I have been running pretty hard at my day job, so I have not had much time to do anything other than get the minimum capability ready and make a Windows installer.  A couple of notes on all this:

• Yes, I fully intend to release the source code under an open source license as I have time to select one and wrap it into all the files.
• Yes, I fully intend to do a Linux installer (deb)–again, it is time thing.
• We have been using this to accumulate Kelly’s Betty Blonde drawings, but by no means have we wrung all the bugs out.  Any notes in this regard will be greatly appreciated.

Go here to download the Windows installer:  http://bettyblonde.com/bleax/downloads/

I am almost there, but have had a little setback in terms of time. I will get this out as soon as I get a couple of deliveries done at work. Everything works fairly well, the installer is complete, and there is only one item left to add in terms of functionality–the web post capability. Hopefully, I will be able to get the beta release out before the end of the month.

Lyle over at our RWDub’s Reviews was kind enough to write an article on our upcoming software release.  Thanks Lyle.

Go here to read the documentation.

The purpose of this blog is to provide a place for BleAx comic strip aggregation software. I thought I would start by explaining a little bit about how BleAx got started and what I am trying to accomplish with the program. BleAx (Betty Blonde Aggregator of Comix) is a comic strip aggregation program. The original purpose of this program was to provide a way for Kelly Jean Chapman to scan and upload her hand drawn comic strip to the ComicPress themed WordPress blog at http://www.bettyblonde.com.

Screenshot

History

When my daughter Kelly first started writing her Betty Blonde comic strip, I did not expect her to keep going for more than a week or two. We scanned her strips into the computer, one panel at a time. We cleaned them up, added borders, titles, a by line, and a copyright, all in GIMP. Now GIMP is a great program, but the process was very, very tedious. After a couple of months, when I realized she was going to keep going, I decided to write a program to automate as much of the process as possible. I wanted to learn Python, so I used that language to write the original BleAx program.

Kelly did two full years of Betty Blonde strips until we agreed she ought to quit when she started college. Kelly knew she wanted to continue her strip, but was moving from the informality of homeschool to college a couple years earlier than what might be considered normal, so we put Betty Blonde on hold for a year. After she finished her first year of college, she felt ready to fire the strip back up. I decided that it would be a good idea to make some improvements in her program to minimize the amount of fooling around required to put up a strip.

Even though the original BleAx was written in Python, I am a C++ guy. In my professional life, I use Microsoft Visual Studio to develop machine vision and image processing programs in C/C++/C#, but in my volunteer life, I use generally use open source tools and libraries. The tools I use include the QT Creator IDE (awesome product) and the QT libraries, OpenCV, Subversion, Ubuntu Linux, VirtualBox, and other tools. I decided it would be easier to maintain and extend if I used the tools with which I spend the most time. Therefore, I switched over to C++ and the above tools for this project.

Concept

The purpose of this program is to provide hand-drawn comic strip artists with tools to maximize the amount of time the spend drawing while minimizing the time they spend performing infrastructure tasks. Here are the steps we expect a user to take to create a comic strip and post it on the web:

1. Print out on template for each panel of the strip.
2. Draw the panels.
3. Scan all the panel sheets into a user specified directory.
4. Press the “Create” button to aggregate the comic and display it on the BleAx GUI.
5. If it is OK, press the “Upload” button to upload the strip to a user specified location on the internet.
6. Write a blog post and publish it from BleAx to a ComicPress themed WordPress blog.