Messages

1801

General Software Discussion / E Texteditor experiences?

« on: May 04, 2007, 04:06 AM »

Looks like an interesting contender for the future:


I've been looking for a long time for something similar to textmate for windows after watching some RoR video's where the speed of developing in textmate became apparent The software doesn't  have an official release yet, but the screencast is interesting for sure. You can try out beta releases though and imho it could really take editing to a whole new level.

E is a new text editor for Windows, with powerful editing features and quite a few unique abilities. It makes manipulating text fast and easy, and lets you focus on your writing by automating all the manual work. You can extend it in any language, and by supporting TextMate bundles, it allows you to tap into a huge and active community

more interesting features

Effortless Productivity

Take control and make writing fun and fast again. Snippets automate tedious and repetitive typing, saving you time and effort. Powerful bundle commands transforms the text to your needs. By letting the computer do the manual work, you get the freedom to concentrate on your writing.
UNIX at your fingertips

You can leverage the full power of a unix scripting environment, right from within e. Close integration with cygwin gives you access to the full range of UNIX shell tools and lets you extend e with your choice of languages like Ruby, Perl, Python and more. If you have any task that could benefit from automation, you can be sure that e is up to it.
Customization

Make the editor fit the way you work. Everything in e from the syntax highlighting themes to bundle commands and keyboard shortcuts can be customized.
Community

TextMate is the award winning editor for MacOS X, that has revolutionized the way text editors work. By supporting TextMate bundles, e makes you part of a huge and vibrant community. Whatever task or language you need to work with, there is a good chance that someone has already made a bundle with all the needed adaptations.
Personal Revision Control

Most people have tried saving a document under all kind of "creative" names to keep track of old revisions. In e you can write and revise without worrying about losing your prior work.

You can commit regular milestones of your documents (with comments and labels), and track your progress with the combined timeline/graph in the History view.

1802

General Software Discussion / Re: Changing properties of multiple files in WinXP?

« on: May 04, 2007, 03:21 AM »

Is it just me or is there no longer a way to edit any of the fields on these tabs in Vista? Would you lose information if you migrated to vista?

1803

Post New Requests Here / Re: Software AutoUpdater -- Experimental Software Autoupdating

« on: May 04, 2007, 03:06 AM »

A small thing to note is that the first time you run an update for a program it doesn't have any 'last check' information, so currently after adding an ini the latest version is  downloaded.

I can't assume that the software is up to date when installing the ini file (why would someone download an updater if their software is up to date). However it's not ideal either. One way to solve it is to compare to the real executable's version, but this would mean more information needed to be added to the ini's.

I'd be interested in hearing other approaches about this. 

1804

General Software Discussion / Re: To Vista or not to Vista that is the ?

« on: May 03, 2007, 07:15 AM »

There's always vLite, but I have never touched it.

1805

General Software Discussion / Re: Changing properties of multiple files in WinXP?

« on: May 03, 2007, 04:44 AM »

Until there's a solution that allows you to edit multiple files at a time *winks to f0dder* you can use the following script I enclose below, including AHK source if you feel comfortable with that.

Select a file and press scroll Lock (next to pause/break and printscreen) it will navigate to the comment field.

1806

General Software Discussion / Re: Changing properties of multiple files in WinXP?

« on: May 03, 2007, 04:24 AM »

If you can give me the keys you press I can whip up a quick autohotkey script that you can assign a hotkey to
alt-enter for the properties
then right 3x for the summary tab?
then 6x tab for the commentbox?

1807

Living Room / Re: Best Buy Geek Squad Confession (long and interesting)

« on: May 03, 2007, 03:39 AM »

Some piece with some shocking revelations, although not totally suprising for the cynical minded.

Are you aware that you can locate every image and movie located on your hard drive by just using the windows search function? Did you know that, especially if you use Internet Explorer, Windows keeps an easily retrievable record of many of your usernames and passwords to almost any website (including banking websites), whether or not you save your password manually?

Is this still the case with IE7? I take it the guy is referring to the index.dat?

1808

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Mouse wheel enhancement for Windows

« on: May 03, 2007, 02:55 AM »

I have this installed as well. I have however disabled the middle button functionality as it confliced with the middle button closing in Opera However it's still worth using for the universal scrolling, especially with a two (or more) monitors setup.

1809

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Use locate32 with Farr

« on: May 03, 2007, 01:20 AM »

You don't have to click on the search button the alias will do that for you and just run the search without any further mouse clicks or keyboard input.
The power you get from this combination is that FARR is great in searching and displaying your common folders, but locate already has an index of your whole drive. So if you can't find it in FARR (or are looking for individual documents) then run a 'loc <document>' and the results are in the locate window. I hope that helps clear things up.

edit: ahh we're editing at the same time

1810

Post New Requests Here / Re: Software AutoUpdater -- Experimental Software Autoupdating

« on: May 02, 2007, 01:50 PM »

I hope to solve 1) I have not looked into it yet.
But regarding 2: I use the httpqueryinfo script from http://www.autohotke...orum/topic10510.html  to query the http headers. I do not just it requests the whole .exe but will double check tomorrow. MAybe you can tell from the link, it's quite technical (calling .dlls)

1811

Post New Requests Here / Software AutoUpdater -- Experimental Software Autoupdating

« on: May 02, 2007, 10:41 AM »

What is it?
Did you ever wish Windows Update worked for more programs? Do you use a lot of software from small vendors and wish you could update them quicker? Then maybe this will help.

Inspired by Mouser's Find and Run Robot and his frequent new alpha releases I have created a software updater program.

• Configuration on a per application basis through ini files
• Decentralised, after installation developers can easily spread new versions to end users (or users can provide the ini files)
• Automatic checking and downloading of newer versions of software for end users

Whether or not this program will actually be useful depend on developers picking it up and users having the same dream as me.

As it is based on Autohotkey it can easily be extended for example with installation AHK scripts. Functionally it is more to prove auto-updating can be done and brings great benefit.

How it works
People can install a .ini file in the Apps\ folder for each application they want to keep up to date. a sample ini file has the following configuration:

[Select]

[Updates]
Title=Test Software
IniURL=http://amasan.co.uk/downloads/updater/Apps/test.ini
URL=http://amasan.co.uk/downloads/updater/test.exe
LastCheck=Wed, 02 May 2007 13:55:24 GMT

The Title line is optional for display purposes. The IniURL pair points to the same ini file online -- updated by the developer or third party (the program then knows where to look for updates as well as being able to move ini files). the URL pair points to the latest executable. LastCheck is systemgenerated, so don't include it.

The auto updater will compare the last-modified header of the URL to a value it writes in the local ini file of the last check of the program, if the file is newer then the previous check it will download it and run it so the user can upgrade. Afterwards it will write out the time of the update to the ini file.

I'm curious to see what you think of it. I wish it could update itself, but because the executable is in use while updating I have not solved this. Also I wish to make it possible to provide a redirect as a url, less updating for the developer (untested so might already be possible)

Suggestions, implementation issues an comments are very welcome. See the source etc, it is the first public version and will probably have some bugs.

1812

General Software Discussion / Re: Does anyone use PhraseExpress?

« on: May 02, 2007, 10:12 AM »

I have tried several and although it seems actually Topstyle (my web editor) is mainly causing things to slow down, I have opted to create a small AutoHotkey script that I have running. Howeve I don't use a shortkey but a phrase: I type ty` and it gets replaced by a longer phrase instantly, that works better for me. I'll enclose it here in case you want to go a similar route.

But on your problem, you should try and pinpoint where the problem lies:
Do any of the example phrases work? if not try creating a new rootnode (you have created all your phrases of the "sample" folder, which has its own settings which might conflict). If the standad phrases work then it's probably a setting that needs changed.
If nothing work you might have another program running with the same shortcut or another program that logs your keys. Hope that helps.

1813

Post New Requests Here / Level - Copy files from various sources into one flat folder

« on: May 02, 2007, 10:01 AM »

babble

Inspired by this forum I have been getting to grips with AutoHotkey and my first product is a utility I wrote for my work here at Angus College to collect all the student/staff portraits in one central folder for use in our staff directory. We have 11 different folders across the network, and I was not sure where new pictures were added to, but always needed the latest updates to be available on the intranet. Anyway, I am sure it will be of some use to someone (and I am quite proud of it  )

Levelcopies files from multiple sources into a flat folder. It can be invoked from the commandline. For every source you can specify a file filter, and currently therre are switches to include/exclude subfolders, whether or not you want to overwrite all files that already exist or only older ones. You can have unlimited sources (afaik) When you start it from explorer you see this:

I can imagine that it would be handy to use to consolidate all your music from different pcs into one folder.

It requires cat.exe from UnxUtils because AutoHotkey doesn't allow you to send the output directly to the commandline. So if you want any output then put |cat at the end of a command. Instead you can also pipe it to a textfile.



for example:

[Select]

level -oo -s c:\temp\1\*.* c:\temp\2\*.* d:\temp\output |cat

This would copy all never files from 2 sources on the c-drive into one destination folder in the d-drive, including subdirectories. However the output folder won't have any subdirectories (it's flat -- so if you have duplicate files, the newest version is always available)

Feel free to use it in any way or if you have suggestions they are welcome too.

Download Page

1814

General Software Discussion / Re: Does anyone use PhraseExpress?

« on: May 02, 2007, 09:35 AM »

I did use it but I found the pasting of the phrases too slow for coding if I can remember right.
Do you have a screenshot of the screen where you have set the hotkey? That might help.

1815

General Software Discussion / Re: BugMeNot

« on: May 02, 2007, 06:30 AM »

It's questionable then if they would have participated at all.

1816

General Software Discussion / DE Coffee Manager

« on: May 01, 2007, 10:14 AM »

The most fun we had in our office since friday (when we installed the new coffee machine):
The Coffee Manager. There's an administrator who makes a coffee group, the DECM manages who's turn it is to make coffee. You can then select what drink you want and all orders will be delivered to the right person. You can even print out statistics. 

Are you always the one who's stuck getting coffee for your colleagues? How does Keith in accounts take his coffee again? You're going to get a coffee, but is there anyone else who wants one too? The Coffee Manager is the answer!
The Coffee Manager is a small application for your work computer, which asks everyone in the office if they would like a coffee, then gathers all the drinks requests and selects a person to make the trip to the coffee machine! The Coffee Manager can also present you with a graphic display of statistics to chart the drinking habits and rituals of your team. 

1817

General Software Discussion / Re: Hackety Hack — the Coder's Starter Kit

« on: May 01, 2007, 07:15 AM »

Sounds like great stuff, man! But you know, it is so easy?! People might get tired! Being all enthousiastic like that, wow!
But I guess it's still refreshing in the programming language world, better then reading long dry volumes of reference manuals.

1818

Developer's Corner / Re: AutoHotkey how to allow multiple inputs?

« on: May 01, 2007, 05:25 AM »

Thanks for that. After consideration I have decided to recreate the program as a commandline program, it makes it more flexible. However I  have a problem displaying the results.

I am appending statuses to stdout. I know Autohotkey cannot display the stdout by itself:
http://www.autohotke...nds/_ErrorStdOut.htm

Currently I have copied over cat.exe from GNUutils for windows and type this:

[Select]

level.exe |cat

However it would be good if I could use the one file to make it more portable.

I've attached a first version of my Level app and a screenshot. See what you think.

1819

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR v2 - Vista Compatibility Testers+Discussion

« on: April 30, 2007, 12:50 PM »

Yep I have used it extensively for two days and have found no other problems

1820

General Software Discussion / Re: Opera 9.2 annoyance... any ideas?

« on: April 30, 2007, 09:52 AM »

Thank you very much I was pleasently suprised by your generousity. 

1821

DC Website Help and Extras / Re: recent post link to topic start instead

« on: April 30, 2007, 07:54 AM »

Yeah But..
It makes sense that:

• if you want to see the recent topics(show recent topics) and click on an entry you want to read the topic (so from the start)
• if you want to see the latest posts (show recent posts) to a topic, and click on a topic you get sent to the last posts. (so at the end).

At the moment if you click on Show recent topics, then on a title you go to the last post. Or maybe I should just get used to it

1822

DC Website Help and Extras / recent post link to topic start instead

« on: April 30, 2007, 05:01 AM »

I just noticed I always press the home key after opening topics. When we go to the recent topics list and click on a topic title we get sent to the last reply. It's good to see what the latest addition is but I think it would be better to get the context of the topic as it is unlikely we've already read it. So from that point of view it would make more sense to go to the topicstart instead.

Not a biggie but maybe something to think about.

1823

Developer's Corner / AutoHotkey how to allow multiple inputs?

« on: April 30, 2007, 04:41 AM »

I've created an AHK script that takes multiple folders and copies all files inside to a destination folder, making a flattened copy as it were. At the moment I specifiy the folders in the script but to make the script more general I would like to allow the user to specifiy an 'unknown' amount of input folders and one output folder.

What would be the way to go? I could create an ini file but am not sure how to read in unknown amount of keys? I've never created an interface like that either.

code below

[Select]

;
; AutoHotkey Version: 1.0
; Language:       English
; Platform:       Win XP / Vista Tested
; Author:         justice <>
;
; Script Function:
; Copies photos from multiple folders without subfolders into 1 target folder
;

#NoEnv
SendMode Input
#SingleInstance,Force
Menu, Tray, Icon, Shell32.dll, 174
SetBatchLines, -1  ; Make the operation run at maximum speed.
CopyDest = c:\temp
NewFilesCopied = 0


; Example: A moving progress bar overlayed on a background image.

Gui, Color, White
Gui, Add, Picture, x0 y0 h350 w450, %A_WinDir%\system32\ntimage.gif ;doesn't exist in vista
gui, font, s16, Arial
Gui, Add, Text,BackgroundTrans x10 y10, PhotoUpdate
gui, font, s9, Arial
Gui, Add, Text, BackgroundTrans, Copying updated photos into `n%CopyDest%.

Gui, Add, Progress, vMyProgress x10 w430
Gui, Add, Text, vMyText wp  ; wp means "use width of previous".
Gui, Add, Picture, w140 h170 x155 y90 BackgroundTrans vMyPic,
Gui, Show

IfNotExist, %CopyDest%
FileCreateDir, %CopyDest%

CopySourcePattern = d:\temp\01\*.jpg
GoSub, CopyIfNewer
CopySourcePattern = d:\temp\02\*.jpg
GoSub, CopyIfNewer
Sleep, 10000
ExitApp


; Example #5: Copy only the source files that are newer than their counterparts
; in the destination:
CopyIfNewer:
timesCalled += 1
GuiControl,, MyText, %timesCalled% (%NewFilesCopied%) - Reading %CopySourcePattern%...
i = 1
; Caller has set the variables CopySourcePattern and CopyDest for us.
Loop, %CopySourcePattern%,0,1
{
Sleep, 10
if i > 100
{
i = 1
}
GuiControl,, MyProgress, %i%
i +=1
copy_it = n
StringReplace, FileNoSpaces, A_LoopFileName, %A_Space%,, All ;Take out spaces
IfNotExist, %CopyDest%\%FileNoSpaces%  ; Always copy if target file doesn't yet exist.
copy_it = y
else
{
; File exists
FileGetTime, time, %CopyDest%\%FileNoSpaces%
EnvSub, time, %A_LoopFileTimeModified%, seconds  ; Subtract the source file's time from the destination's.

if time < 0  ; Source file is newer than destination file.
copy_it = y
}
if copy_it = y
{
NewFilesCopied += 1
GuiControl,, MyPic, %A_LoopFileFullPath%
GuiControl,, MyText, %A_LoopFileFullPath%
FileCopy, %A_LoopFileFullPath%, %CopyDest%\%FileNoSpaces%, 1   ; Copy with overwrite=yes
if ErrorLevel
MsgBox, Could not copy "%A_LoopFileFullPath%" to "%CopyDest%\%FileNoSpaces%".
}
}
GuiControl,, MyProgress, 100
GuiControl,, MyText, %timesCalled% (%NewFilesCopied%) - Finished copying %CopySourcePattern%.
Return

GuiClose:
ExitApp

1824

General Software Discussion / Re: Opera 9.2 annoyance... any ideas?

« on: April 30, 2007, 04:11 AM »

If there's interest I can encloses my standard_menu(1).ini enclosed if you want to use it, but I'm not sure if any other modification have been made to it compared to the stock Opera 9.2 menu.ini or your configuration.

1825

General Software Discussion / Re: Opera 9.2 annoyance... any ideas?

« on: April 30, 2007, 03:29 AM »

Actually I noticed that as well. I'm sure there's a context menu item that would allow you to open the folder of any file. According to a forum user: (http://my.opera.com/...ndpost.pl?id=1958636)

Actually ... in 9.10 there was a bug in the Windows version, it ignored the Platform specifier in the menu setup.. We had a few complaints back with the first preview after 9.10 about this item disappearing, when the truth is that it wasn't supposed to have been displayed to begin with (though there is a wishlist topic on having it displayed).

In Windows, it is (currently) only supposed to be shown when you click on the "Transfer completed" notification.

Which explains why it is not there now but not how to enable it, so I keep digging:

http://my.opera.com/...ransfers-right-click
Create a new menu.ini (Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Toolbars -> Duplicate menu setup.
Then go to your Opera profile directory (
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Opera\Opera\profile\ in my case) then into the MENU folder, edit the .ini there. go to line 1400 (in my case) and change it to:

[Select]

Item, 69697=Open transfer folder