In light of the fact that EEGUI has been out for 2 years now, and is still the only high quality full-featured GUI system for Truevision, I have decided that until I have some real competition in the GUI market here, I need to raise the price of EEGUI to be more in line with its real value.
Why is it valuable? Why is it the best GUI system for TrueVision that you can get?
1) It's free to try, without being restricted or "gimped" in any way. All you have is a watermark that registration removes.
2) It's highly extensible. You can inherit from any of my base controls to extend their functionality, or simply create your own controls by inheriting from the main base control.
3) It's supported! Need help making that custom control? There is a EEGUI google group to post in to get help not only from me, but from other EEGUI users! Ventrilo voice chat support is available, as well as desktop-sharing help from me, where I can view your code and help you in your own environment! All of these things I am more than willing to do even for unregistered users!
4) Many pre-written controls! Aside from the basic "button, image, label, textbox" controls, there is a combo box, list box, rotating image, scroll bars, value sliders, progress bars, and more!
5) Very cool "over time" effects! Alpha fades (up and down), resizes, and slides, when combined, can make a lot of neat effects! (A fade up, with a resize from small to large, while sliding up and left, can give a "window coming out of the distance to pop up in your face" type of effect... It's very cool!)
6) A new cursor management system, where you can easily set up not just one cursor, but a lot of cursors of any gui control type (including animated images), so you can quickly and efficiently switch between cursors based on various events (like a mouseover event may trigger logic to change your mouse cursor, and the mouse leave event would change it back).
7) A built-in tooltip object that's fully customizable, to the point of even replacing it with your own custom control that can be anything you want it to be... and can be positioned relative to the cursor in any of the 8 major directions.
Full-featured focus handling, including always-on-top controls, tab ordering, bring-to-front/send-to-back, etc... and logic for handling the focused item's input.
9) Full-Featured text handling, with horizontal and vertical alignments, auto-sizing of labels (and anything that derives from them, including text boxes) to grow or shrink to the size of the text, fully-customizable text coloring, as well as text shadows. Cursors are variable width, and textboxes can be masked (for password fields)... all built in.
10) Robust click and drag handling, including logic for parents "holding on to" their children, constraining them within themselves; parents allowing children to be plucked from them and dropped on entirely new parent windows (like the WoW inventory system), etc...
11) 5 different look-and-feel states for every single control, fully customized with textures or colors for the main body of the control, and colors for borders. (Base, mouseover, mousedown, selected (focused), and disabled).
12) A nicely developed demo app that demonstrated how to use EEGUI to its fullest potential through the use of inheritance for your own custom controls that extend from the internal base controls.
Let's be honest... this is ground on which many people have attempted to navigate, but thus far, very few have gotten very far, and only a few have succeeded... and EEGUI is the result of that success.
GUI development is necessary for just about every TV project, and everyone seems to want to make their own GUI core to handle all of the aspects of a GUI. I have personally seen, in the last 3.5 years of being in the TV community, no less than 10 GUI systems ANNOUNCED... only about 6 or 7 ever got to a point where screenshots were posted, and only 3 or 4 were ever released to the public. Out of all of those, only one has been able to really PRODUCE the results people want!
That one? EEGUI!
With all that in mind... the price of EEGUI is now $65 for a 1.x unlimited use license.
You may say "Wow, $65 for a GUI system?"... well, yeah... considering how full featured EEGUI is, and how no one else seems to be able to get one developed that's able to even come close to what EEGUI offers... I think it's worth that much.
Anyway... 2.0 is in the "I'm thinking about how to do this stuff while in the shower" stage... and planned for that is an actual graphical GUI editor, as well as render surface layers to split the GUI up in to sub-parts to make things more efficient. Honestly, if I can get a graphical editor done, the price for 2.0 will likely be $100. All 1.x users, though, will get 2.0 for merely the difference in whatever they paid for 1.x, and the price for 2.0 (so new EEGUI users as of now would only pay $35 to upgrade to 2.0 once it's released). Also, 1.x will always be available and supported... so never fear there.
/end announcement.
