This one adds the often-requested movie in the sidebar. Just make sure you have a dual-core CPU before running with movies enabled.

Download now for Windows Vista

Full Sun v2.1 Release Notes

v2.1 Changes:

- Added movie to sidebar
- URL cache for better responsiveness when changing detectors

DRAGGING THE GADGET: To move the gadget you must use Microsoft’s drag pad for the gadget, which appears when you hover over the gadget. For some reason if a gadget wants to do something when clicked (like this one does), then dragging it by its face stops working. One commenter pointed out that I could change the click to a double-click to work around this, but I don’t want to add an extra click to opening the detector browser (something people might do a lot) to make it easier to drag the gadget, which most people don’t do very often. Hopefully there’s a better solution somewhere which involves being able to click AND drag a gadget (gasp!).

THE BLACK FRAME: The Sun is in Space, which is what the black frame is. I don’t know of any way to remove that from the image in a gadget, especially while preserving the prominences. I tried to make it look as attractive as I could, sorry if it’s not enough. But then, you got this for free and I wrote it for free so hopefully expectations are set accordingly ;)

SIDEBAR MOVIE: 2.1 adds the ability to play a movie in the Sidebar instead of just showing the current image. This consumes a noticable amount of my CPU, which is a fairly low-end machine by today’s standards (single-core 1.8 GHz Pentium M). My recommendation is that only dual-core users enable this.

PLAYBACK SPEED: The movie playback supports half speed but my copy of Windows Media Player has issues with playing back at 1/2 speed (it goes black after one loop). I originally also had 1/4 speed, but WMP completely barfed on that. I’m leaving in the 1/2 speed option in case it’s just my copy of WMP or in case Microsoft fixes the issue (assuming it’s theirs and not mine).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Astronomy, Downloads, Full Sun, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.