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FARR v2.104.01, Win 7 Pro x64

Launching apps works fine for me, including launching MS Office documents.

Microsoft also publishes Excel - what some have called the The Deadliest Computer Game of All.

Considering how many real-world jobs, businesses, research projects, sports statistics, lives, and plans for world dominance are 'virtualized' using Excel - and are then acted upon based on the results it furnishes - it's a pretty accurate description IMO.
 

And that review was brilliant!

Yeah, Excel is what I was playing all of last week

Been playing it all day long

Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice

Thanks guys. Will check them out.

Anyone know some software that can create a thumbnail image (jpg) from .mts files (AVCHD)? Doesn't have to be free, but shouldn't be too expensive either. It should be able to batch process or handle a whole directory tree structure. Should run on Windows or Linux.

Most Linux distributions would be good enough for us. But this part of the system really has little platform-specific stuff, i.e. it's mostly "business logic" (if you can call it like that) and typical OS stuff which is well covered by boost (file I/O, threading, I/O covered by ASIO, networking).

Concerning GUI: we're currently assuming that we will not be able to come up with the kind of GUI we want with one of the available GUI libraries (like GTK). So we'll most certainly make the GUI Windows-only. If the decision was made that the GUI needs to run on Linux as well, I would certainly calculate with more than 25% for that (despite using a library).

The team I'm working on is planning to build parts of our system for both Windows and Linux. We're unsure how much overhead we should calculate into our time-estimates.

The relevant parts will be implemented in C++ and probably 99% of platform-dependent stuff we'll need can be covered by boost. Nevertheless, we'll need continuous integration for both platforms and although we're using a standardised programming language we assume there will be stuff that doesn't just compile neatly on both platforms or unit tests that don't just run on both platforms and will therefore need time to sort out. We're also mostly Windows programmers (we have access to experienced Linux programmers for support though).

We're currently calculating with an overhead of 25%. Has anyone here any experience with cross-platform development using C++ on Windows and Linux and can tell me if that is a reasonable assumption?

/a at the end as well as FARR's own PgDown will already do what you expect from +sall. I can implement +sall though if that's preferred. I'll have a look at the others.

I still want to try to improve stability (although I've never had it crash myself, but I'm not using it very often). Actually, making sure it never crashes really should be my main concern. Hearing a user say something like "I get the occasional crash but it's manageable" is certainly one of the worst things that can happen to a professional programmer

Here's a video suggesting how to combine sugru and lego.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnwQXxEbaPw

If 80 pixels is a big deal, why not hide the UI automatically? You can set it to auto-appear only on hover or when the ALT key is pressed. This actually takes up less real estate than the standard menu system with toolbars.

And I would not be surprised if the next version of Office would allow you to dock the ribbon to either side, and as such using horizontal instead of vertical space.

Also don't forget that the ribbon is more than just a menu / toolbar replacement, e.g. the Galleries are a new concept, which I think is very powerful.

Yes, the part where you hover the mouse over a font or style selector and the text in your document temporarily assumes that style - that part is awesome. But although it came together with the ribbon, it does not require one. You could just easily have that kind of "live preview" with a menu or a toolbar.

But it's not only the preview when hovering over it, it's also the mini-preview of the style which the ribbon itself is already giving you. And that needs some space.

On the other hand, Office 2007 had these tiny semi-buttons:
 (see attachment in previous post)
I wonder how many people ever figured out you can click those. I personally know a few who never have. And these are pretty important buttons - you can't get to Font or Paragraph properties without those. Why not allow users to click the whole lower bar where the "Font" and "Paragraph" labels are? Now that would be intuitive and easy to click. Seems like no-one at Microsoft has ever read Joel Spolsky's essay on affordances - or they have read it and decided to do the opposite out of spite.

And although you can navigate to these tiny thingamajigs with the Tab key, try doing that in Word 2007, it takes at least twice as many keypresses as Alt+F (Open Format menu) and three or four Down Arrow (to navigate to "Paragraph..." or "Font..") used to take. And really, even if you see them, there is no indication of what they do. They seem to still be there in Office 2010.

And that is exactly what I meant with "learning and understanding its concepts". To be honest, I did not notice that tiny arrow myself until I read about it. And as you say, that knowledge is essential when working with ribbons. So I agree, ribbons are not perfect yet. But nevertheless I think they are an improvement over menu / toolbar for Word and Excel.

Also don't forget that the ribbon is more than just a menu / toolbar replacement, e.g. the Galleries are a new concept, which I think is very powerful.

My rule of the thumb is, if you have enough UI to fill half a dozen tabs on the ribbon, then maybe  consider it. But if you're going to have a whole huge ribbon with only one tab and six buttons on it, then that's exactly what the ribbon was not designed for.

Which is exactly the advise the this ribbon guy gives in the video under the location pointed out by ewemoa above.

I prefer the ribbon as well, at least in MS Office, which are the only applications which I use that have ribbons. I think learning and understanding its concepts helps seeing its advantages and getting used to it. For the power users amongst you: ribbons have not replaced keyboard shortcuts

the video mentioned above can be found here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-of-the-ribbon.aspx

And today, as it seems.

http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/hippoedit

Thanks phitsc.

if you specify 25 there, you'll never get more than 25 result items.

Yes I understood that. However, what I don't understand is :

A)
- I set 45 as the max
- I search for some term ("Denise")
- There are much more then 25 items found (e.g. : status bar says  75)
- But farr shows only a few : 32

Ok, so this could be because of what you said earlier. But there's more :

B)
- I set 100 as the max
- I search for the same term ("Denise)
- Now status bar says that it found 100 results (why ? before it said 75 and the max was set to 45)
- farr shows only a few : 49 (Why 49, which is more than the previous 32, and at the same time doesn't seem to increase proportionally -- well not in an obvious way)

In any case, setting the max displayed items to 100 or more helps getting what I want, but there's still something funny about the way windows search and farr interact.

If I search for the same term in the normal windows search interface, I get 538 results. Granted, some might be shortcuts etc., but it's still a huge difference (compared to 100 or 75). Strange 

Ok, that is indeed strange. I'll check it out.

FarrWindowsSearch will query for is the 25 (or whatever you choose) most recently changed items in the Search Index, matching your search terms. FARR will then show you however many of these as you've specified in the FARR Display Options. I think FARR will also do its own filtering, e.g. if you have two file results point at the same file (don't know if that is a practical case) it will end up only once in the list.

Thanks for the precisions. I got that you chose to present the most recently changed items. I'm ok with that, as long as "terms matching" has the topmost priority... Right ?

Yes, that's correct.

I had lost messages even when using Gmail and Android only. It's one of the reasons why I don't use GTalk any more. I wish WhatsApp had a Desktop or Web Browser client.

Thanks phitsc

What's weird is that farr says (e.g.) "28 results found in 0s", but it shows only 5...
An I also compared with the normal Windows Search interface, and it does (usually) show me much more results. As the others have reported. I haven't done that many tests -- lack of time. But I can confirm that there's some problem. I never noticed before as I was mainly using it for contacts and recent emails.

So results in farr seem to be filtered in some weird way.

EDIT : I might be mistaken, but it seems that the "Max. items to search" option not only reduces the items to be shown (e.g. : 50), but also shows only a fraction of the result, no matter how many were found, and even if the number is < to the defined max. E.g. : if ws find only 28 results, it'll show 5, if ws finds 50, it'll show 20, etc.

The "Max no items to search" option directly influences the query, i.e. if you specify 25 there, you'll never get more than 25 result items. The sorting I chose is by item date, newest first. So what FarrWindowsSearch will query for is the 25 (or whatever you choose) most recently changed items in the Search Index, matching your search terms. FARR will then show you however many of these as you've specified in the FARR Display Options. I think FARR will also do its own filtering, e.g. if you have two file results point at the same file (don't know if that is a practical case) it will end up only once in the list.

Now I neither know how many items Windows searches for for its list. And I don't know the search order either (though I guess it could be newest first). I also don't know if it makes more than one query, e.g. one for Office stuff and another for documents maybe. I could maybe experiment around with such options, or offer the possibility to do your own experimentation (by offering more options as user settings).

Strange, this only searches Outlook mail and mail contacts for me.

In Win 'Search programs and files' enter Search and select 'Change how Windows searches', that brings up the 'Indexing Options'. What do you see there?

... I'm actually not sure about the wording of that option -- shouldn't it be "Max items to display" ? Or maybe I'm not understanding what it does ?

The option effectively limits the number of items the search query returns. So yes, "Max items to display" would probably be a better choice.

I was able to test on a different installation of Windows 7 and had more success -- get results in FARR now

It is still puzzling to me though why via the windows key, "cmd" gives the result "cmd.exe" but with FARRWindowsSearch I get nothing.  Similar with "regedit".

Any ideas?

I can only guess. Could it be that 'Search programs and files' does not use the Windows Search Index exclusively, but offers search results from other sources as well, like the Control Panel or the 'All Programs' menu?

Hi phitsc, I still get the EAccess violation error (mentioned in the thread earlier).

Ok, thanks for letting me know. So I'll go over a second possible source of crashes next (making sure I use the Search API correctly, especially checking all exception cases).

I was indeed asleep

With ws SPACE search term you're using the plugin correctly. What should happen is that you get (roughly) the same results as if you had typed that search term into the 'Search Programs and Files' box after pressing the Win key. On my machine I get the exact same results as the ones in the 'Microsoft Outlook' category. I guess they are the ones most relevant. I could maybe implement grouping as Windows does itself in the plugin as well (i.e. add some results from Outlook as well as some file results).

Now why it does not work for you ewemoa I have no idea to be honest. If you type 'search' into the 'Search Programs and Files' box, there's a 'Find and fix problems with Windows Search' item in the 'Control Panel' category. Maybe you can give this one a try? As you say, I would guess that Windows Search is enabled (and therefore indexing) by default in Windows 7.

I can't get the latest to work at all.  Using Windows 7 x64.  Every time I type ws a space and then anything it freezes and crashes.

But the one before that was working fine?

I'm using it on Windows 7 x64, by the way.