Orphalese Tarot Zone Community Forum

I mentioned on a previous thread that I was hoping to bring out a beta version of Orphalese Tarot 11 this summer. The process is taking longer than I hoped but I thought I would just share a little bit about what the new version will look like for anyone who remembered that previous post, just so you know I haven't abandoned the idea.

The current program is written for something called "Windows Forms", which was cool when the program came out in the first years of the millennium. Nowadays those programs look somewhat dated, mostly because screen resolutions have increased a lot and their windows often look very small on the screen, but also because all the graphics for Windows Forms programs are generated by the computer's CPU, rather than by the graphics card. The new version uses a more up to date technology called "Windows Presentation Framework" which produces windows that you can resize easily, making them much easier on the eye, especially when used on tablets. Also all the graphics are sharper and crisper because they are generated by the graphics card when available.

Here are a couple of screenshots to give an idea, first from the current program:


And this is from the version I am working on, at the same scale:


It will be a few months at least before I am ready to produce a beta, because a lot of the source code needs to be reorganized for the new interface. Mostly I am concentrating on not losing any of the current functionality in the transition, but I am happy to improve any existing features at the same time so suggestions are always welcome

I'm looking forwared to the V11 .. I have converted a number of programs from winforms to WPF.
It is painful, and for a while I couldn't see the advantage (actually it seemed more difficult, like on searches from design window etc.)
But it does make an improvement in the presentation and forces some better organization of each page .. can't just drop a textbox anywhere
.. I've been programming AI for the last few years and a Addon App for Microsoft Flight Simulator.
I also created an image database .. that can store any images (like a tarot deck) and can comments that are attached to any part of the images
((so I can attach a comment to all the items on a card and cross relate them)) One day I'll create a database for tarot and each deck could have comments and they can be cross-referenced to show what's different or in common for various decks.
thanks, good luck ..

Hey that sounds cool! If you had anything in a format that you think might be useful to other users of the program you would be welcome to post a link to it.

I will contribute something in the near future ..

I'm glad to see you are still being active with the program. Not being a programer I have to ask, will this potentially make it able to run on directly on Mac OS? I basically pay for parallels for a very small handful of programs, this being the primary one.

Hi Argos, Sorry to disappoint you but that won't be the case. Although the latest versions of .NET are described as being platform neutral that only goes for very simple console type programs and libraries with no interface. For this program you will still need to use Windows or a Windows emulator.

Just to say, five months later I have finally got the beta to a point where it is stable enough to share. More details here: https://orphalese.net/BetaEleven.