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1

Post New Requests Here / IDEA: A manager for manually installed software

« on: June 02, 2012, 12:15 AM »

Situation:

Microsoft Windows has "Control Panel/Programs and Features" application to control the installed software. However, not all software has installers or need one. Some programs are downloaded as .zip archives and can be unpacked to any directory.

Idea:

1. To have a full list of all installed programs. This could be done by adding information to standard Windows "Programs and Features" application.

2. Ability to "manually install" an application. I imagine it as
a) right clicking a folder or zip archive
b) selecting option "Install to..." in context menu
c) a dialog appears to choose a human-readable application name and destination folder (default is "Program Files/Application name")
d) clicking Ok and files are copied to the destination folder

3. Ability to uninstall an application. By clicking the "Uninstall" button in "Programs and Features". Deleting the destination folder will be enough.

Improvements:

It would be nice to
- check if the destination directory is empty before installing. If not, ask the user for action (probably he tries to update the application?)
- remember exact files installed, and at uninstall ask if the user wants to delete files that were added later. It will keep documents and savegames.

Thanks everyone for help.

2

Post New Requests Here / IDEA: Random sequence generator

« on: March 08, 2011, 01:15 AM »

I would like to have a program that brings some randomness to my life. It seems rather simple and useful for others too.
This application helps to do something in random order like watching episodes of a film, reading periodical comic strips or accomplishing a to-do-list of actions.

What it should do:

1. Preferable output format is a text file with meaningful name chosen by the user. The file is saved in the application folder. Application should ask for overwriting the file.
Minimum: it contains random numbers, each on the new line.
Maximum: it can contain random numbers in several aligned columns (for convenience, number of columns chosen by user)

2. The program should produce randomness in several formats with range entered by user.
Minimum:
- completely random (integer numbers from A to B)
- random sequence (integer numbers from A to B in mixed order, including all numbers from A to B, no duplicates)
Maximum:
- random date sequence (days from A to B in mixed order, including all days from A to B, no duplicates)
- random date sequence with days of week filter (for example, only Mondays and Wednesdays)

3. There should be an option to leave space for completion marks at the left of the random numbers. I think a nice variant will be a space between square braces:
[X] 27
[X] 4
[ ] 14
[ ] 12

An example implementation can be found online: http://www.random.org/sequences/
Drawbacks:
- Does not work offline
- Does not work with dates
- No completion marks
- I have to copy data and save files manually

Thanks in advance for all your ideas and efforts.