Sometime on Tuesday night, my time, mouser had a telephone conversation with his server administrator regarding the availability of Circle Dock's executable files hosted by DonationCoder and he instructed his administrator to remove those files. At the same time, he amened my pinned message informing people of the latest version and providing the download links to read "All downloads suspended until further notice". However, his server administrator obviously couldn't be bothered to check which of the various files stored on the dcmembers site were publicly available or were related to the current release of Circle Dock and which files were not. He simply scrubbed my entire space clean, removing ALL files in the process.

Not only did he remove the current (1.5.6) 32-bit and 64-bit executables, he also removed the only backup copy of the source code, some private files pertinent only to "Team Circle Dock", but also two programs that I had recently written and made freely available - "CleanDesktop" and "WallpaperChanger". He also deleted the "live help" section which contains the very latest help and is automatically loaded by a constituent of Circle Dock. These, like almost all the files deleted, were my original work and my sole copyright.

Needless to say I was only informed AFTER THE EVENT. It is fortunate that both gentlemen concerned are not UK-based for if they were, I would be filing a complaint with the Police under the Computer Misuse Act, 1998.

To add insult to injury, he concludes his message to me with the following words "it's not such a horrible thing if the downloads are down for a week."

There is no excuse for way mouser or his server administrator have behaved. Had they requested me to remove those files, I would have done so immediately. Instead they have acted in a rude and overbearing manner and, I believe, it was a thinly veiled attempt to get me to continue hemorrhaging financially by simply making all future versions open source - but so long as they're not hosted by DonationCoder (they wanted the downloads off their servers, remember) - in his words "if you do decide to release the source code for all of your additions and modifications to circle dock, it would be a joyous cause for celebration and would be a happy outcome for dc users." Yes, at my expense.

I've resigned as a moderator of this site as I wish to have no further part in an operation that encourages you one minute and then pulls the rug from beneath you. I can not and will not remain a member of a site such as this which arbitrarily and without warning deletes many months of work. I've also asked/told mouser to return all $192.79 which has been donated to me since September of last year to those who so kindly donated. If you are one of those, please don't think I'm ungrateful but I don't think it is at all appropriate for me to receive those credits under the circumstances. And please, do make sure he returns the money to you - as far as I am concerned neither he nor this site should benefit from unrepaid donations.

There are some good people on this site and many of them have made themselves known in this corner of DonationCoder only quite recently and I wish to thank all of you for your input into recent threads regarding the GPL and the future of the Circle Dock program. Thank you one and all and goodbye.




Mark

Touchscreen project? There was a touchscreen project?!!  :D

Circle Dock works perfectly on touchscreens. However, the Sarge is referring to the possibility of adding gesturing support similar to trackpads found on more recent laptops and netbooks.

There are two different touchscreen technologies: the first is "resistive-effect" which has been around for almost 30 years and is the type most commonly used in ATM machines. Whilst robust, it's not terribly accurate. A much more recent technology is "capacitive-effect" is far more pixel-accurate and this is used for screens found on Smartphones, iPads and similar devices.

The touchscreen referred to uses the older resistive-effect technology and emulates mouse movements and actions involving the left mouse button. A gesture on such a device would be received as a left mouse button down, a movement and then left mouse button up. Circle Dock would need to build a memory map of all cursor movements, from the moment the mouse's left button was pressed down until it was released, and then trace all the coordinates in order to interpret the gesture. The amount of code required to do that - and the overhead in time and resources - would have been substantial and for little gain since very few people would use CD in that way.




Mark

Icon Orbit

Orbit Dock

OrbiDock

-wraith808 (August 05, 2010, 09:21 PM)

Orbit Dock was a fore-runner to Circle Dock and inspired Eric Wong to design his program. In fact, his (C# coded) releases all included DLLs (compiled libraries) taken straight from Orbit Dock. My v1 Release was the first Circle Dock release that doesn't include any of that code.

Circle Dock does use one or two third-party libraries but we have assiduously checked their licenses to see if there're any restrictions about their usage in commercial or non-commercial software. There are no such restrictions.

Circle Dock's new name might be in Welsh: "Cylch Penfro" (Circle Dock), "Ddoc Cylch" (Dock of Circles) and "Cylch Doc" (Circle Dock) are all Welsh for "Circle Dock". Welsh, however, is a mutating language, hence the different forms which depend on how the name is used. The first form would be used as a 'standalone' name, the other forms would be used when the name appears in a sentence. That could be awfully confusing for users, so maybe not!



Mark