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51

Mini-Reviews by Members / GeminiSoft Pimmy

« on: February 10, 2006, 07:05 AM »

Historically, Pimmy has been an incredibly small mail client designed with portability in mind.  Drop the program's folder on a floppy disk or, in this day and age, USB flash drive and you're ready to go.  As of this morning, Pimmy is officially version 4.0 -- and packing quite a wallop for its mere 750k!

I've always felt the need to try nearly every mail client to be released, even when completely happy with the one I'm using, so I've tried quite a few.  I've used more powerful clients than Pimmy . . . and I've used smaller clients than Pimmy -- but I have never used something that was this small and powerful.

Pimmy is happily suited to handling multiple e-mail accounts and streamlines this with filtering capabilities more powerful than most "full" mail clients I've used (not all mind you, most), can be used for reading/replying to newsgroups, and fetches RSS feeds.  Aside from these bigger things, they haven't missed the details either -- little things are present, like the ability to configure multiple sender profiles with unique reply to info and signatures; a plethora of keyboard shortcuts for common tasks and even the ability to rot13 or password encode blocks of text in the composer.


The way you organize things in Pimmy is a bit different from the traditional approach, and I think it works really well.  It's a tabbed interface, not a true MDI -- switching tabs swaps your entire view. 



Create a tab for your RSS feeds, another for your newsgroups, another still for your work mail and one for your personal mail.



Pimmy 4.0 isn't free, as previous versions of Pimmy were -- a license will cost you twenty USD but I have no qualms with that.  Pimmy has always been a remarkable application and unrivaled for a portable mail client.  This release raises the bar further, making Pimmy 4.0 capable of accommodating full-time, rather than just on the go, use.  The caveat there, is with a large mail base (thousands of messages) she can get a little slow if you're selectively viewing messages ( ctrl+g to filter messages by text/subject, ctrl+h to filter by read/unread).  In this day and age of gmail, I find myself not needing a larger more resource intensive mail client as I once did.  I use Pimmy for the every day downloading/reading and leave my archiving to gmail. Which brings to light another caveat--Pimmy doesn't natively support SSL, but they do have a nice quick guide to using "Stunnel" to connect to SSL servers.

Bottom line, Pimmy is an excellent choice for on-the-go users or users who need something small but effective for home and on the go.  It's not a great choice for e-mail pack rats who like to keep all their mail in the same place over the years, it's just not geared to handle that kind of bulk.

You can...
 View What's New in Pimmy 4.0
View the Full Feature set
Download Pimmy

52

Developer's Corner / Nested Matches

« on: February 04, 2006, 03:37 PM »

For my web-based php regex find/replace do-hickey, I need to match individual back references and wrap a tag around them so they'll be unique to the rest of the match for individual color markup.  Initially this would seem easy enough, however not all of a potential regex match is going to be within a back reference.  So it's necessary to replace the back reference, and only the back reference, while preserving the context of the match.  For example, if I were to search the text

fish this fish fish

looking for

.*?(?<=this )(fish).*

I'd match everything, capturing  the second instance of fish into the back reference.  I can't simply take the match and run a replace for fish in order to apply the highlighting, because then i'd end up with 3 highlighted "fish", 2 of which weren't supposed to be.  I also couldn't simply return the back reference with the markup, as that wouldn't return the non-back referenced stuff.

My initial solution was to run the original find text over the match to get the back references, using an extra flag to have it return the offset of each back reference.  So now I have the location of the text within the string, and can get the length of it from that point from the string itself.  Going backwards so as not to mess with the numeric location with in the string, it captures back references without losing context or data.  Perfect.

. . . until back references are nested.  In this example:
(.*?(?<=this )(fish).*)
back reference 1 would be fish this fish fish, back reference 2 would be fish -- here's where the problem surfaces.

If I wrap back reference 2 in the markup, when I apply back reference 1's markup it's going to apply the end tag in the wrong place since the string has increased and the original length calculated no longer applies.  If I replace back reference 1 first, same problem.  I'm sure there's some obvious, simple solution I'm overlooking having exhausted a bunch of complex attempts to compensate for it.  Any fresh perspectives on the best way to markup nested groups while preserving the integrity of the return?

53

fSekrit / Re: IDEA - encrypted-SFX-EXE to see secret text

« on: January 31, 2006, 04:52 AM »

fsekrit is uber-cool, man.  A couple little things I think it's missing.

1) Some sort of file > open dialog to import a text file
2) Remember window size on a per-.exe basis.  Some files are wider than others and, surely, I can't be bothered with resizing my own window
3) Take a few command line parameters -- so I can launch fsekrit with the file name and text file to use as the document source already predefined.  This would make it possible to encrypt a text file on the fly using a text editor that supported external tools.

54

Find And Run Robot / macros

« on: January 28, 2006, 02:03 PM »

Mouser, are there any macros available for use in the "groups" section?  What I mean --

Currently, I use the groups to quickly access several favorite search engines. I'd like to do something similar, but instead of running searches use it to open a file from a list of programs.   In this case, what I need is a full path macro so I could set up items in the group like

EditPad | C:\Program files.... -%fullpath%
Opera | C:\Program files.... -%fullpath%

Etc. -- so I could match *.html files and bring up those options, from there I could view the file in my browser or edit it in my text editor.  Further macros that would make it even more useful would be directory navigation based for opening files that are on my webserver, numbering directories from the root.  So in c:\html\prawn\fr c: would be %root%, html would be %dir1%, prawn would be %dir2% etc. -- using %dir2% would print 'prawn' while, perhaps %dir2+% would print 'prawn\fr\' then %filename% would print 'index.html'  -- so with this:

Opera | localhost://%dir2+%%filename%

I could open opera to http://localhost://prawn\fr\index.html
--the backslashes/forward slashes would be inconsistent without a way to toggle them, but the browser ought to be able to sort htem out.  %dir2+/% or %dir2+\% could be used to toggle them as well, I suppose.

This might be something not broadly useful though, or you might already have something better in place I haven't figured out yet.  Just throwing ideas around.