§ ¶Update on "word mark" issue in Germany

Thank you for all the support that you have given regarding the "word mark" issue in Germany. I apologize for the lack of public response up to this point, but I did not want to say too much before confirming that it would not hurt my case.

To be clear, I have not received a warning letter from Mr. Kliemen, since I and my web site are based in the United States. However, many of my users in Germany have, and the registration is sufficiently worrying that I have been in contact with an attorney in Germany regarding this issue, from the firm Kaufmann & Stumpf. She is sending a warning letter to Mr. Kliemen on my behalf, asking him to voluntarily cancel or cede the registration; if that does not work, I will explore further steps. This will take time, but it is important to get this right.

As others have noticed, the publishing firm Heise, which publishes the well-known magazine "c't," has an article online in German about the issue: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/77006.

I have not stopped working on VirtualDub over this issue, nor do I have an intention of doing so. If I have to, I will rename the program and the website to avoid international problems. However, I believe that I have priority over the name, and intend to fight this "word mark." I will post further updates when they become available.

§ ¶Illicit word mark registered on "VirtualDub" in Germany

I have just gotten word that someone has registered "VirtualDub" as a "word mark" in Germany as of June 6, 2006 and is now sending out notices to people in that country demanding money for so much as mentioning the program and linking to the SourceForge download from their website. I, Avery Lee, have nothing to do with this and am vigorously opposed to any such registration. This is an attempt at fraud. Both the first public release of the program and the website registration far predate the word mark's registration, and I have not authorized anyone to be a software distributor or representative on my behalf with regard to VirtualDub.

The big problem here is that (a) I am not a lawyer, (b) I have no presence whatsoever in Germany, and (c) I do not speak German. I am a citizen and resident of the United States of America and speak English. If anyone could provide help or experience with combating this problem, I would very much appreciate it. I intend to look into this and try to do what I can to stop it.

Update:
To make things abundantly clear, my personal policy is and has always been that linking to the publicly available pages on this website and to the VirtualDub project pages on SourceForge, and using the name "VirtualDub" in describing the link or the program, can be done free of any license requirement or fee.

§ ¶VirtualDub 1.6.16 released

This minor bugfix release is long overdue (~3 months since last release), but fixes several bugs and a couple of regressions in 1.6.15. Enjoy.

There is a feature release in the works (1.7.0), but I do not have an ETA for its release. I can say that there will be one change in system requirements: 1.7.0 will definitely require at least Windows 98. This is partly being driven by the increased system requirements of the Visual Studio 2005 C runtime library, but also because I have a desire to use UI components and system calls that require at least Windows 98, and the number of systems that are running Windows 95 or 95 OSR2 is fairly minimal at this point.

§ ¶Debugging a full-screen application

If you've ever tried to debug an application that goes full-screen, you've probably discovered the main problem with doing so: the application window is marked as "topmost," meaning that it always appears on top of other windows, even if it becomes inactive. This means that when the application crashes, you can't get to the debugger, or for that matter, almost any other window.

Sure, you could get a second monitor, or do a remote debug, but that's inconvenient -- especially if you didn't get to choose the machine on which the program crashed.

There's a simpler way to solve the problem. The application you're trying to debug is stopped, so you can't make its window non-topmost, but what you can do is make the debugger window topmost too. Two windows that are marked as such will sort normally relative to each other, so once the debugger is marked in this manner, it will pop up in front of the debuggee without problem. How you mark the debugger window as topmost is up to you, but programmatically, once you find the right HWND, a call to SetWindowPos() will do the trick.

Having a Command Prompt open at all times is a useful trick too, because its fullscreen mode (Alt+Enter) trumps any other window, topmost or not.