Messages

1

Found Deals and Discounts / 40% discount: Agenda At Once, CD Label Designer and Web Log Storming

« on: June 27, 2008, 12:57 PM »

Hello all,

A massive 40% discount for any of our products is available until the end of this month. For coupon code visit:

  http://www.datalandsoftware.com/blog/

2

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Make any Window Dockable to the Side of the Screen

« on: June 17, 2008, 09:21 AM »

Maybe something like this?

  http://www.datalands...om/files/DockAny.zip

Funny thing is that I started making this for myself yesterday... It has not really been tested so don't be too harsh. There are some glitches with some applications but main functionality is there.

[Select]

=== "Dock Any" Readme file ===

WARNING: This is version 0.1, meaning it's far from finished. Use it if you
can, but if you have problems or special requirements, feel free to let me
know.

* Usage

To dock applications / windows, choose "Add" option and then click at
window you wish to add.

Use "Undock" option to detach window back to its original position.

Use "Close" option to close tab AND application entirely. If you close
embedded application directly (i.e. from File | Exit), "Dock Any" will
not be aware of this (at least for now).

3

General Software Discussion / Re: GAOTD & Virus

« on: April 08, 2008, 02:20 AM »

People always tend to think that virus is causing all their problems, while solution could be as simple as plugging in a mouse. Similarly, blaming GAOTD for troubles with featured software doesn't make any sense - nobody blames CNet or Tucows for buggy software they host.

It doesn't really matter where GAOTD is based as they are not software authors. On the other hand, judging company solely by country of origin bothers me personally as I make certain efforts to raise level of trust on my website, which isn't always easy as it would be if my name was John Smith (I heard of a guy who actually made up a new name for support e-mails).

No offense to anyone, but the only time I have been burned with ID theft and credit card ripoffs is when I bought from Chinese or “Eastern Bloc” vendors.

Seriously... WTH?! Even if this is true, entering CC number into unencrypted forms is always a big no-no, no matter of country of origin. This implies that western people are honest and eastern are not - and that's a nonsense. Of course, we can talk about probabilities of individual fraud, mostly caused by other factors than plain good/evil categorization.

In essence, if Chinese or Iranian vendor sells software via known and secure payment processor (and most of them are USA/WE based), there's nothing to worry about. If USA or UK citizen asks for a CC number on his website, I'll go away and never look back.

And at the end, regarding GAOTD rants, let me quote Eric Sink:

If we lower the price, we will merely attract the attention of someone for whom it is not low enough.

If we give the product away, someone will complain that we are making them buy more disk space to install it.

If we pay each user a hundred bucks to use our product and send Salma Hayek in a bikini to personally install it for them, someone will complain that they prefer blondes.

4

Living Room / Re: BEAT THIS! ;)

« on: April 07, 2008, 01:47 AM »

I don't have a problem not to turn on the computer for half of a day, occasionally (usually when I'm a guest at weekends). That is, as long as I use a cell phone to read e-mail (at lease once per hour).

Well, when you are in this business, you simply don't have a luxury to ignore e-mails. Vacations? Without computer and operating internet connection, it wouldn't be a vacation but a punishment... 

Edit: Hm, yes. It seems I found a perfectly valid reason to justify my addiction.

5

General Software Discussion / Re: Professional Task Scheduling/Task Management

« on: March 30, 2008, 11:51 AM »

You may want to try Agenda At Once. There a 30% discount for members.

Please let me know if you have any questions regarding AAO.

6

Living Room / Re: Am I too demanding, or are they all cheating?

« on: March 24, 2008, 08:51 AM »

And now tell me: Am I too demanding

-yksyks (March 23, 2008, 03:51 PM)

Not at all. Having those all the time, although, as some kind of vendor, I'm often not inclined to call it "cheating", just "lousy design", "unawareness of need" or "too complicated to implement in this case".

Here are few of my examples, from the top of the head:

- Dishwasher with 8 programs (max. that I could find here), but no program for fast few minutes rinsing without detergent. Fastest way is to use 20 minute program with small amount of detergent (we're using regular sized tablets, so no way to do this).

- DVD player with radio - radio works only if headphones/ext. speakers are plugged in, not if you use AUX outputs.

- Database system/library that locks whole table if in transaction.

- Invoicing software that allows template changing: you have GUI to change colors in HTML template, but HTML is hardcoded so there is no way to add or remove things.

- Modern phone with only one entry in redial history.

- Car with an option to lock rear doors (children protection). With a previous 10-years old model of (almost) same car, unlocking has been done automatically by opening front doors, and new model requires you to exit the car and open door from the outside.

- Same car: doors are automatically locked if speed exceeds 10 kmph, but you can open any door from the inside, unless children protection from above is activated (see above: in this case, it's never possible to open rear doors from the inside, locked or not). What's this? A hijacking protection?

- A laptop with just two USB ports placed so close one to each other - no way to use both unless you are using very thin cable.

List goes on and on...

7

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Agenda At Once v3.0 final - finally :)

« on: January 31, 2008, 05:30 PM »

Is there a way to display more than initials in Assignees column?

-ChalkTrauma (January 29, 2008, 02:40 PM)

Sorry for late answer - busy week. :-) Only way to do this is to remove initials completely. In this case, to-do list should display full name instead.

Do you plan vCard import for contacts?

-ChalkTrauma (January 29, 2008, 02:40 PM)

Yes, but it's not priority right now.

8

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Agenda At Once v3.0 final - finally :)

« on: January 28, 2008, 02:40 PM »

By the way, there is a chance I will be switching to a BlackBerry phone with built-in schedule software, like the Treo I have now. Will Agenda At Once interface with those devices and other "smart phones" as well?

-KenR (January 28, 2008, 02:25 PM)

Plan is to implement one at the time, in the order of number of requests. After Palm, we will decide between PocketPC and BlackBerry.

9

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Agenda At Once v3.0 final - finally :)

« on: January 28, 2008, 09:40 AM »

I did try that, and it does work to a point, but then if you view a project todo list the category column is very hard to read,

-ChalkTrauma (January 28, 2008, 09:18 AM)

Yes, I see what you mean. I suppose that adding an option to show only subtasks of specific tasks would do the trick then? We will consider adding this in the future. Thanks!

One other question.. Is there a published plugin API or is that closed?

-ChalkTrauma (January 28, 2008, 09:18 AM)

Currently it's not published and it's not polished. If there were enough interest from users to create own plugins, we will make it available. Otherwise, it will just serve as a way for implementing some features.

10

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Agenda At Once v3.0 final - finally :)

« on: January 28, 2008, 05:24 AM »

Thank you both for kind words and useful comments!

Agenda at Once looks great. I use a Palm hand held computer which contains a lot of this information. This hand held came with a windows program (Palm Desktop) that works in concert with it.

-KenR (January 27, 2008, 08:41 PM)

Yes, synchronization with various product is planned as a next major improvement. Actually, we would like to straighten up any possible problems with this initial release before we start developing this. According to poll among beta testers, support for MS Outlook and Palm are first to be implemented.

• The program crashed when I added my first contact

-ChalkTrauma (January 27, 2008, 10:11 PM)

Argh! I hate this! OK, I'm good now... Can you please PM me an AgendaAtOnce.elf (error log file)? From the main menu choose Tools | Open folder | Error log file to find it.

• When I set layout to: top-Left = To-do, top-right=Notes then tab for "Schedule" contains quick notes

-ChalkTrauma (January 27, 2008, 10:11 PM)

I will check this. Thank you.

• Is there a way to add "assigned by" to tasks? I manage tasks by, who requested the task and who is working on it...

-ChalkTrauma (January 27, 2008, 10:11 PM)

Unfortunately, there is no additional field to enter contacts, but it sounds interesting. I suppose that "mixing" "by" and "to" assignees in same field doesn't make sense for you?

• Export to XML as an option would be nice to allow XSLT transformation to HTML or other data formats.

-ChalkTrauma (January 27, 2008, 10:11 PM)

Noted. Thanks. As I said before, various syncs and exports/imports will be implemented soon.

• It would be nice to have a higher level grouping like project instead of just category. I track my to-do lists by project, and inside projects I group by category ( coding, review, research, testing, etc ).

-ChalkTrauma (January 27, 2008, 10:11 PM)

Makes sense. Still, can you use multiple categories for this purpose? For example, create categories: Project1, Project2, ..., Coding, Review, ... and then assign pairs to each task: [Project1, Coding], [Project2, Coding], [Project1, Review], ... After this you would be able to filter by projects, types or both.

11

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Agenda At Once v3.0 final - finally :)

« on: January 27, 2008, 01:13 PM »

As Agenda At Once is mentioned several times in these forums (several members also provided great feedback - thank you for that!), I suppose that there could be people interested to hear that, after long beta period, Agenda At Once v3.0 is finally out.

[attachthumb=#1][/attachthumb]
http://www.agendaatonce.com/

Oh, and although this post refers to an old version, I want to confirm that 30% discount for donationcoder.com members is still active.

12

General Software Discussion / Re: post your 5 most used applications in 2007 here!

« on: January 01, 2008, 03:56 PM »

vradmilovic: you might want to correct your links as they're broken (see pic)..

-lanux128 (January 01, 2008, 07:52 AM)

Oops, thanks.

- http://www.datalandsoftware.com/agenda/ may be a better link

-Curt (January 01, 2008, 08:08 AM)

Yes, currently mine link redirects to yours, but it will be vice-versa very soon.

13

General Software Discussion / Re: post your 5 most used applications in 2007 here!

« on: January 01, 2008, 07:46 AM »

Happy New Year to all!

Other than browser (Firefox) and e-mail client (Thunderbird):

• Borland/CodeGear Developer Studio (aka Delphi)
• Total Commander
• Find & Run Robot
• ClipMate
• and <shameless_plug>Agenda At Once</shameless_plug>

14

General Software Discussion / Re: Current IE8 build renders the ACID2 Test correctly!

« on: December 20, 2007, 01:09 PM »

Then Opera or my apps do not respect the setting all the time . At least, when I launch a link from a HTML Help file, I get IE7.

-Lashiec (December 20, 2007, 01:02 PM)

It's not Opera's fault. HTML help (CHM) viewer is based on IE, which is the reason for this misbehavior. It drives me crazy, too. 

15

General Software Discussion / Re: End-user problems with Artplus Software

« on: December 16, 2007, 04:42 AM »

Except... EasyNoter still IS profitable

-artplus (December 16, 2007, 04:28 AM)

Sorry if I wasn't clear - I didn't mean to imply that your software is not profitable: you said that you had OEM/VAR contracts and other projects that postponed development, and this is something that we experienced ourselves with Agenda At Once. We had comments on our forums similar to doublewitt's, but despite what some people could think, we never delete them - rather trying to explain the situation.

But, don't confuse people. Now they'll think you're defending my case cause you're from Croatia too... 
Nope folks... he's not from Croatia. He just shares my views as he does the language (to some point... for both) 

-artplus (December 16, 2007, 04:28 AM)

That's right, of course. Sorry once again if my regards in non-English caused a confusion.

16

General Software Discussion / Re: End-user problems with Artplus Software

« on: December 16, 2007, 03:40 AM »

+1 vote to keep this board alive. The donationcoder.com community is really great and there are no flame wars as they exist in other forums (at least that I'm aware of). As a developer, I find great value in it to hear user's opinions and, even if they are not directed directly to my company, I can learn what gets customers unhappy and try not to repeat same mistakes.

However, Neven is right, maybe it would be fair and much more interesting if companies are automatically notified so they can take an action and respond (or not to respond, which gives valuable information, too)? Simple mandatory "Company e-mail" field would be enough.

In this particular case, while I was reading initial post of this topic, I thought that it was slightly overreacted, although I can understand why (doublewitt, don't get me wrong). It's important to understand that any company has a right to choose to prolong or completely cease development if they decide so, as long as they don't advisedly make explicit promises in order to gain a clear benefit, which wasn't the case here I believe. The reasons can be various: temporary assigning resources to another projects, deciding that further development is not profitable anymore, etc. This is a business decision that can't be made outside of the company.

Za kraj, Nevene, pozdrav iz Novog Sada.

17

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Agenda At Once v3.0: user friendly PIM - public beta available

« on: December 06, 2007, 01:48 PM »

AAO was mentioned few times on these forums in the past, so I presume that some of you will be interested to hear that AAO v3.0 beta is available for public now. Here's quote from the web page:

[attachthumb=#1][/attachthumb]
After long period of development and private beta testing we are glad to announce public beta for Agenda At Once 3.0. Compared to previous version, this release includes large number of long waited new features and improvements that, we believe, cause this software to ascend to the new level.

Agenda At Once is a very powerful but at the same time lightweight and easy to use GTD (Getting Things Done) capable Personal Information Manager. In an essence, it allows you to organize To-do list, Schedule appointments, write Quick Notes and maintain Contacts database. Carefully designed user interface reduces the number of mouse clicks and keyboard presses, and regardless modern look and feel, memory consumption is still low for today's standards.

More info: http://www.datalands...are.com/agenda/beta/

18

Living Room / Re: Laptop or Desktop — which are you?

« on: November 17, 2007, 04:16 PM »

Laptop. I know I am missing power that desktops can offer. I work at office, at home, on weekends, when out of city. Heck, I even work on vacations, somewhere near the sea. Having all my data and software always near me makes me feel happy knowing that even at countryside, in the middle of the night, if there's no electrical power, I still can fix an urgent bug and upload new build via GPRS or dial-up.

At office, I use external keyboard, mouse, other USB peripherals, and monitor in dual screen setup. In other cases, just mouse.

19

General Software Discussion / Re: Money Management Software

« on: November 13, 2007, 03:22 PM »

I was also searching for similar software, but for small business. Generally, I would need to define products, create invoices and quotes, budgeting, etc. Mostly, as iphigenie pointed out, available software doesn't handle different currencies, which is main issue. GnuCash does, but aside user unfriendliness, I've found several areas that makes this software unusable. Well, unless you take a source code and change it. I would expect much more from the SW that's in mature state.

For home finance I also use AceMoney paid version. It's small and functional piece of software that does everything what's needed. It would use little improvement on budgeting features, but generally, thumbs up.

20

Found Deals and Discounts / CD Label Designer at GiveAwayOfTheDay

« on: November 11, 2007, 06:00 AM »

Hello all,

Just a quick note that our CD Label Designer is featured today at GiveAwayOfTheDay. So, if you are interested, hurry to get it before offer is expired.

21

General Software Discussion / Re: You MUST See the Price for this Software

« on: October 29, 2007, 04:50 PM »

He says he just started this model 3 weeks ago

-Ralf Maximus (October 29, 2007, 04:19 PM)

Oh, then it wasn't him that I remember then... I stand corrected.

22

General Software Discussion / Re: You MUST See the Price for this Software

« on: October 29, 2007, 03:51 PM »

It's quite brilliant.  I wonder how it's working for them?

-Ralf Maximus (October 29, 2007, 08:08 AM)

I think that author posted this idea somewhere some time ago. He was quite pleased with results, if I recall correctly.

Personally, I'm not sure what to think. Although reasons for this from their web page make perfect sense, I don't think that it would work for everyone. For start, it looks slightly unprofessional to me. No matter of that, I'm still tempted to run a time limited test and see how it would work for one our products.

23

General Software Discussion / Re: Have any web-based applications replaced desktop apps for you?

« on: October 18, 2007, 05:15 AM »

GMail's spam filtering works pretty well (they have much more training data than any local e-mail client), but I use it with Thunderbird/POP3. I rarely open web client.

I also recently started using Google RSS Reader. I'm reading feeds once or twice per day and there's no need to have application active all the time just for this. Additionally, it sounds natural for me that feeds are accessed through web browser.

24

Developer's Corner / Re: Association of Shareware Professionals

« on: September 24, 2007, 01:26 AM »

I'm a member too, for almost 5 years. Right after joining and gaining access to private area you will probably be thrilled about amount of information you can find there. Note that they are currently in web site redesign so you can't find all of the content that is meant to exist. After initial information boost, things are slowing down a bit, but it's still worth every penny, IMHO. And don't forget to subscribe to newsgroups (NNTP/Usenet) as the real value is in them.

25

General Software Discussion / Re: Web 2.0 Poll

« on: August 09, 2007, 03:51 PM »

As a desktop developer I might be biased, but I'm still trying hard to understand whole web 2.0 buzz. We can "thank" to major factor in the industry for most imaginative ideas - Google. Personally, I'm not thrilled with Microsoft and it's philosophy, but microISV are greatest victims in the war between those two.

Of course, I can see the advantages of web services for meaningful purposes (web 1.0 or web 2.0, whatever), but sometimes ideas go too far in my opinion. I don't want to install an desktop application just to order food, find a rent-a-car or a hotel room, but I definitely don't want to use a third-party (and untrusted, should I say) web service for keeping my confidential personal or business data. Google already knows my searches, sites I visit, part of e-mails and feeds that I read (my latest stumble, ahhh); should I now let them know about visitors at my web site, letters I write, appointments and spreadsheet calculations? What's next? Google Budget? No, thank you. I'm not a paranoid, otherwise I would not use even G from Google, but line must be drawn somewhere.

I'm biased, alright, because Google attacks towards Microsoft can well be interpreted as attacks towards our company. First, Google buys Urchin (previously a high-end and expensive product) and lets anyone use it (Google Analytics) for free, which directly competes with our product Web Log Storming. And second, their Calendar competes with our Agenda At Once. It's alright, I'm still not hating, but if they create web based label designer, I will be really P.O'd...

OK, now this became Google rant instead of Web 2.0 rant, but you got a message anyway. As a conclusion: I don't think that whole this buzz is generally a good thing, but I don't think that it will fall down miserably anytime soon - Web 2.0 can have a meaningful target, and, also, very powerful players are behind it. Still, a vote for a "joke/hype/bubble/fad".