Forums Feature Suggestions Dialog Feature

Allow gifs in dialogs. Gifs are an html thing I know, but there's gotta be some way to make them compatible with mirc dialogs.

Also, how about a dialog maker built in to mIRC?

They could easily be but I understand there is a licence issue with .gif images.

Really?

The LZW patent (that gifs use) has been copyrighted and any program that wishes to provide any kind of gif support must pay a quite large amount of money to the company that owns the patent. Read more details here. (thanks qwerty ).

Right idea, wrong words. They don't own a copyright on the "LZW patent" they own a patent on the "LZW algorithm"

sux0rs

http://www.mircscripts.org/dstudio/ < should work

This is a VERY handy dialog maker, and works extremely well.

I use it all the time, and it is a definate time saver.

Download link is dead

No it isn't.

yay its up again, mircscripts.org has been having major server issues lately, not sure why but theyve been up and down alot thhis last month.

Maybe its on your end? >:D

Perhaps instead of GIF, PNG which I heard was actually better in a lot of ways, like the fact you don't have to pay lots of money...

The LZW Algorithm Patent will expire to public domain before the next version of mIRC is released (June 20th, 16 days...). :P

I'm also reading a number of websites that say "Many legal experts have concluded that the patent does not cover devices that can only uncompress LZW data and cannot compress it." That means that if mIRC only reads the .gif file, it should be safe from legal issues.

Other resources:
http://burnallgifs.org/
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html
http://www.unisys.com/about__unisys/lzw/
http://www.unisys.com/about__unisys/lzw/lzw__companies.htm <- All 17 companies presently licensed to create LZW GIFs.
ftp://ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/doc/comp-patents/US4558302.Z <- Read the actual patent. The file is Z compressed; Winzip can read the file, but you will need to specify the 'txt' extension when prompted.

- Raccoon

If you read on burnallgifs.org it says it expires on the 20th in the US, mIRC is not made in the US. It says the patents last longer in other countries.

Who would want a dialog builder built in to mirc, the are like 5 programs (Dialog studio,mdx studio,Stardust,...)