mgsgta3, Hi. You erase by drawing with the secondary color. ie, paint with the left mouse button and erase with the right mouse button or tablet eraser.

Just Me, the previous giveaway of howler 8.2 SE feature for feature is significantly better equipped than this lite editon. The ONLY benefit I can see with this lite build is it is able to use my failing GPU to accelerate some of the calculations whereas howler 8.2.SE was unable to recognise my older GPU. You can get the old giveaway howler 8.2. SE any time you like as it's being offered on Dans site ...

https://thebest3d.com/howler/download/home-edition/index.html

DJ, The Photographic category of filters includes 12 filters specially related to film processes or camera lens systems, such as fisheye lens, or simulation of 2 color film processes. That's not to say there are no image processing filters that can be used for photography. There are still about 100 filters available.

Stewart Wallace, Hi. If you have multiple versions of Howler installed, you will have to run them both/all as administrator. It's a limitation of COM in Windows, since we are an "active x server application" like Office. Basically servers self register so that all the COM stuff is managed automatically, and that is normally done on install, but if more than one application is installed, they self register each time, and that requires administration rights.

Stewart Wallace, yes that is a design flaw in all their products... for your systems safety you should only let it run as an admin to register the OCX objects then exit and relaunch it NOT as an adminstrator. It is a significant security risk to leave any dogwaffle.exe perminantly set to run as an administrator in compatability tab since the developer allows non-elevated accounts to write to and change the contents of the programs installation folder due to a different design flaw and because the dogwaffle.exe is unsigned it could easily be infected by malware with out needing elevated rights and then if you ran the infected dogwaffle.exe you'd get no warning as it runs elevated and is unsigned and the malware could then do anything to your system since windows won't be able to tell the executable had been changed because its unsigned. This problem has gone on for all their giveaways and been mentioned many times and as yet nothing has been done to fix the dangers.

Dan Ritchie,
Thanks for explanation.

L. Cleveland Major,

"If you are expecting a full version in a giveaway, you are not going to get it in most cases for any program."

True, but there's always open source, in this case Krita. krita[.]org
Or you can buy it for $10 in win10's store or on Steam.

That's not saying anything good or bad about Howler -- just an alternative or compliment for your toolkit.

mike,
My first version was way back in 2009. At that time the free version was just called Project Dogwaffle. There were more advanced version already available, but as I was just getting started, I chose to just get the free one. Even that old version was impressive to me, and I was able to do a lot with it. I even repair damaged photos by scanning them with my copier into my computer, opening that in Project Dogwaffle, and using the tools in the program to do the work. When I printed the result out, the people i did it for liked what I gave them a lot. It was much easier to use than Photoshop or Gimp, even back then.

The thing is, at that time, the free version was all that I needed for my skill level, and I worked with it within the limits it had. As I said, I never had any complaints; either of my own or from others I did my work for from using the program. Because of this, I am a lifetime fan!

L. Cleveland Major, You state:

"If you are expecting a full version in a giveaway, you are not going to get it in most cases for any program. If you are looking for the latest and greatest pro version here at GAOTD, I've not seen that happen ever."

You may never have seen it happen but it has many times!. The original aim of giveawayoftheday.com was to offer FULL commercial programs legally licensed with the standard usage and re-install restrictions and no lasting obligation on the part of the project contributor to offer ongoing free technical support. we have had MANY MANY full latest release versions of commercial programs.

I remember one giveaway was for a windows password reset tool that was for desktop editions of windows... but was good and reliable at its job but it would not operate on server based versions of windows because as with most giveaways its for strictly personal use and not licensed for server use. So I recommended it to my boss that we bought a copy with the server capability license and a sale was made off the back of a good giveaway. of a full pro product That is the sort of marketing project this is supposed to be. We get paid with a cost free full licensed product they would never have sold us anyway and if their product and giveaway was any good they could be repaid by us recommending their product to others.

TK,
Thank you for clearing that up. I was just speaking from my own experience.

That said, there is the one thing that nearly all the software offered here has in common, which is in the readme packaged in every zip I have downloaded via Giveaway of the Day. I quote this from the readme itself:
"Please note that the software you download and install
during the Giveaway period comes with the following important limitations:
1) No free technical support
2) No free upgrades to future versions
3) Strictly non-commercial usage"

This to me means that there are restrictions not placed on a paid full version. I take this as meaning if you wish to have all of those things with your full version, you must buy it.

Furthermore, many of the downloads I have acquired here at GAOTD have an extra addition that is a restriction within itself; some type of builtin feature that does something to the work one uses it for that prevents certain things from being possible which are possible in the paid version. I have found this to be a common practice for many producers of software that they give away for free. This is what I call the trial version, which lets you try the software, but will not allow certain things to be done with what you create or produce using it. To get rid of that feature, it is recommended that you buy the program.

One more thing to consider as well is that even if you get the full version of a program here, the serial number, or activation key is designed to let them know that your version was acquired for free. This lets them know who is not entitled to the things they restrict. I have no problem with this, as I understand that to have full access to everything, they need you to buy that right. After all, they are in business to make money.

Now I do not download every give away offered on this site. If I did, my computer's hard drive would have been filled up long ago. So I only choose what is relevant to what I use my computer for.

I have received some replies from this site telling me If I do not wish to receive emails from GOATD, I should unsubscribe. Not sure who it was that posted that message, as the message would already have been removed by the time I get to the site to post a reply, but I do find it a bit rude. I feel like someone is not understanding the context of my statements that I post here. Perhaps they read it wrong, or they get triggered before they read the entire comment. At any rate, I try not to let it bother me, but sometimes it does; especially if I feel strongly about something I'm commenting on.

If I am offending anybody with the way I word my comments, please know that it has to do with the way my mind works. It is never meant to be offensive, as I have the utmost respect for everybody here.

L. Cleveland Major, Those boiler plate giveaway restrictions are part of the way the giveawayoftheday.com give the "project contributors" assurance that by taking part in a giveaway event they are not required to make a long term developer and tech support labour charge commitment. With many products it is better to NOT be sucked into a future update because sometimes developers have odd or unhelpful ideas that depretiate or change a favorite feature and you can end up with software that is less easy to use or eats resources or in the case of android apps that bogs down a device with so many background activities and data mining that it makes a device practically unusable with excessive battery power consumption, excess heating, personal data leakage and appication crashes due to resource depletion. Also those restrictions are purely boiler plate restrictions and every contributor can choose to not apply any or all of those restrictions... I do recall one piece of software that was the best software they offered and an un-restricted license that activated the standard build of the product and when a new major version update giveaway occoured I tried installing the major version upgrade over the top of the previous giveaway and to my surprise it retained the old giveaway license so this particular vendor chose to not enforce no free future updates boiler plate limitation. While others may offer unpaid tech support... Hippoedit has been known to do that in the past not differentiating between paid and giveaway users in my experience.

Some examples of FULL non-limited software giveaways I can recall from the past (partly because I still use them regularly) Clipdiary , AllMyNotes Deluxe, Allavsoft downloader, Hippoedit. There are many more... personally I do not view no assurance of tech support to be a problem because it is so rare I ever need it ;-)
If I am happy with the way a version of software works I also do not find any inclination to install the latest and so called greatest version unless I have to,
I feel the strictly personal use limitation is often the same restriction already on a product if you buy the same license from the contributor anyway... for example the AOMEI Backuper Pro is for personal use in at home or in an office... to use it for commercial purposes requires a MUCH more expensive license than the commercial Pro license. I too being somewhat outspoken can be misunderstood but my goal was not to attack or insult but to just correct a misconception about what visitors and contributors should be able to expect from THIS sites plainly stated goals. It's not a charity software bank it is a "unique marketing opurtunity" that increases any contributors product exposure exponentially if they contribute their commercial products in compliance with the stated aims and promises of the site.

If a contributor offeres their best product and SOME do their potential rewards are thousands of product fans that have the possibility of becoming unpaid marketing department or unpaid affiliates sending leads their way... There is also the other potential but side effect that if and when a windows system needs to be re-installed or a new machine is bought and the old one disposed of if their giveaway was as good as it could be and became a lifeline for the giveaway participant they could well be inclined to buy the commercial license to get the familar good software on their new installation or new machine. But that is not the purpose of the site just a potential plus for the contributor.

TK, I have set my machines up with very reliable malware protection software, and cleaners. Those back doors you are mentioning have yet to present any problems for me. The Project Dogwaffle applications have been invaluable in my artist's toolbox, and while you choose not to keep it, which is your right, I do not wish to give up something so valuable to my workflow. I run my protection software often, and the reports for over 7 years have for the most part been favorable, and anything that was found was easily cleaned from my systems. This works for me quite well. To be clear about the malware problem, I am a very cautious person, have done extensive research to find the best protection I can get for my machines, and installing those I choose. I put each of them to their best uses. I have learned that what one does not find, one of the others will, and I have made sure that none of my protection software sees any other as malware. There are competing malware protection software developers that will program theirs to see competitors' as exactly that! I'm sure you know this, though. I do not nor will I ever deal with such developers. What I have works well together, and that's the way I endeavor to keep it. With some of that software comes a warning system, that will let me know if something looks too risky.

Now to the issue of the backdoor you mentioned in Project Dogwaffle's various software apps. I read your reply to Dan Ritchie, in which you mentioned that the other day. I think this is something you should have posted in the suggestions part of GAOTD, where they ask "How would you improve the software?". It is how GAOTD allows the participants to record their suggestions, so that that record is available to the software developer on a more permanent basis. I would hope that you did this, because your comments are the only ones I've seen that even mentions it. As I am a big supporter of the software that The Best 3D develops, it is in my best interest and theirs to see that they are able to improve in every way they can.

Cheers!

Rune, HI. Sometimes you might have to install the WinTab drivers. It's an age old battle between wacom and microsoft.

Rune,
I actually prefer to use a mouse and actual keyboard for the art and editing I do with PD Howler. Yes I am an artist. As such, I always strive to learn the methods put before me by the programs I choose to use. Understand that the programs are only your tools. You must provide your own imagination and skill. For the skill, you must build that up, and the best way to do that is through practice. There are tutorials to help you get started with the better programs, and I should say this is one of the better programs.

Check the system requirements for this one, and see if there are instructions on how to get it to work correctly with your Tablet.

Quick note RE: the driver pack I think Dan is talking about -- it's for their Surface line of tablets at microsoft[.]com

Hi again. Sometimes it's just a matter of making sure that tablet sensitivity hasn't been toggled off, as it can be turned on and off. It's the fith icon across the top toolbar.

Rune, Hi again. If you are on a machine that uses the Microsoft drivers such as the Surface, the wintab drivers appear to be optional (Microsoft and Waccom are competitors, so they don't include them by default, I guess)
It's not just us who are effected, but any program that uses the Wintab interface and not the MS one.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49498

Rune, re Dans link to MS download site when you click through to download you will be offered a choice of files to download... IF the problem is due to a lack of an installed wintab32.dll just select the 64 bit or 32 bit version depending on if your OS is 64bit or 32bit as appropriate, you should not need the much larger surfacepro4 named files just either Wintab_x32_1.0.0.20.zip or Wintab_x64_1.0.0.20.zip personally if you have 64bit windows I'd get both 64bit and 32bit since todays program is 32bit only and could conceivably not be able to interface with the 64bit DLL which is still called wintab32.dll but counterintuatively is in fact a 64bit DLL I'd check to make sure you don't already have a wintab32.dll in your system32 folder just in case the tablet driver package installed a manufacturer specific one when it was first installed as I know Aiptek bundle their own branded wintab32.dll with some of their tablets. I say this because it might break your other programs access to the tablet if a manufacturer specific wintab32.dll is replaced by a generic MS built one. Hope that helps.

L. Cleveland Major, I think it is just Howler's implementation.

Back in the day I did everything with a mouse. I finally tried a tablet and my production went up 400%! I have a friend who is doing animation the hard way - paper and then cels. He doesn't get a lot done.

Rune,
I understand what you are saying, and I agree that a 400% production increase is quite good. That said, I know that most tablets are limited as far as graphic resources are concerned. Perhaps you have one of the better ones, but it still cannot compare to the power of a Gaming Computer with a dedicated Graphics Card such as an nVidea. The power of a device to do what you want is key to your success.

Still you should stick to what works best for you. None of us work in the same way; each having our own methodology. I wish you well in all of your endeavors.

urkim99, yup... can't find the lite version for sale on their site so the slightly restricted Howler, depretiated at the time of the giveaway, 8.2 SE from a previous giveaway is still not quite the commercial version but at least that one has most of the features of the full version at the time just slightly fewer filters (20 less) The site wording suggests the version 12 is not a stable full release when comparing the details with 11.4 which seems to be the most recent called stable release...

The System Requirements is a marketing ploy only to apear it's devloped in a modern manner, it is not... it is still built out of MS Visual Basic 5.2.82.44 (C) 1987-1997 yes Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 software environment! It will install on Vista and might install on XP SP3 though I have not tested it. Under XP there could be problems with the D3D11.dll seeing as XP never supported DirectX 11... but the library may be able to interface with earlier versions of DirectX. Direct3D is not a critical requirement as if it were it would not work with non-accelerated drivers on a broken Nvida GPU under remote desktop if it was a show stopper requirement. It has significantly reduced functionality to the previous 8.2 SE and suffers with exactly the same design bug where if you want to switch between different project dogwaffle installed programs you will need to run them as an administrator because they MUST be able to self register their own coppies of the same OCX components, the program fails to use other same version copies registered in a different folder and insists on re-registering its own ones completely ignoring Windows XP and aboves WinSXS side by side system to have multiple different versions of the same OCX on a system... I suspect the project has just gotten too convuluted for the developer to bring uptodate and compliant with modern design and installation paradigms, which is a shame.

Their giveaways listed a bit more completely than in the Publisher:

link https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/?s=howler
Plenty of still relevent comments in those previous giveaways to read.
I would find PD howler difficult to promote to my customers and friends and family seeing as its practically STILL pre21st century software and only parts of it use "modern" platforms like visual C++ ImageMagik and LUA scripting libraries from other developers but still no requirements for any modern version of windows.

Also being offered crippled or out of date not for sale editions or versions rather than the current full product as a giveaway means I have no experience of the full commeercial product to evaluate and maybe recommend either.

urkim99,
Are you saying you already have a paid version? If so, why did you download this Lite version? Does the word 'Lite' not tell you that it does not have all that a full version would have?

Every version of Project Dogwaffle I have ever had, whether free or paid, I have had no complaints. I used them within their limits, not expecting anything they could not do to magically work.

Sorry if this seems a bit harsh, but I am only suggesting that you give this program a chance within its own limits. You cannot seriously expect it to do what a full version can do.

No, I do not mean to browbeat you, so please don't take it that way. I only mean to get you to think about the potential of the program, even though it does not do what a full version can.

If you do not have a full version and you want one, I suggest you go to their site and buy one. They even have earlier full versions available, and by my own experience with them, they will work with you to help you get as good a version as you can afford. I got my current version back in February of this year, and am about to get a free upgrade for it which has recently been released. They are really some very nice people.

In closing I'll say, PD Howler in my opinion is far better than Photoshop or Gimp, which are way more complicated, and it can do some things that those others cannot. As for Photoshop, I cannot see paying a monthly fee for the right to use it. At least with Howler, you do not have to do that.

urkim99, Hi. Sorry you did not find it useful. Howler is a paint and animation program that has been in development for a long time and contains over a million lines of code. It can be really slanted toward visual effects work, and many people will not understand a lot of it, but it is also a capable art tool. As mentioned above, nobody can give away their full software that they make a living on for free. What I did do was try to remove only what what very specific to visual effects work such as batch processing and exposure sheets. 1 in a million people are ever going to need those. I did keep the ability to animate filters, either directly, or through a timeline, and save as AVI. AVI's can contain other formats such as MP4 with the right codecs installed. I kept all the drawing tools intact, and only reduced drawing medias by 30% to save disc space, as the full program is over 500 megs and not everybody wants to fill up their hard drive. I did not take out the best stuff. The fact is, I have to keep the best stuff in, in order to give users enough to entice them to look at the full version. Removing the best stuff would be counter to that.

Dan Ritchie, Hi again. I did remove plugins, but this was not to remove great features. At this point in development, most of our plugins have been internalized, and the plugins and scripting that are there were mostly for developers. Since this program was not aimed at studios with software pipelines, those features were removed.

TK, Hi. Yes, we have been on the market for 20 years, and because of that, we made/make use of Visual Basic. At the time, it was THE tool to use to develop programs for Windows. We also use Visual Studio C++ up through 2018, as you can tell by the C++ runtimes during installation. Like any program that's been developed continually for 20 years, there is some legacy, and we are continually rewriting the program up to the current day with modern methods including GPU and multi-threading support, object oriented programming and SSE acceleration. We chose SS2 as the base level, because most people will be using it.. We are not an app in the sense that we do not use MS's newer cell phone based API. We are a desktop program.

Hi Urkim 99, but almost everything you said is just not true. We do not support Windows XP or Vista. Windows 7 and higher is required. We make extensive use of Visual C++, c++ amp, and make extensive use of modern programming practices in addition to supporting legacy code. We're not in a rush to port hundreds of thousands of lines of code to something entirely new just to say we did it. APIs come and go on a regular basis. Windows Forms, WPF, and etc, have all come and gone, but we continue to use what makes sense. Again, I'm sorry you did not find it useful. 20 years ago, we set out to write a program that would help people get their films made, and we've worked hard and put our money where our mouth is over those years.

Dan Ritchie, I think you are replying to my post here...

Windows 7 or higher is certainly not required! It absolutely does install without any event or warning under Windows Vista all the executables are are built/linked as requiring at least NT 4.0 not NT 6.1 or higher which would make it Windows 7 or higher.
I did not say it would work on XP SP3 but that it might, the only limiting factor might be the Direct3D use using DirectX 11 dlls which is true. I know you are in no rush to wrewrite anything to bring all your codebase to currently suported dev platforms and are in no rush to resolve the OCX conflict problems when switching between your programs.

And just to clear up any doubt I just installed this giveaway on an OLD Dell Inspiron 6400 XP Pro SP3 laptop and everything installed all 3 of the MS C++ runtimes and the program itself and the program fired up and was able to edit a canvas (scribble on it with the default pen) and save it as a JPG without issue or error. Only deficiency on that machine is the creen resolution of 1280x800 is not quite enough to render the GUI area fully as there was not enough room.
The only functionality that did not work was the benchmarking because the Dell Inspiron does not have a supported GPU to benchmark against the CPU.

see https://1drv.ms/u/s!Ai4kUYFAeZV7gVh76HQm77igTbu0 screenshot for proof of it running on XP today.

Whether you actively support XP or Vista by testing the program on those platforms is imaterial since nothing you have done programing wise is precluding those operating systems from running your programs. So saying that it does not support operating under XP SP3 and Vista but it only supports Windows 7 and up is not really true is it...

By insisting on sticking with depretiated Visual Basic 5 you are having to foist upon users the pre XP problem of DLL HELL and the registry complexities of using unsupported ActiveX controls and fragile COM objects.

There is absolutely no assurances that future versions of windows will continue to be able or willing to run the visual basic 5 runtimes since MS completely retired it a long time ago before 2008.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic

It just does not seem wise to continue struggling to develop with a retired unsupported dev environment and with unknown security vulnerabilites and known bugs that must be unsurmountable with the current mix of programming interfaces or else you would have fixed them a long time ago.

Developers often bite the bullet and do a complete re-write periodically to migrate disparate code from different development platforms some of which may no longer be supported with even critical security patching to a supported platform that can do everything the mish mash of code did and do it better with better unit testing and debugging facilites and not having to keep switching between different language sytems and their different syntaxs which has got to make it easier to find your way around the project. Most developers that do such an exercise do so to make the program better, more reliable, higher performance and more streamlined in the distribution build like not having to bundle 4 different runtime libraries when only a single VC++ 2017 redistributable should suffice! They don't just do it as an exercise in futility as you seem to think it would be.

You do include OCX files in your programs folder and require them registered in that folder as sytem servers before your program can use them and by doing so if one switches from say the partcle variant to howler light to howler SE each time you switch programs the program you want to switch to has to be run as an Administrator or else the program fails to iniitalise and throws an error "Unexpected error, quitting" It has had this problem since before the very first giveaway by now the "error" should not be "unexpected" and if the OCX files were used properly like the ones that are installed into the Windows\System32 folder the errror would no longer occour or alternatively if you just MUST keep those OCX files in the local programs folder then you could have caught the EXPECTED error and use windows API to request rights elevation to allow re-registering the OCX files for this instance.... Microsoft Visual Basic 5.2 is long depretiated and while you may still be able to develop code using it such code cannot be assured to be free of vulnerabilities, no one is testing it's interaction with current codebases! Or if your program can be used nefariously to harm a system since one of the workarounds for one of the bugs is to use compatability settings to always run your programs as an administrator. It is clear that your program is not compatible with Microsofts best programming practices by you changing the inherited ACL from the Program Files parent folder to allow non-elevated accounts to write to any file that is not in current use which means the programs executables are vulnerable to even the most trivial virus software since it can get in and executed without getting elevated rights and if an infected dogwaffle.exe gets run with elevated rights the attacker could do anything on the system with no further UAC prompts! I presume you do that so imagemagick can write temporary data to a folder within the program files heirachy for example "C:\Program Files\HowlerLite\TempTGA.tga" when saving to any file type that requires convert.exe to be used rather than using accounts %temp% folder... None of that makes sense to me for someone wanting to be a good witness!

As yet I cannot find a single thing I wrote as being untrue nor was anything said by Urkim 99 untrue. I am not attacking you or your programming abilities but trying to exhort you to adopt a wiser attitude to this group of programs so you stop making your customers computers less secure and more prone to faults that are not at all necesasry... e.g. you could add to the TempTGA.tga path passed to converter.exe %temp%\TempTGA.tga OR use the path you use elsewhere C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Howler\Temp\Saved_Document.lyr or make it smarter by using the installation paths subfolder in this case defaulting to HowlerLite in the path to the programs own temp folder so that there would be no conflict if different programs were saving as at the same time and so generating their own TempTGA.tga at the same time do not collide AND the program files folder can be restored to the correct inherited ACL security settings.

Dan Ritchie, By the way are you aware todays giveaway dogwaffle has a hit on virustotal... it is likely a false positive but due to the unsafe programing practices already described I'd not immediatly dismiss it as a false positive without further consideration.... Especially considering the executables are not even digitally signed using the latest industry recomended digital certificates to lessen the chance of that easy infection vector the development choices have generated. We have NO WAY to know the dogwaffle.exe file we have is as you built it.

Scan Date: 2019-04-27 03:43:35
Hash: cf3d53f07379514ae80d77222c67b01d
Detections: 1/71
---------------------------------------------
VBA32 BScope.Trojan.Diple

Sorry to be the bearer of more bad news!

TK, The program was scanned before and after with Virus Total with a clean result, .t is a requirement of their product packaging rules.

Dan Ritchie,

Something doesn't add up here. Before and after what?

Dan Ritchie, who's product packaging rules? You can't mean giveawayoftheday.com as it is well known that programs have been given away with at least one detection on virustotal many times in the past and they make a determination based on unknown criteria that the detection is a false positive but that is always a subjective decision and NOT a clean result with no detections but a a scan with a discarded detection.

Usually the declared false detection is registered on the installer and not the program files contained within and the normal declared false positives are based on heuristic detection methods and produce a generic detection not specific detections on the programs main executable.
I am not lying to you, the detection report is genuine.

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/165a7c67f07a1997342e4f217469940fb2f8700089c00aa4f915d6b1c348c346/detection

It might be plausable that the Hooks registered portion of the sandboxing testing might have triggered the process for VBA32 programs suspision of there being trojan behaviour. It may well be a false detection but since the executable is unsigned we have no way to know if the file was changed before it was packaged or since it's been on our system... Other than the file is exactly the same hash as it was when it was scanned by a 3rd party on 27th March 2019 a significant amount of time before the giveaway event so it suggests the detection is nothing to do with any changes since installation on my systrems as I got the file from the giveaway zip packagd installer. Also it would be a different matter if the program had been built in a conventional manner and installed following MS best practices rules but it has not. If an operating system had been built this way there would be cries of they built in a glaringly obvious back door to permit local and system wide infection with malware of any kind... due to the addition of the Everyone group with full read/write/modify rights to all the files in the installation folders and the advice to set the applications compatability settings to always run as administrator if you want to use different PD program streams on the same system.