AnneW's world

What do you do when you have an itch to scratch, and you can’t reach it? You get someone else to help. Yes, I have an itch that I’d dearly love to scratch, but I simply don’t have the skills. Here’s the problem.

I have an embroidery machine. When you buy such a machine it comes with some patterns installed in its memory. You then buy software that gives you more designs and allows you to modify designs. You won’t be surprised to hear that the software runs under Windows. In fact I have two software disks. The first installs and runs under wine, so is no real problem. The second uses a hardware dongle, and so far I’ve completely failed to get that to work with Linux. Most of the software on that second disk I can live without, but one facility it provides makes working so much easier – and this is where the itch starts.

You can buy additional patterns on the Internet – and I often do. Each pattern contains the instructions to the machine to embroider the design, but it also contains a thumbnail image. What I’d really like is to have a native Linux application that reads the image part from each file in a directory and displays them as a catalogue, rather like a Dolphin icon-view with previews enabled. In fact if it could be added into Dolphin I’d love it.

While what I can afford to pay would not pay the whole cost of development, there are possibilities for further income. There are about 10 different machine formats, but I suspect that the part of the pattern that describes the thumbnail will be the same in each one, so variations on the software could easily be made. If a developer also could write a Windows version I suspect that there would be a sale for that too – the disk I talked about earlier has some advanced machine programs and is thus very expensive. There are free examples of the machine formats on the Internet and I could help get it publicised on the web sites that sell patterns and in a machine-embroidery magazine.

If you fancy a break from your normal work, why not look at the design of the month at http://www.advanced-embroidery-designs.com/freedesign.html, particularly the JEF format, and see just how feasible this is?