FilterMeister: First Public Beta

["Alex Hunter" <alex@afh.com>]

Hi everyone,

As many of you in the FFDG know, a small group of us have been
working for the past couple of years on a worthy successor to Adobe's
Filter Factory.

It's called "FilterMeister" and it's here at last!

FilterMeister (FM) will eventually be available in three editions:

1. A professional edition called "FM Pro".

2. A low-cost shareware edition called "FM Lite".

3. A freeware edition called "FM Free".

FM Free has all the features and functionality of FM Lite, except that
it cannot generate standalone filters.

FM Pro has the functionality of FM Lite, plus advanced features
and optimizations for producing commercial-quality plug-in filters.

FM Free and FM Lite have been in private beta testing for several
months, and today we are opening up FM Free for Public Beta
testing.

To download your copy of the beta release of FM Free, go to the
official FilterMeister web site at

	http://www.filtermeister.com/

and follow the link to the FilterMeister Public Beta site.

The self-extracting download package contains the FM Free beta
plug-in, a "Getting Started" manual in PDF format by Werner Streidt,
and several sample standalone filters produced with FM Lite by
Werner Streidt, Ilya Razmanov, and others.

So don't wait!  Download your copy of FM Free now, and start
producing those filters you've always dreamed of, but couldn't
create because of limitations in Filter Factory.

Best of all, FilterMeister is 99.9% upward-compatible with Filter
Factory, so you can immediately use your legacy FF code to
produce equivalent filters in FM.  In fact, you can directly import
your old Filter Factory *.8bf modules into FM in one easy step with
the Load... button. Migrating from FF to FM couldn't be easier!

We have set up a new mailing list for FilterMeister.  To subscribe
to it, send an e-mail to

	fmml-request@lists.best.com

with the command 'subsingle' (without the quotes) in the body
of the message.

Once subscribed, post your questions and messages by e-mailing
them to: 

	fmml@lists.best.com

We can also discuss the relationship between Filter Factory and
FilterMeister here in the FFDG mailing list.

Best regards,
-Alex Hunter
FilterMeister programmer