Version 0.2 released with Unicode and EXIF support. End of Windows 9x compatibility

Version 0.2.0 was released to add some important features.

First of all the application now uses unicode nativelly, and can open/save filenames with international characters.
The highly demanded EXIF support is there to let you keep or remove EXIF profiles from JPEG images.
Also for the lite plugin there is a notable increased image drawing speed and memory usage reduction.
With version 0.2 Windows 9.x support was removed.
Windows 9x does not have native unicode support thus is incompatible with RIOT.
Windows 9x users can still use the last version 0.1 of RIOT with ANSI encoding.
They are strongly encouraged to upgrade to a newer operating system.

The problem is like this:

  • unicode is the native charset in modern Windows OS versions and it’s unlikely to be changed in the near future
  • unicode is an industry de-facto standard and contains all characters in the world in a single charset (for me this is a very good thing)
    (See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr…59(VS.85).aspx)

on the other hand

  • windows 98 or earlier MS-DOS based operating systems are already obsolete. They are more than 10 years old !
  • Microsoft decided to stop supporting Windows 98 more than two years ago. At that time a 2.7% spreading was registered. Why support a program that is not supported anymore by the producer?

Changelog:
v.0.2.0
– full unicode support
– added option to keep/remove embedded JPEG EXIF profile
– plugins: now fully compatible with ansi2unicode plugin from IrfanView
– plugins: new Unicode-enabled functions
– minor changes in about dialog
– added PNG preview in open dialog
– plugins: Lite version speed-up in drawing. Memory usage decreased (like in extended now)

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