Messages

1076

General Software Discussion / Re: does anyone of you believe in defragmentation programs?

« on: February 05, 2006, 12:20 PM »

Back when I first started using dirms/buzzsaw, I was certain my computer ran better -- especially in long stretches.  I haven't not used it in so long, though, I don't actually have any perception of what the benchmark change might be.  Computers are so much better these days, the difference might be negligible . . . but I feel better knowing (or at least assuming) my computer is constantly being defragged as I work.

(You should see the queue of files to work through after I import/export a big mail base . . .)

1077

Living Room / Re: Is this offesive?

« on: February 05, 2006, 11:51 AM »

They get away with it because they aren't doing anything wrong, necessarily.  With the exception of adult only content, there aren't laws requiring ratings on websites in the same manner as, say, movies and TV -- and while this is suggestive, it doesn't quite hit the AO mark.  Further, I haven't seen the picture in context of the full flash and website it's on, but  in the original post, rover said

My concern is that it is inside a free flash games that to me is aimed at kids.

-- 'to me is aimed at kids'  -- which makes me think it seems like a childrens game because of its simplicity and cute rodents, but is perhaps not explicitly aimed at kids.

I'd wager it's just a blacksheep.com ha ha shock value deal, maybe designed to seem like it's for kids while being adult themed (ala peewee herman's playhouse .

1078

General Software Discussion / Re: extremely good gif editor required

« on: February 05, 2006, 11:39 AM »

Xara Xtreme is awesome, total control over palettes and such -- though I prefer my exports as PNG's

Worth looking at is Graphics Gale, as well --   It's geared toward pixel by pixel art for video game devs who need to zoom in on the grid -- I'd imagine pixel art people would need total palette control, so that might be worth looking at.
http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/.

In the free version you can't save/open gifs . . . however you can copy/paste them in/out

1079

General Software Discussion / Re: does anyone of you believe in defragmentation programs?

« on: February 05, 2006, 10:08 AM »

I've always been a fan of BuzzSaw -- it runs as a process, degragmenting as you go -- essentially keeping a hard drive defragged  -- assuming you run it on a hard drive defragged to begin with

1080

Official Announcements / Re: DonationCoder.com Logo Contest is Over - We Have a New Official Mascot/Logo!

« on: February 05, 2006, 09:52 AM »

I figured as much . . . great to hear it

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Official Announcements / Re: DonationCoder.com Logo Contest is Over - We Have a New Official Mascot/Logo!

« on: February 04, 2006, 08:41 PM »

Now he just needs festive outfits for holidays ala google. It'd be cool to have seasonal logos.

1082

Living Room / Re: Is this offesive?

« on: February 04, 2006, 08:31 PM »

It's in image I'd want in kids game . . . I just wouldn't let my kid play it.

1083

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR version 2 - discuss the best way to handle 'actions'

« on: February 04, 2006, 07:40 PM »

to clarify what i was saying from before, i was saying we cant insist that the filename comes first,
because sometimes there is no filename, for example when you want to send an email.

-mouser (February 04, 2006, 05:22 AM)

Essentially, wouldn't the email address or contact name be the "file" -- Without additional parameters, it's not an action, just a launch.

1084

Living Room / Re: Just for fun: What is this ?

« on: February 04, 2006, 04:27 PM »

?

1085

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?

1086

Living Room / Re: Just for fun: What is this ?

« on: February 04, 2006, 03:19 PM »

There's a new farm of these a few miles from where I grew up.

1087

Best E-mail Client / Re: The Bat! (Some constructive criticism)

« on: February 04, 2006, 07:10 AM »

Yeah, I'm a bit rusty but you should include the -- yourself if you're using quick templates to switch the signature -- that's what tells it where to delete the text before inserting the new one.

I have the sig delimiter in my main template, beneath that the qinclude -- so swapping among quicktempaltes -should- replace everything beneath the delimiter with the quick template text.

I think.

:-)

1088

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR version 2 - discuss the best way to handle 'actions'

« on: February 03, 2006, 08:59 AM »

As for keeping it newb friendly -- the keystrokes and stuff aren't likely going to be used by anyone but power users

-allen (February 03, 2006, 08:00 AM)

Here, i don't agree with you. I think we should try to fins a solution that is both suitable to power-users as much as intuitive, so as someone new to farr can see it's power immediatelly.

-jgpaiva (February 03, 2006, 08:42 AM)

I don't disagree with you on this point -- I absolutely agree that it should be intuitive regardless of experience level.  All I'm saying is no matter how much brainstorming you do to have optimized keyboard shortcuts, keyboard shortcuts are not par for the course for less experienced computer users.  My point was that there should be an alternate method or methods of accessing all this functionality without expecting a point-click user to use the keyboard.

As it is often descibred, most people when trying to use a software, only evalute it in the first use, which means that these kind of functions should be as easy as possible, but also providing as much flexibility as possible.

-jgpaiva (February 03, 2006, 08:42 AM)

Right, which is precisely my point.  There needs to be a quick, easy way to access the features from the start -- if a user has to spend the beginning of their trial of the software learning a bunch of proprietary keystrokes, they're going to throw in the towel.  Give them things to click on, and display the shortcuts next to the menu items or in tooltips and they'll have their GUI interface and the shortcuts will be right there for them to learn when they're ready.  It's not difficult to hit "enter" after typing a website, but users want a "go" button, you know?

1089

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR version 2 - discuss the best way to handle 'actions'

« on: February 03, 2006, 08:00 AM »

part of the challenge is figuring out a solution that doesnt require opening the help file and searching for a day looking for the magic keystroke to do things..

-mouser (February 03, 2006, 07:42 AM)

One thing to consider is something I've seen in several applications in recent years -- a section of the help file devoted exclusively to listing keyboard accellerators and link directly to it in the help menu.

As for keeping it newb friendly -- the keystrokes and stuff aren't likely going to be used by anyone but power users, so it seems the trick there is to have all those available shortcuts available as items in a right click contect menu as well as, perhaps, a drop down button in the toolbar.  An "actions" button, so to speak.

1090

Best E-mail Client / Re: The Bat! (Some constructive criticism)

« on: February 03, 2006, 05:15 AM »

I'm a pack rat -- losing my e-mail archive was far more traumatic than the loss of the computer itself, or the DVD's, or anything else for that matter . . . it was a growing experience, I had to learn to let go :-)

-- it took most of the night to download all my gmail messages into The Bat!.  As it would turn out, I had almost 50,000 -- I have a nice, full mailbase on TB now

1091

General Software Discussion / Re: "Mail and/or RSS reader" screensaver?

« on: February 02, 2006, 05:45 PM »

Gmail does have an RSS feed--as long as the screensaver supports SSL/authenticated feeds.  There's a good chance the reader, in most cases, is using MSIE's rendering engine and xslt to grab/show the data -- so as long as you're logged into gmail in IE, the reader should be able to grab the gmail feed.

1092

General Software Discussion / Re: "Mail and/or RSS reader" screensaver?

« on: February 02, 2006, 11:12 AM »

RSSmore has its shortcomings, it's young -- but it does a decent job with most feeds.  It's donation-ware, too

1093

Find And Run Robot / Re: A unified FARR / Launcher Interface Proposal

« on: February 01, 2006, 10:56 PM »

As long as the overhead doesn't increase by much, and I don't think it would knowing mouser, I don't think those of us who wouldn't use the launcher would object to the functionality being there so long as it could be removed.

As for FRR being an almost launcher, I think it's more than that -- at least for keyboardcentric users, it's a ver powerful, fully capable launcher.  Between its search setup and the configurable groups, launcher gives immediate access everything I need to get to with minimal interaction -- couple of keystrokes, and I'm where I want to be.  This isn't to say I don't understand FRR's obvious weaknesses to those who prefer to use the mouse to interface with their computer -- it takes no stretch of the imagination to see where FRR falls short in that regard.

Personally, I'd rather see unified than separate and I don't even have any immediate plans to use the launcher.  As mouser stated, it would be advantageous in terms of the ability to maintain groups as well as frequent/recent access lists between the two interfaces -- as well as other shared configurations.  On a day when I'm sitting back and actually using my mouse, if I toggle on the launcher module, all the stuff I'm used to accessing in FRR is right there and vice versa.

There's also the matter of having one application to maintain/support versus having two -- while having one that is merged would be more effort to maintain than either of the two as individuals, I can't imagine it would be easier to maintain them both than to maintain one app.

Plus, having one fully featured application ideally suited to both ends of the mouse v. keyboard debate is surely more likely to grab the attention of the WWW -- offering a loaded hybrid program is surely more valuable than offering two great but limited programs.

1094

Best E-mail Client / Re: DonationCoder.com members - 50% discount for TheBat!

« on: February 01, 2006, 10:44 PM »

Way, way late in replying to this thread--I blame it on being way-way late in showing up here altogether -- but I was immediately impressed to see it as a praised application here with a significant discount offered.  Having first discovered TB when it was in version 1.2x or 1.3x something and having used it as my primary e-mail client for most of the years between then and now, it has a special place in my heart.

I was amused to read in the review about the complaints of seemingly trivial version increases -- having been there at the time of it.  Version 1 supported free updates for several years, with most of the active users fearing version 2 was a pipe dream.  When version 2 was released, even though only a minor upgrade from the current 1.x version with most of the new features promises rather than implemented, I had no problem paying--simply because I'd used it for so long without having to pay further.  Version 3, on the other hand, came quickly and with a similar level of upgrade--trivial with promised features.

The developers are certainly not renowned for their internal organization and if they're known for their documentation, it's because it's absolutely terrible -- but there's no question about it, they deliver the most powerful e-mail client on the market.  It's a lot easier to get your feet wet with Thunderbird, but even with dozens of extensions installed--neither it nor any other client can compare to the featureset of TB.

Anyway, it's nice stumbling into a public venue where she's getting some love.

1095

Best E-mail Client / Re: TheBat Toolbars

« on: February 01, 2006, 10:30 PM »

Toolbars? I avoid such problems by not using them

1096

Best E-mail Client / Re: The Bat! (Some constructive criticism)

« on: February 01, 2006, 10:28 PM »

For the record, I've set my gmail account to make all messages available for download and am in the process of downloading15000 + messages, dating back to 2002.  In '01, a roommate pawned my computer and ran, so I lost everything from '98 - '01, but I'd imported everything after that into gmail when I started using it -- so at least I'll have a few years searchable archive.  Have a few templates configured and am slowly moving back in.  I learned from this thread I haven't forgotten as much about using TB as I'd thought, which makes the move a bit less daunting

1097

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: CLIPBOARD HELP+SPELL LATEST VERSION INFO THREAD - v2.23.01 - Nov 22, 2013

« on: February 01, 2006, 06:00 PM »

2) ill look into that -  do i understand that you're basically pointing out a user interface annoyance/baddesign or is there something deeper i'm missing?

-mouser (February 01, 2006, 05:26 PM)

There's nothing deeper, it's just initially a bit confusing when you go to toggle a box that -appears- active, and nothing happens.  Took me a second to figure out why those checkboxes looked more lively than they really were ;P It has absolutely no impact on actual performance of the various cleanup functions that I've used.

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Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: CLIPBOARD HELP+SPELL LATEST VERSION INFO THREAD - v2.23.01 - Nov 22, 2013

« on: February 01, 2006, 05:15 PM »

CHSGreat stuff, mouser -- I especially love the ability to send it back to the application from whence it came without reaching for my mouse.  That change alone makes CHS exponentially more useful to me.   Of course, I have to nitpick still -- would it be possible to have an option to have it close after sending the text back?

After using this a while, my favorite feature is the ability to apply cleanup presets on the fly via the quick paste menu -- Saving me oodles of time there, I don't believe anyone else offers that do they?

Few things quickly.
1. If nothing is selected, would it be possible to automatically select all before copying? Would be handy in textareas as well as text editors where the intent is, in fact, to grab the whole thing.  Save a keystroke or two.

2. In the text cleanup, when boxes are unchecked most of the child stuff is grayed out -- however now all children are grayed out.  Actually, the only check boxes grayed out when the parent is disabled is "Trim Excess White Space" and "Add to Empties" -- the rest, while unclickable, remain bright white requiring more scrutiny to figure out what is/isn't actually enabled at the time.

3. If CHS is open, activating Capture/View/Spell does not bring focus to CHS, though the text is captured properly.  So if you use it, then send it back to the application, then go to use it again -- you'll have to give focus to the CHS window manually.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Internet Explorer 7 BETA 2 - Publically Available

« on: February 01, 2006, 05:01 PM »

Regarding the UI / features, blatant imitation is par for the course, Microsoft are pretty good at it. However, claiming Firefox as precedent is quite funny — it was originally designed to imitate IE

-nontroppo (February 01, 2006, 01:16 PM)

Indeed! -- Irony.  Firefox looked not unlike IE, now IE looks not unlike Firefox . . . perhaps that means IE looks more like IE?

1100

Best E-mail Client / Re: The Bat! (Some constructive criticism)

« on: February 01, 2006, 04:59 PM »

I don't necessarily know all the advantages to the microed as far as efficiency and such things are concerned but when I started using TB it was -the- editor and I've used it since.  It's quick and responsive, that's always nice -- and I love how it reflows text -- I've always had it set with "persistent" selections, automatically reflowing with full justify.

The truth is, though I'm rather comfortable with these settings, they're not of the importance they once were.  When Microed was in its prime, it was common for mail clients to have trouble with long lines--sometimes reading, but at the very least with replies having ugly broken lines.  Microed rose to the occasion, elegantly wrapping incoming and outgoing mail and was/is fully capable of seamlessly reflowing quoted/forwarded text.  Things are handled more elgantly by other mail editors now than they once were, making MicroEd less important, I suppose--but I still have yet to find an editor that handles plain text mail more elegantly.

I've often wished they'd release Microed as a standalone text editor/notepad.  No luck there, but The Bat! does now have "Smart Bat" -- a built in notepad/calendar -- jot down notes with it and it can be used to have e-mail messages automatically sent out at certain times/dates.  Once upon a time, scheduler saved me face when I'd forget birthdays, it'd still mail them.  They'd think I remembered