you get, like you didn't know that).
Like most programmers entering strange waters though, I read the introduction chapters of the manual then tried out the sample application they had in the beginning of the book. I also took a look at one of the sample programs that ship with the product. I was impressed by DEMOALL, the sample program. This demo program shows off all, or nearly all, of the features of the product. It ran without any trouble in Win NT 4.0 and Win95. The full source code for the demo is included, and as you'll find out, needed. Seeing the potential of ImageLib made me jump right in and try my hand at it.
What I learned was that the task of allowing my program to interact with my TWAIN scanner, cost my program exactly one line of code! PMultiImage1.ScanImage is all it takes. I must take my hat off to SkyLine Tools at this point, ImageLib Corporate Suite is the ONLY program/tool that works properly with my scanner under Win NT 4.0! Everything else tries to use the 16 bit TWAIN driver, where ImageLib correctly starts the 32 bit version. Once the image is scanned in and you are displaying it in a PMultiImage1 picture box, you can do almost anything to it your heart desires. But what I wanted to do with it was to stick it into a database where I could keep an eye on it. Again, this task was as hard as using their custom SaveFile dialog box that also shows a thumbnail of the image, and again issuing a single command MyPicture.LoadFromFile (MMOpenDialog1.FileName), again using a custom FileOpen dialog box that also shows a thumbnail of the file currently selected in the chosen directory. In the previous example, MyPicture is of type TPDBMultiImage. As you might guess from the name, it is a data aware. There are commands for saving in all the common bitmap graphics formats. You should find a format to fit your needs. As it turned out, to add all the graphics capability I wanted to my program, involved adding a few controls and under 10 lines of code! You can't argue with that.
ImageLib Corporate Suite comes with 20 custom controls and a manual that covers every property and method of each control. Although the manual was extensive, I was not happy with it. I did find a few errors and it didn't have enough examples as I would like. But please don't let this keep you from buying the program, the information you can learn in the sample programs is priceless. I spent a lot of time wandering through the halls of the DEMOALL code, picking up simple techniques on how to create a professional graphics program.
In review, ImageLib Corporate Suite is a powerful document imaging suite of controls that will allow any programmer to add high quality, professional looking, graphics manipulation to any program. ImageLib Corporate Suite works equally as well in Delphi 2.0, Delphi 3.0, C++ Builder. So, if you are looking for a package to help you move your program from the land of many to the SkyLine above, look no further.
SkyLine Tools Imaging
A division of Creative Development, Ltd.
For sales and additional info, send E-Mail to sales@imagelib.com
or contact SkyLine via Phone (818) 585-5867
© 1994 - 2002 SkyLine Tools Imaging. All rights reserved.