its a pity that its not possible to download files from itch.io directly, because they have a very crude download javascript. But on itch.io there are many Amiga games, so besides Aminet it’s most probably the most used platform for Amiga software.
So i tried out how to download their stuff, and it is possible, not too difficult as it seems. A first very crude version is seen here
it only downloads the first file and has no error checking, so there is more work needed but as a short technical preview its already good. Look forwards to next AmiFox Version.
I updated the online component of AmiFox, just some tiny bugfixes and improvements for avoiding anti-crawler detection and some modules update including some changes for newer chrome versions.
There is no update needed for AmiFox it stays at the current version. Only if you use the docker on your own server you might want pull the latest version. The AmiFox Server Version is still 0.3 because there is no functional change, but the underlying WRP Version is now 4.6.1 (up from 4.6.0), you can read this Version numbers in the About Box of AmiFox after you loaded a webpage.
A while before I showed that the PDF output can now also show the japanese characters. I also implemented a direct printing of japanese characters to the application itself.
it uses ttengine which is available for Amiga, MorphOS and AROS which is good for me to use. but of course the application will also work without, just the fancy print will not work.
so today i publish this Version on time for the Amiga 38.
Prepared a special Version of AmiFox for Amiga38. McDope did a lot of work to create a boxed Version of AmiFox to sell to people (later I decided to pay the bill and make the box a free of charge item).
The Box looks very nice and will be given out for free at the event (others already pre-ordered and will get the box by mail). Originally it was planed to have 50 boxes but the printer services was somehow very generous and send much more boxes for the same price. I added a little serial number and the A38 logo for the people getting this boxed version, every box has a unique serial number. But the serial ist just cosmetics and shown in the window and about. AmiFox is and stays free.
The new version has some new Features like a AREXX interface, a possibility to submit a webpage as command line parameter (both useful for OpenURL usage).
Especially for small screen Amigas (like Native PAL Hires Mode) parts of the interface can be hidden. either automatically (the status bar) or by button click (the text input bar).
When I created AmiTranslate I tried the multi byte languages as well (chinese, japanese, korean and others) but the PDF Export did not work and I didn’t understand why, so I left them out.
Today I noticed there is an option when saving the PDF in FreePascal which reduces the embedded font to a minimum to keep the file size down. It seems like it does that by removing such asian chars, so even you define a special asian font the output will just be empty.
The downsides it of course the PDF becomes huge, some megabytes, you can reduce that by let the font pack on PDF creation, but even in UAE it needs a long time, so I disabled that as well
I noticed some bugs in AmiTranslate and also got some suggestions how to improve the program. Firstly the scrollbars for the text edits did not work (where not connected to the actual textedit). The pdf did not care about returns or line wrap so a longer text are not readable. Now it cares about returns in the text and will also insert line wraps for longer texts.
A wish was to include a context menu for both edits to copy and paste text.
So it’s time for a new release 0.2, Download at the Programs Page
Usually when I translate texts from one language to an other I use DeepL to do it, it makes better results than Google translate in the most cases (at least if german is the target language). It also has an API to use and the first 500.000 chars are free, so I created a little program for Amiga to use that API.
It’s stupidly named AmiTranslate I know very unimaginative but hey seems the name is not used already, so why not. Of course the program needs an Internet connection and SSL (OpenSSL3 on MorphOS; AmiSSL on all other systems) because it talks directly with the DeepL server (via https) and it needs the texteditor.mcc.
Of course for some of the languages there is the problem of showing the chars (e.g. russian) for that I included a PDF writing function and a plain UTF-8 Text output then you can use other programs to read the actual text. of course nicer would be to make a real TTF output maybe later.
I also removed some languages which does not work at all (even the PDF output, like japanese, korean and chinese)
If you have an own DeepL key you can add the ToolType „DEEPLKEY=<key>“ to the icon, then even my 500.000 chars are used you can still use your own, it’s free so why not.
Of course it’s perfectly possible to use any text 2 image webpages like getimg.ai with AmiFox on Amiga. But of course a better way is to make a specialized app for it using hugging face with stable diffusion.
It also contains Magic prompt which can produce more sophisticated prompts or even a complete random prompt. Gives really nice pictures sometimes.
Introducing AREXX commands for AmiFox, so you can send a URL to AmiFox to view. If the Browser is idle it will directly start to load the new URL. If still loading another URL it will remember the URL and start it after the current one is finished loading, maybe later also stop the current task, atm its easier that way.
Wit this new AREXX command of course one can use an AREXX script but even better you can use programs like openurl to directly send urls to your favourite Web-browser… or AmiFox 😀
