AbelCam

AbelCam discount

noreply@blogger.com (AbelCam) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:13:00 +0000

Bits du Jour is selling AbelCam with a substantial discount on Dec 12th.
don't miss this opportunity

AbelCam 3.2.2 released

noreply@blogger.com (AbelCam) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:57:00 +0000

AbelCam 3.2.2 has been released to the public.

New features in this version are:

motion detection can now be set for an area of the image
instead of the whole image
Motion detection for Local Save and FTP Upload now work independantly
IP Filter to block unwanted visitors

Download AbelCam

Upcoming AbelCam deal

noreply@blogger.com (AbelCam) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:38:00 +0000

you might know the site Bits du Jour. They offer 24 Hour Discount Deals on Fantastic Software Applications every day.

AbelCam has been chosen to be offered with a huge discount on December 12th.

So if you're using AbelCam now with a free license, don't miss this unique chance to get AbelCam at a fraction of the regular price.

If you're not familiar with AbelCam yet, download a copy and try before you buy

Once I tried AbelCam, I was hooked

noreply@blogger.com (AbelCam) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:46:00 +0000

MaxC has reviewed many software packages to stream video from his site.

He has purchased and tested 23 programs for streaming and they all failed to meet his requirements with two exceptions: MS MediaEncoder and AbelCam.

Read his report

Traffic time lapses

noreply@blogger.com (AbelCam) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 22:14:00 +0000

AbelCam comes with a program to convert series of JPEG images to video, JPEG2Video.

Last weekend I spent in a different part of Switzerland.
I set up a webcam in the car to take images.

On the way there I took a snapshot every 10 seconds.
Here's the video that results from these 1400 snapshots, replay at a 12fps:

The result looks ok on the Autobahn, but on the smaller roads in the Berner Oberland the 10 seconds are too long to keep a context between the images.

On the way back I did the same with 1 frame per second.
With the 9000 images, I created a 24fps video:

Now this looks much better!

If you like this route, here's the Google Earth KML file recorded with a Sony GPS-CS1

Project Stats - a look behind the curtain

noreply@blogger.com (AbelCam) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 05:00:00 +0000

Some times people ask me how much code is behind AbelCam.
The project has been growing constantly since its start back in 2005.

The AbelCam 3.0.1 solution has
215 code files that form 387 classes, 13 modules, 842 properties, 4067 procedures and 254 interfaces.

Total code lines are 68'648.

Of course this includes some libraries and plugins.

Here are the numbers for the core AbelCam project, Version 3.0.1
(numbers in brackets: AbelCam 2.2.5)

AbelCam consists of 155 (75) code files, 173 (89) classes, 13 (13) modules, 810 (180) properties, 3 (1) interfaces and 37 (30) structures.

The core has a total of 61'577 (41'674) lines, 47'666 (33'623) of them are code, 8'142 (4'049) lines of comments.

AbelCam has been written using MS Visual Studio, most of the code is VB.NET

Translation Troubles

noreply@blogger.com (AbelCam) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:09:00 +0000

AbelCam has been translated to seven languages by various users.

Partial translation to Finnish, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Slovenian are currently available, in the next release Finnish will be complete and partial translations for Swedish and Dutch will be added.

The slovenian translator, Tom Placer, reported a special problem. Most slovenian users run their windows in english with localized keyboard settings. As .NET uses the culture of the operating system for the application, his translation was not coming up when he ran AbelCam.

Today I wrote a wrapper, SetCulture.exe , which allows to select the culture used for AbelCam. Basically it allows to select the culture, loads the AbelCam assembly, starts a new thread, sets the culture for that thread and then runs AbelCams entry point.

The culture can be selected eighter from the command line or through a popup form.

This works fine, all languages are now selectable. SetCulture.exe will be included in the next release of AbelCam with shortcut to all installed languages.

Links from external sites - good or bad?

noreply@blogger.com (AbelCam) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:38:00 +0000

As a webmaster, you can see who links to your site by looking at the access log of the web server.

Links to your pages are something good - it brings people to your site. But what if there's a bad comment about what you have on your site?

Some times it's not easy to find out what the referring URL is talking about - see these examples:

Italian

Russian, more Russian

Polish

German (ok, that's easy for me)

Chinese more Chinese

Sometimes wrong information links to your site and leaves you wondering if you should try to correct it, or unfriendly companies suddenly start to send visitors over

I am just welcoming all visitors to my sites, no matter where they come from.

As not everybody reads english well, I have started to provide URLs to have my sites translated to their language - maybe that helps them to understand what I wrote just like it helps me to understand what others write (about my sites).

Visitors vs. Languages

noreply@blogger.com (AbelCam) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:45:00 +0000

When I decided to go multilanguage with AbelCam, it was not because most users came from non english speaking countries. It was because I wanted to make AbelCam friendlier to people who had little or no knowledge of english.

The visitors came from these countries in the last 30 days:

Country	Visitors
United States
Germany
Italy
Russia
United Kingdom
Brazil
Romania
Canada
Netherlands
Turkey

You might know that AbelCam 3.0 has been translated to Finnish, French, German, Slovenian, Spanish and Portuguese. These languages were chosen by people who volounteered to translate, it was not a marketing decision.

Probably it will take some time until the new version becomes known in the countries where those languages are used. Most webcam software is available in fewer languages only, and those translated in many languages are not as powerful and flexible as AbelCam is.

I'll keep an eye on those statistics and let you know if they change significantly.

AbelCam Gadget

noreply@blogger.com (AbelCam) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:40:00 +0000

To figure out what Blogger Gadgets can do, I wrote a small gadget showing the most popular cameras on the AbelCam Camera List

If you'd like to use this Gadget (it works in iGoogle as well), use this URL:
http://www.abelcam.com/en/cameras/abelgadget.xml

AbelCam 3.0 released

noreply@blogger.com (AbelCam) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:10:00 +0000

Now that I have released AbelCam 3.0 after almost 9 months of development, things are calming down a bit.

This year has been full of testing, finding bugs, implementing small improvements. The test group found new versions of AbelCam at least once a week if not daily.

Having released AbelCam 3.0 to the public feels a bit like having written a test: The work is done, now I am waiting for results.

I am looking at web server statistics to see how the new release is being picked up by the download archives.

Something that caught my attention today is the use of keyword in search engines to find AbelCam (see the table below). What amazed me is the high number of people searching for camera device names ending up on AbelCam.com, and also how many people do one word searches.

keyword	searches
abelcam	597
free webcam software	86
webcam server	74
windows	46
forum	36
vimicro301 neptune	33
vimicro301 neptune driver	32
issues	24
logisphere	21
view my webcam online	17
windows cam	15
free webcam program	14
trust webcam 14823 software	14
usb pc camera vimicro 301 neptune	13
webcam	11
trust webcam 14823	10
server	10