Messages

3926

Living Room / which hierarchical note program?

« on: May 18, 2005, 04:44 AM »

i would like to 'branch' out and begin using a hierarchical note program. but i have only one idea so far of which to go for: the one that Zaine mentions on his site - TexNotes Pro.

i know mouser uses something (i can't remember if you've mentioned the name of it before, mouser) and can well imagine that a lot of other visitors to this forum use one. so i ask: what are they?

i use ADBIdea http://happyjackroad...ideaLibrary/idea.asp on my pocket pc so i can see the usefullness of these programs but i'd really like something that can link to, or open directly, pretty much any common file type you care to mention. or is that asking too much?

TexNotes looks really good - but if there is something even more versatile i'd like to know your opinions. thanks.

3927

Living Room / Re: Bitwise Magazine - please call by soon....

« on: May 15, 2005, 09:19 AM »

i'm not a programmer of any description but i can see the high importance of a dedicated coding magazine - it does make you wonder why it doesn't exist already.

more importantly, it sounds tempting enough for a non coder like me to see what's its all about - maybe i'll actually learn something.

3928

Living Room / Re: just a bit of fun... what category are you?

« on: May 15, 2005, 02:55 AM »

ha, ha, 'freeloader', that has got to be the best so far Zaine - i'd be happy to be one of those.

i really like where Scott is going with the Greek 'philos'. that would make a grand sounding term. are there any Latin words or maybe even other Greek words that would be appropriate?

i'll see if i can find anything in a few dictionaries.

3929

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Dim rest of desktop/windows, except for focused window

« on: May 15, 2005, 02:42 AM »

had a quick play around with it on my system Brian but it seemed to have a mind of it's own - there didn't appear to be any pattern to how it behaved in ghosting windows, it was just clear that it wasn't happy.

i've got samurize running with alpha blending so maybe it was that causing the problem - it didn't get any better with that turned off though.

if i can spot a pattern to the irratic behavour i'll let you know exactly what it is doing.

3930

Unfinished Requests / Re: IDEA:Something that will tell you wether a folder is empty or not.

« on: May 15, 2005, 02:36 AM »

again, i'm not going to be of the greatest help but i'm sure that i've seen one or two little apps that claimed to monitor and report whether a folder contained anything or not.

they might not have strictly monitored if the folder was empty. i think they observed if new files had been placed in the folder - would that be enough.

if i can find them i'll let you know but they must have been things i've seen over at shellcity.net or nonags.com.

3931

Screenshot Captor / Re: Beta Testers For ScreenshotCaptor?

« on: May 14, 2005, 07:51 AM »

yep, printscreen key functions now work fine on mine.

3932

Screenshot Captor / Re: Beta Testers For ScreenshotCaptor?

« on: May 13, 2005, 09:17 AM »

printscreen key still doesn't want to play but otherwise everything else okay. 

3933

Screenshot Captor / Re: Beta Testers For ScreenshotCaptor?

« on: May 13, 2005, 08:51 AM »

ah right, that's a good feature.

3934

Screenshot Captor / Re: Beta Testers For ScreenshotCaptor?

« on: May 13, 2005, 07:40 AM »

running as admin - but have a clipboard capture thing program running which probably get in the way (i did turn it off but haven't rebooted yet so it's probably the problem).

regards external editor - it's not that important really but what i meant was to have more than one editor defined so you click one button for one editor and another button for another editor. but thinking about it it's maybe going too far - i don't know.

3935

Screenshot Captor / Re: Beta Testers For ScreenshotCaptor?

« on: May 13, 2005, 07:12 AM »

launching a 3rd party editor sounds like a good idea - probably more useful than anything else. could you perhaps allow the choice of more than one outside editor just in case.

3936

Screenshot Captor / Re: Beta Testers For ScreenshotCaptor?

« on: May 13, 2005, 06:34 AM »

looks great mouser, i don't seem to be able to get it to capture though - my system causing problems maybe.

can you resize the text and will it be positional - for adding comments to the capture?

if you could get it to capture and scroll down windows at the same time - like hypersnap - then i would use it all the time.

3937

Living Room / Re: just a bit of fun... what category are you?

« on: May 12, 2005, 04:34 PM »

yes, i'm just after definitions - not the politics of which software to go for.

it doesn't have to be freeware - i just thought there would be more collectors with larger collections of freeware. as it's free it's easy to amass a greater number of programs that you could ever use.

if it's not freeware then i wouldn't have thought the collections would be as big - if there also people collecting shareware and payware (what's the term for software that you pay for?) with large collections then they should be defined also.

maybe there should be a general all emcompassing term for someone that collects 'software' and then subcategories under this definition. the important part is the word 'collector' - someone that merely uses the software they need without storing programs they may or may not use is not a collector.

as a philatelist does not post any of the stamps he owns, but instead admires them for their rarity, so the free/software collector admires the programs he collects for their potential use even though he may not use them.

3938

Coding Snack Guidelines / Re: CODERS: READ IN and POST HERE

« on: May 12, 2005, 01:46 PM »

good idea.

3939

Living Room / just a bit of fun... what category are you?

« on: May 12, 2005, 01:44 PM »

i can well imagine this has been discussed elsewhere in an article or someone's blog but i've never really come across anything, so...

i'm wondering what is the most appropriate term to use when referring to someone that collects 'software' or more specifically,  'freeware'.

Zaine has used the term 'softaholic' which pretty much sums it up - is this the established term or has anyone got something else?

from the top of my head, all i can really come up with is a 'softaddict' but that is pretty much the same as Zaine's 'softaholic' and doesn't sound as good.

one term i did coin that i think pretty much hits the nail on the head is 'warez-cretin'. this describes the sort of folk that download all the warez stuff they can find yet haven't got a single idea of what the software is for - they just know that it's 'cool' to have the latest '0 days' release installed on their machine. i've known a few and they even had to admit they were 'cretins'.

anyway, back to the point - what are people that collect freeware. we know that stamp collectors are 'philatelists'. there ought to be an elitist sounding word for 'freeware collectors'.

(i need to know as i'm lacking an identity - there's no t-shirt i can buy that tells me who i am.)

3940

Best Virtual Machine Tool / Re: A Gift from VMWare

« on: May 10, 2005, 02:42 PM »

absolutely amazing.

3941

General Software Discussion / Re: Good video conversion app?

« on: May 10, 2005, 02:38 PM »

true, the freeness of it must play a part in it's popularity.

but as there are several flavours of the program with slight modifications here and there i think it shows that virtualdub is quite versatile - once you get used to it. i remember having it installed for years before using it and that was ony after going through some of the guides other people had made.

with the right filters and the right codecs you should be able to get it to do most conversions. i have to admit that it's probably not worth the time trying to figure it all out if you are just doing typical conversions.

3942

General Software Discussion / Re: Good video conversion app?

« on: May 10, 2005, 02:21 PM »

i can't claim to be an expert - just done quite a bit of converting from one format to another. seems to me if you are converting between fairly regular formats and don't really mind on how things come out then sticking to the 'one size fits all' type programs will suffice - just go through the wizards and you'll get a satisfactory result.

beyond that - if you are picky about the end conversion then you might need a whole variety of tools.

virtualdub and avisynth always seem to be top of the utils you'll find mentioned at dedicated video websites like:

videohelp.com http://www.videohelp.com/

doom9.net http://www.doom9.org/

i'd also like to know if there is single program that will do everything and do it well - 'cleaner XL' isn't cheap but it's meant to be great. things like adobe premiere are brilliant for editing but rubbish for conversion tasks.

most things seem to work fine until you start converting between different frame rates - if there is something that excels in that area then i'd like to know.

3943

Unfinished Requests / Re: IDEA: time calculator

« on: May 09, 2005, 02:56 AM »

thanks for the info Scott.

3944

DesktopCoral / Re: multiple corals, a suggestion

« on: May 06, 2005, 10:18 AM »

that 'wipeout' thing is 'RAD'.

it's like having the biggest menu possible - your entire desktop becomes a menu - brilliant.

3945

DesktopCoral / Re: multiple corals, a suggestion

« on: May 06, 2005, 10:14 AM »

can some kind soul email me 'Hawkeye ShellInit' it doesn't appear to be available at the website - the download link is broken.

fhoyos, can't you configure 'worktop' so that it has different sized border at each side - this would be similar to using more than one 'desktopcorral'.

i've just been playing with it and it seems quite good for setting up a 'free' border around all four sides of your screen - or isn't that what you are trying to do with 'desktopcorral'?

3946

Unfinished Requests / Re: IDEA: time calculator

« on: May 06, 2005, 09:24 AM »

my initial searches on 'nonags' and 'google' for the search term 'time calculator' didn't really come up with a great deal of useful matches, so i gave up 

thankfully your encouragement made me search 'freshmeat' and up popped 'HMScalc' http://freshmeat.net/projects/hmscalc/ it's java but it looks good to me.

that's all i can find though, am i sufferring from 'selective search result blindness' or are there really no others. there seem to be plenty of little calculators that operate on different dates - just not time.

3947

Unfinished Requests / IDEA: time calculator

« on: May 06, 2005, 04:21 AM »

this is perhaps more of a plea for someone to kindly tell me of a program that already does this...

quite simply: a calculator with the usual basic functions but it works upon TIME format input, i.e. you can add 01h 33m 11s to 00h 56m 28s and obtain the result in a similar time output display.

i've had a look around and found 'time calculator pro' but it's not freeware - okay it's cheap - but i would have thought this kind of program would be a freeware thing somewhere.

of course, anyone willing to code it up from scratch would be my hero.

3948

Unfinished Requests / Re: IDEA: Web Page annotation Tool

« on: May 04, 2005, 02:44 AM »

i know there are at least two companies that provide software that does this, sorry - i can't remember the names of either of them.

i know that they weren't freeware and from what i experienced myself the annotation method wasn't 100% perfect. reloading pages would sometimes move the annotations around a little bit.

this was all a few years back so whoever it is that made the program(s) may well have got it all working correctly by now.

personally, i'd love to see an annotation tool done as a 'coding snack' - i know i'd use it if it worked properly.

3949

Finished Programs / Re: DONE - IDEA: change wallpaper at specific time - not timed intervals.

« on: May 03, 2005, 11:27 AM »

calendar or date would be a good feature - i think you would have to allow it to be positionable by the user in some way, otherwise it could become hidden by icons.

3950

Finished Programs / Re: DONE - IDEA: change wallpaper at specific time - not timed intervals.

« on: May 03, 2005, 08:09 AM »

just wanted to say many thanks mouser, great little program. extremely simple to configure - just got the hourly theme going at the moment.

looks like i'll need to create some wallpaper sets now.