Messages

1101

Living Room / Re: cool or fool - microsoft's scalable fabric

« on: February 01, 2006, 04:41 PM »

So far, Opera is the only application I can get to resize.  The Bat! won't minimize at all with it active and other applications seem to bahave as they normally would.  Something must be making it unhappy.  Maybe it only likes programs launched after it?

1102

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

« on: February 01, 2006, 06:52 AM »

Yep, seems as good a time as any to pick it up again.  Particularly cool is their new "voyager" that comes with professional edition--so you can run TB from a removable flash drive.

It's not handled in the same way as Pegasus, but TB does know a signature from a template -- though its' all handled through the template system.  It's not immediately obvious how to do it, but it's not too tough and really powerful if you want to get into the macros one of these days.

Here's what you do to simply toggle signatures -- go to options > quick templates
Now, click new.  First type %ISSIGNATURE in there and hit enter. Under that, put your signature as you want it.  You can create as many signatures as you'd like in this way.

What the %ISSIGNATURE macro does is tell it that this isn't a message template but, rather, just a signature.  When selected, it will do one of two things -- if you already have a proper sig delimiter in your message (-- ), it will replace everything under it with the quicktemplate you just applied.  If you do not have a sig delimiter then it will append one and your sig text to the bottom of your e-mail message.

So, for example, you could automatically include your main quicktemplate signature at the bottom of your e-mail by putting %QINCLUDE="MySig" at the bottom of your message template.  You could then switch signatures as easily as utilities -> insert quick template (or ctrl+space).

1103

Living Room / Re: who here is in the WYHI club?

« on: February 01, 2006, 04:30 AM »

Yup.  Ballcap, stockin cap or fedora, depending -- the latter no so much in doors, it gets in the way.

1104

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

« on: January 31, 2006, 06:05 PM »

Is it just me or did they blatantly immitate firefox on a number of things?  The live bookmarks/rss icon not withstanding

They've definitely cleaned up their interface, freed up a long more screen space and -finally- caught up with everyone else on the tab browsing wave.

The real question withstanding is how much better its rendering engine is, it'll be interesting to see what the web gurus with time to test, test test have to say about it.  One thing I'm glad to see is it now supports alpha transparency in fully color png images -- web devs have been complaining about the absence of that for a long time.  I imagine if that's implemented they've at least fixed a few of their CSS problems, too.

1105

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

« on: January 31, 2006, 04:00 PM »

I wonder if there is a way to have the two synchronize to each other to avoid confusion.

-superboyac (January 31, 2006, 03:37 PM)

You're in luck, there is -- in the view modes, as you suspected.  You'll benefit from playing with them, but to save you the trouble I'll walk you through getting your folders squared away real quick right now.

Get the sorting etc. setup the way you want it in any of the windows/pains -- once things are perfect, right click on a column title (like date, from, etc. it doesn't matter what one) and select "save view mode to" then "<generic view mode>". (or you can give it your own name, doesn't matter.  To make sure that one is used by all the folders, click view -> global view mode -> manage view modes.  Select your preferred view mode, select 'use by' and then check all the folders you want to display with that view mode.  Probably most of them, but not trash, sent or drafts.  Once that's done, any edit you make to that view mode will reflect on all the folders that use it.  Handy.  This is a fairly new feature, back in the old days we had to configure each folder/view manually.  It was painful.[/quote]

You can see how it would confuse a newbie to sort the list in the main window, and then open up an indivdual message and see that it is sorted differently.

Yeah, absolutely -- and the view modes aren't immediately obvious/transparent for those who weren't betting testing them while they were being developed.  Unless you're there for the feature announcement, it's easy to miss the feature when there are as many as there are in TB!

So that's where the real users are, eh?  I'll have to check out the list.  But I don't want to get that heavily involved yet.  I'm already on too many lists as it is.  Is there a webpage where you can search the archives of the discussion list?  As for templates, I haven't got into them too much besides some simple tweaking of the general reply, new message, etc. templates.

Yeah, it's a fairly high-volume list, but I'll tell you what--there are few, if any, questions that go unanswered there.  The archives are here:
http://[email protected]/

Another cool thing, related to the templates, "cookie" text -- you can specify an external file or copy/paste into the cookie field in your account settings -- using the cookie in your signature %cookie% will print a random line from that file! So you can have a random quote in your message.  Very cool.

So, I'm curious, what do you use for email now?  Webmail?  Gmail?  For someone who seems to have spent so much time with something like the Bat, I find it surprising that you'd move away to something else.

I lost all my TB data/settings -- everything -- with my hard drive and just haven't had the time or energy to set it up again to where I'm 'happy'.  Installation is easy, but getting all the templates and everything else the way I want them, filters, etc. -- lot of work.  Talking about it though has got me thinking mourning time might be over, time to pick it up again.  I certainly didn't 'move away', I was pushed away There's nothing out there with a better featureset.  Not that I've seen, anyway.  Presently I'm using gmail and Opera's built in client. Weak

1106

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

« on: January 31, 2006, 03:06 PM »

Allen, thank you.  You really know the program well!

-superboyac (January 31, 2006, 10:19 AM)

Spent quite a few years in it -- it's come a long way, in terms of usability, if you can believe it.

Hmmm...I really can't find what you are talking about.  Maybe it's different for the newer versions of the Bat or something, but I can't find any popup message list, nor can I find where the view settings are that control the next/previous settings.  I see where the "view modes" are, but changing the default sorting there doesn't seem to affect how the next/previous buttons work.  I'm having such a hard time with this.  I posted this issue in the Bat forum like 3 or 4 separate times, and no one has suggested a thing.  I can't figure it out.  If you can look into it more, I'd really appreciate it.  My problem is that I'll open a message, and I know how the list is sorted (because I did it, obviously), but then I'll click next/previous, and I'll get lost because the buttons ignore my sorting method.  I mean, it shouldn't be this hard to simply go down and read messages as I've sorted them.

Ok, in my copy here clicking follow next makes it move to the next message in the message list -- next being down.  Previous makes it move to the previous, previous being up.  So if I sort chronologically by date with older messages on the top and newer messages on the bottom, pressing follow next will take me to the next message by date.  If I reverse that sort, putting new messages on top, the next message will be the older one.  The follow buttons don't actually follow date, necessarily.  They follow your message list from top to bottom and back based on your sorting order.  If you're reading the messages in folder view (click on a message in the main window and it pops up in folder view) you may not see a list of messages, instead you'll see only the message you're viewing.  To view the message list go to view -> show message list.  See if it is following the order that folder is sorted by -- if so, you can just change the order by clicking the column you want once or twice to insure it's pointing the messages in the right order.  Remember, it'll read top to bottom when you're following.  If I'm misunderstanding or not being clear, we can exchange some screenshots or something.  There's some good software for that right here on this website

Of course, I'm aware of the FAQ and the forum.  I've posted there a few times already.  But it's a little inconvenient to have to search forums to find the explanations to settings and options in the program.  I really feel that the help file should cover that.  Forums are more for ideas and problems that the developers couldn't anticipate.

The help file should cover a lot of things it doesn't, but it's always been an afterthought to the developers -- and it shows.  People tend to often get frustrated with rit's development process -- at least at the end of the day, there's a good application in hand though.  As for the forum, I have no idea -- never been there.  I was actually talking about the e-mail discussion list 'TBUDL' -- which is where the real Bat geeks hang out.  Of course, if I can answer your questions I'm more than happy to--not trying to chase you there.  I'm just saying, I'm not the -best- man for the job.  I'm a little rusty, haven't used TB in a while.  Although you're making me strongly consider it again, I miss it.  You should see what you can do with the reply templates with a little regex/tweaking

1107

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

« on: January 31, 2006, 07:22 AM »

The Bat really is the most powerful email client available and I'd like to do what I can to further make it the best and most complete email client available. 

-superboyac (January 30, 2006, 10:47 PM)

It truly is.  I used it from version 1.x through early 3.x until after I lost years of e-mail and configurations that I didn't have backed up (I know, I know, backup...).  I just haven't been willing to go through trying to start from scratch, not yet anyway.  I keep my license key current just in case, though.   If you're willing to spend some time learning her ins and outs, there's nearly nothing you can't do.  The documentation is clearly lacking, but The Bat! has a very active and knowledgeable e-mail discussion list -- you'd do well to check it out.  Also, you might want to repost this -- the developers do read and comment on the lists.

(1)  There are two buttons (Follow Next/Previous) and what they do is use the date of the email to go to the next/previous email in the folder.  I find this confusing because "Next" really means the next oldest, and "Previous" means the previous newest email.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I am pretty sure that is controlled by the sort order.  When you're viewing a message, you can view the message list by clicking view > message list or something to that effect.  Give you a look at how they're sorted.  I may be wrong, but I believe you can have a separate folder view setting for the main message list and for the popup message list display.  That may be why your results are somewhat unexpected? Conflicting view settings?

Hotkeys:  programs this powerful generally have a sizable amount of keyboard shortcuts (hotkeys).  The Bat is no different.  However, most of the hotkeys are preassigned and cannot be changed (except for a handful of "System" hotkeys).  I'm of the opinion, that they should allow the user to make the hotkeys fit their needs.  No big deal, but why not?

Fortunately for you, you're totally wrong on this point It's not immediately obvious, but try this: Right click on your toolbar, select "customize".  Here, you can modify any of the toolbars and/or menus in TB, including the assigning of hotkeys/shortcuts.

Selective quoting in replies.  This is a feature I got used to in Pegasus.  When you reply to a message, typically the entire message gets quoted using the ">" symbol.

Actually, TB does support this.  It's in the right click context menu under Message, i think.  Should be . . . F4 to quote selected text. Maybe. I know the feature is there, anyway.

(4) The Help file:

The help file has been a source of nagging for TB users for as long as I can remember -- almost a decade.  While they've made some strides in recent years to update the help file, it still falls short.  I don't know if they'll ever catch up.   There are a few user made help sites and the mailing list -- those are what have kept the bat going -- it can be a bit daunting without a little help and those sources do help, especially for getting a handle on the more advanced features.

Here is an excellent source for TB related information, including the TBUDL mailing list.
http://www.silversto...om/thebat/tbfaq.html

1108

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

« on: January 31, 2006, 05:04 AM »

Just a warning, I posted a copy of that to the 1.0 thread, which I hadn't found prior to now

1109

fSekrit / Re: Version 1.0

« on: January 31, 2006, 05:02 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.

Edit: Yup, window size remembering is working nicely.  I forgot to move one of the files to 1.0

1110

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.

1111

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

« on: January 30, 2006, 08:55 PM »

http://rssmore.com/
http://www.nuparadig...Toys/RssScreensaver/
http://www.cool-scre...rs.com/onlinews.html


I haven't tried any of them, yet -- rssmore looks the most promising to me, though.

1112

Unfinished Requests / Re: IDEA: Text Editor just for text (stay with me)

« on: January 30, 2006, 03:55 PM »

TED Editor is a text editor in the truest sense of the word. Might be just what you're looking for.
http://jsimlo.sk/notepad/

And there's ewriter, a program I've always loved simply because of the way the auther talks about it.  In reality, it's not quite as eloquent as its description, but . . . it's a nice description.
http://home.earthlin...acorioso/ew_main.htm

1113

General Software Discussion / Re: Most under-rated media player?

« on: January 30, 2006, 11:33 AM »

I started using 'player' when back before "gracenote" was gracenote -- and it was the best of the free, non-winamp players that supported CDDB/gracenote.  When digital music became a thing and he released vuplayer, I switched to that.  It does everything I need, is nice and small and the price is right

http://vuplayer.com

1114

General Software Discussion / Re: Badware

« on: January 30, 2006, 11:27 AM »

I see commercials for stop-sign on tv all the time, these two people with bad accecents talking about worms, protection and how scarry the interwebs are  I never download anything I see on tv, including AOL! 

1115

Living Room / Re: TyperA - test your typing skills

« on: January 30, 2006, 09:16 AM »

I've just got a plain jane keyboard that came with cheap emachines computer I've been coding web pages/scripts for a few years though. (What's your excuse, mouser?

Actually I've slowed down a good bit over the last few years.

1116

Living Room / Re: TyperA - test your typing skills

« on: January 30, 2006, 07:17 AM »

Your score: 425 keys per minute ~ 85 words per minute
Language/mode: en
Ranking: That was fast - you can still improve, though.
Comparison: 11% of registered TyperA users using this language have typed a better result; 89% have a lower or equal result.

1117

Post New Requests Here / Re: Notes Snippet organizer

« on: January 30, 2006, 06:51 AM »

If you were an Opera user, you'd have that built right into your browser from the git-go

Most clipboard enhancers basically do what you're looking for -- ClipMate is the most robust out there--storing everything from text to viewable html to images.  AceText is good for text-only operations -- and there's also Clipboard Help + Spell, developed by Mouser.

You might also want to consider a bookmarking service like spurl.net -- Bookmarks are stored in a hierarchal structure, can also have tags/keywords assigned, you can save a comment/description and snippet of the website in question and, with the exception of huge pages, it automatically saves a copy of the page so you can full-search text and veiw the page even if the actual page ceases to exist.  The downside to that is it wouldn't help you with text you wanted to jot down that wasn't associated with a website.

1118

ContextMenu Commander / Re: ContextMenu Commander

« on: January 29, 2006, 07:14 AM »

I'm a big fan of the perhaps-abandonware "rcFTP" program -- it's a tiny one-way ftp program designed to integrate into the right click menu.  First thing you do with it is plug in your ftp server login info and add folders you'll want to send files to on those servers.  Once that's setup, uploading a file is as simple as right click -> send to -> rcFTP -- then you select the server and folder you want from the dropdowns and send it.  Simple on the fly ftp.

1119

Living Room / Re: caffeine free week - who wants to join me?

« on: January 28, 2006, 03:20 PM »

I think I'd die if I removed even one of my pots of coffee a day. . .

1120

Find And Run Robot / Re: macros

« on: January 28, 2006, 02:21 PM »

The problem for me with the toolbar is that brings my mouse into the equation.  You're a good mouse. Input device mouse, not so much. Tried finding other threads on it, but was looking for a subject that leant itself a bit more to my search query I suppose.  I'll have to find that thread and see where the discussion is going.

1121

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.

1122

General Software Discussion / Re: Most under-rated media player?

« on: January 28, 2006, 01:22 PM »

I'm partial to VU Player, myself -- largely unknown and definitely underrated -- but might have to give your baby there a try.

1123

General Software Discussion / Re: Programs That Don't Do Anything..

« on: January 28, 2006, 12:57 PM »

Reminds me of the Vegitales song -- "We are the pirates who don't do anything . . ." They ought to modify it and use it as a theme song.

(My son is my excuse for knowing vegitales songs 

1124

General Software Discussion / Re: ThePrawn!

« on: January 28, 2006, 12:55 PM »

It's prior versions were only moderately useful -- it choked with really advanced regexes and certain code and such.  My biggest problem was that I was trying to make it portable in case there was any demand for, and I decided to share, the source.  I finally gave up on portability, at least for the moment,  so it only runs if magic_quotes_gpc are disabled on the php server.  That should be a relatively easy fix if I get around to it, though.  So, I -think- everything is in order, unless of course some regex buffs can find error.  At least the obvious ones are out of the way now.

1125

Living Room / Re: Finally a DonationCoder.com License Key for Time Travelers..

« on: January 28, 2006, 12:27 PM »

I totally agree with you, jgpaiva.  I couldn't help myself from jumping on that cheap pun, though