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Imaginary Teleprompter 2.4 and other updates

Tuesday, March 31, 2020

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New Imaginary Teleprompter version 2.4, the project's pivot and an update on the status of v3.0.

For those new and those unaware, Imaginary Teleprompter has been undergoing a re-write for quite some time. The reason behind the re-write is we want to make it easier for us and others to add new features like voice tracking, remote control, mobile browsers support, and the ability to edit as you’re prompting.

Unfortunately it wasn’t until last week that I was able to make advances in the software because the COVID19 outbreak has left us with a bit of free time we didn’t have before. It’s no good to have free software if developers can’t improve it for the lack of time and increasing costs of living.

The past two weeks I’ve been working on two updates to Imaginary Teleprompter, versions 2.4 and 3.0. But before we get into that I must inform you about…

The Pivot

Imaginary Teleprompter 2.4.0 will most likely be the last minor release of the 2.x series. 2.4.x versions will also be the last we distribute freely under the GPL3. Build suspense here…

Version 3 of Imaginary Teleprompter will continue to be Free Software as defined by the Free Software Foundation, and it is being released under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3. We will be distributing official Windows and Mac binaries for a fee through those operating systems’ official stores, and official Linux binaries will be distributed through various mediums, some of which will be free of cost, others which will have a have a pay whatever you want option.

Just Released: Imaginary Teleprompter 2.4

Download Imaginary Teleprompter

Working on v3.0 I realized there’s more work to go regarding the pluginization of features and that 3.0 won’t be out soon.

Since Imaginary Teleprompter users have doubled and continue to rise because of the COVID19 Outbreak, I’ve made the choice to release an interim update to the 2.x series to improve on the previous version’s limitations and include some of the features we were reserving for 3.0.

You can always download the latest version from Imaginary Teleprompter’s page and *version 2.4 can be found here:

*MacOS, Snapcraft and AUR updates are on the way but will take additional time to arrive. We’ll inform when they’re out in our social media: Twitter and Facebook.

New Features

  • The ability to control the width of the prompt area.
  • Skip half a screen forward or backwards with the PageDown and PageUp keys.
  • Add nameless markers to your prompter. This allows you to have as many markers as you want and not be limited by your keyboard.
  • Skip to the previous and next markers, named or nameless, with the Home and End keys.
  • Reset to top using the Home key after reaching the top marker.

Improvements

  • Fixed all problems with the auto save.
  • Timer pauses at end instead of resetting.
  • An increased range of font sizes
  • Editor is now fully WYSIWYG, even when using markers.

Imaginary Teleprompter 3.0

Did considerable advancements in the re-write. Rewrote the animation engine to use the scroll functionality instead of CSS Transformations, but without a huge performance impact that was impossible for us to avoid in the past. The new animation technique is CPU based, not GPU based. It runs at a slightly lower frame rate that’s close to the 60 fps of version 2 on my patched Pentium N3700, and the resulting animation is less jerky.

Teleprompter’s new architecture also enables us to optimize for memory, so people can prompt practically infinitely long scripts, for infinite periods of time, while making changes on the fly.

New Features for 3.0

  • New scroll-based teleprompter animations.
  • The ability to prompt and edit at the same time.
  • Contributed upstream improvements to easy-scroll.
  • Users can use the mouse wheel to scroll in a traditional fashion, interrupting the prompter, and resume prompting from the new location.
  • Re-implemented “start reached” and “end reached” events.
  • Plugins can now reserve keyboard keys to control the teleprompter.
  • Scroll-bars now feature Imaginary Teleprompter’s colors.

Teleprompter Piracy Followup

If you read the last blog entry you’re probably aware a pirated version of our software was being illegally sold at the Microsoft Store. After filling a DMCA complaint, Microsoft was swift to take action. The pirate was banned after the GPL3’s cure period ended and the counterfeit software is no longer found.

It’s Imaginary Teleprompter

When we began developing Imaginary Teleprompter we had no idea how to name the program and thus it has carried multiple names over the years. This has caused a lot of confusion for our users and impacted our search results.

Although this might affect our search results again, we have updated our Git repos and license disclaimers to address the confusion and make it clear that the project’s name is Imaginary Teleprompter. There’s no way to rename the Sourceforge URL so that one will remain for now. Here are the new URLs:

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