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Messages - superticker [ switch to compact view ]

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26
Whenever I add a new clip via CTRL-ALT-C, and the Clipboard Help+Spell window opens, it's not always on the "New" folder as expected. It would be nice if it automatically switched to the "New" folder with this hot-key action.

I'm not so sure, however, if it should switch to the "New" folder with a CTRL-C action alone.  I'll have to think about that.  I think the switching to the "New" folder should only happen when the hot-key action grabs a new clip and presents the CHS window altogether.

There's still a bug present (from a year or so ago) in the CTRL-ALT-C hot key where the clip-capture sound is played, but the new clip isn't actually captured. The work around solution is to use a CTRL-C followed by a CTRL-ALT-C combination to capture clips and bring the CHS window up front. This work around works well.

27
Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: CHS: New Formatting Dialog
« on: October 09, 2011, 10:54 AM »
A saved preset saves/applies ALL formatting on all tabs.
I have an operational question. How can you make creating/using presets intuitive if saving a preset means saving across multiple tabs? In my mind, this design is counter intuitive. (I wonder if Steve Jobs would approve?)

Maybe you could group all the formatting operations that are commonly done together on a single tab. If that's done, then this issue is moot. This also means minimizing the number of tabs in the UI design.

28
Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: CHS: New Formatting Dialog
« on: October 09, 2011, 10:23 AM »
I think you need something in the middle. The new design has too many tabs, but the old design doesn't have enough. Maybe create just three tabs where related items are grouped together.

This also brings up another issue. If the changes you want to make require operations on two different tabs, does that now mean you have define (and execute) two separate PreFormat definitions to get all these changes?

29
Because CHS works with plain text clips, the easiest way to ... [paste the last clip as plain text], instead of pasting with the normal system CTRL+V hotkey, just bring up the CHS quickpaste menu (defaults to Ctrl+Alt+Q), and select the most recent clip (usually bound to shortcut key '1').
Just to clarify, the MS Windows clipboard works independently from CHS and preserves all text formatting. So what you're doing above is washing the clip through CHS to sanitize out the text formatting otherwise saved in the Windows clipboard. That converts it to plain text.

When I first started using CHS, I mistakenly thought the Windows clipboard and the CHS clipboard were the same; they are not.

30
This is why solid state drives are purchased primarily for read applications (e.g. a web server) and not write applications (e.g. a database server). The solid state drive will really speed up any read-application heavy work.
I can assure you that today's solid-state drives are purchased for write-intensive applications as well, and they really do shine there compared to magnetic storage drives too :) - the management firmware doesn't "just" do remapping to reduce wear & tear, they also stripe the data across flash channels to achieve higher speed.

But there's that detail with pendrives vs. sata devices again.
It might be the SATA drives use DRAM (with battery backup) rather than flash; otherwise, you would have a really high failure rate in write intensive applications. I do know the SATA solid-state drives fail much more than their mechanical counter parts, and they fail without warning. That seems odd to me for a flash failure, but it would make sense in a DRAM design if the battery backup suddenly failed.

Come to think about it, it makes more sense to use DRAM over flash in a SATA drive design just because flash write speeds are so slow and their write times can be somewhat non-deterministic because of the MM firmware execution involved.

31
No wonder that random-writes are slow,...
Writes are slow in flash memory for important reasons. For today's flash, you can only write in the same physical memory location 15,000 times before that location will fail (because of a silicon metal state change). (That number was 10,000 times about 6 years ago.) So to prevent writing in the same location all the time, there's memory management (MM) firmware to map the writes evenly across the entire physical address space. So you need to factor the execution time of that MM firmware into the write speed.

This is why solid state drives are purchased primarily for read applications (e.g. a web server) and not write applications (e.g. a database server). The solid state drive will really speed up any read-application heavy work.

32
Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: No html / wysiwyg support?
« on: August 02, 2011, 08:22 AM »
I'll try to add more formats like html/rtf later this year.
I wish the desktop version of The Form Letter Machine had an XML format so I could import data from the web version. Actually, with an XML format, one could convert to any other format (like HTML) or XML schema (like RSS). And since Windows Vista, Windows is able to compress those verbose XML files nicely.

33
Just three questions:
  • How is the new image features for Clipboard Help+Spell going to be any different from Screenshot Captor?
  • Would it make more sense to enhance Screenshot Captor so it would work more like Clipboard Help+Spell for images?
  • After enhancements, could COM/OLE calls be added so the two programs could work seamlessly together to manage images?

34
... ready to add image support to Clipboard Help+Spell, iff it's something enough people really want.

There are two different problems here: (1) Image capture and (2) image archiving/photo album. I would start by creating an image photo album program (with plugins for the different image formats), then add image capture to it later.  I would leave Clipboard Help+Spell out of it.

Another approach would involve changing the name of Clipboard Help+Spell to something with "image clip" in it, then temporarily add the feature only to spin the feature off later into an image archiving program. But this seems like an awkward approach to me.

At any rate, you can always implement COM/DCOM calls (Microsoft OLE) so that both Clipboard Help+Spell and the image archiving program can talk to one another just as MS Word and MS Excel work together as a seamless solution. My only reservation is that the API for COM/OLE is so darn complicated beyond the "standard services," OPEN, PRINT, WRITE.  You almost need a Microsoft architect to design the calling sequences.

35
Instead of using your credit or debit smart card to pay with, Near Field Communications (NFC) chips are now being added to smartphones. It's estimated the new smartphones coming out at the end of 2011 (iPhone 4 maybe) will have them. The Google's Nexus S already does. Now we need to encourage PayPal to process these wireless NFC transactions.

Read about NFC chips in cell phones.

36
Living Room / Micropayments now officially supported by PayPal
« on: February 13, 2011, 01:26 AM »
PayPal now officially supports 3 types of micropayments, which include (1) one-time micropayments, (2) pay-as-you-go, and (3) subscription models. One can make payments with two clicks of a mouse without leaving the vendor's website. See this Yahoo news article for more information.

37
The Form Letter Machine / Re: Importing an XML data (tree) file
« on: November 10, 2010, 02:02 PM »
... nervous about using the web technology in the desktop version, but on the other hand there are lots of neat things you can do with the web version that would be nice to bring into desktop version, and i really don't want to be maintaining two separate systems.  Having a single shared data and rendering system just seems more sensible ...
I would maintain a single source-code base regardless of what you do.

There are two very different options:
1) There are some tools that will turn a desktop application into a web application. They work okay, but you have to install a special run-time library.

2) Since most people already have the Java virtual machine installed, it may make more sense to just use Java coding for everything. The Web side can do everything in Java applets or beans. And Java has a nice database facility to work from. My only concern is:

2a) Java applications execute very slowly.
2b) I'm not sure where Java is going now that Oracle owns it.

38
The Form Letter Machine / Re: Importing an XML data (tree) file
« on: November 10, 2010, 01:16 PM »
tflm doesn't support xml import (yet).... importing xml back into the form letter machine is more troublesome...
Most SQL interfaces/databases can go either way. I'm not sure why the database for TFLM would be different.

... and there is a question of whether i should re-write a Form Letter Machine 2 from scratch, rather than try to improve it around the edges.
So what are the issues surrounding this question? What's wrong with the current design for extensibility, and in what way would a new design architecture be more extensible?

Were you going to switch to a different SQL database that supports XML imports/exports in both directions? Would this new SQL database also be used in other DonotationCoder applications (including JavaScript Web 2.0 apps) enabling collaboration? (Did some users request groupware features?)

The current program works well for my needs.

39
The Form Letter Machine / Importing an XML data (tree) file
« on: November 10, 2010, 10:57 AM »
I needed to make some global spelling changes in one of my Form Letter Machine data files.  So I exported it as an XML file and made the global substitutions in my XML editor. Now I'm trying to figure out how to import the edited XML file back into The Form Letter Machine. The Form Letter Machine seems to open with the old binary data file even when I click on the newly edited XML data file. How do I import the newly edited XML file?

40
PayPal is going to introduce a new, low-cost, micropayment service. This would allow making small payments to DonationCoder instead of using DonationCredits as it does now. Yahoo news article: PayPal introduces micropayment service

Honestly, I don't mind using DonationCredits. I usually buy some (say $25 worth) when I want to donate for a new software program I'm using. I give $20 for the program, and I keep the other $5 for future individual donations.

I wonder if the PayPal micropayment service would be more popular than the DonationCredits that DonationCoder uses now? Not everyone uses PayPal, although many people do.

Screenshot - 8_13_2010 , 4_16_20 PM_thumb.png

41
The Form Letter Machine / Re: Choosing the right XML export schema
« on: November 21, 2009, 01:54 AM »
can you try to explain this a little more to me
The goal here is to export an RSS 2.0 "event" feed (XML output) of upcoming events. A second goal is to export an hCalendar microformat output (XHTML/CSS output) that can be posted on the event calendar page of a website.

To accomplish this, the top folder level must define different events with required local variables like %date%, %time% (required for hCalendar) as well as local user-defined variables such as %location%, %price%, etc. for a given event.  A create-event macro can be use to create a new event at the root level and define its local variables.

A check box on each event folder (root level) can indicate if this event is active or inactive (pasted).  Only active events will be included in the exports. (Alternatively, it might be nice to group similar events together in root-level folders instead.  In this case, the event-level folders are just below the root-level folders.)

The subfolders in each event folder will work exactly like TFLM does today.  The only change is that local variable values (for a given event) take precedence over TFLM global variable values when they are resolved in the subfolders.

It would also be nice if the exported formats had the events sorted using the local event variable %date% and %time% as the sort keys.

Does this help make the proposed RSS Writer and microformat hCalendar Writer much clearer?  Did you need references?  I'm doing something like this today with the current TFLM, but without the hypertext tags that the RSS and hCalendar exports would include. I can send you that TFLM event tree if you like.

42
The Form Letter Machine / Choosing the right XML export schema
« on: November 19, 2009, 05:22 PM »
It would be great if The Form Letter Machine supported an XML schema export in either RSS 2.0 or iCalendar for online publishing of events listings.  The problem with some of these schemas is that it would be nice to extend them.  For example, some events (e.g. dances) have "locations" and "prices", but that's not part of the standard iCalendar or RSS 2.0 schema.  Those would be user-defined fields to extend these schemas.

So let's add a "create event" macro that allows a couple user defined variable fields.  The main body of each event can then be managed like TFLM would normally do (check boxes and radio buttons), but local event variables like %date%, %time%, %location%, %price% would be resolved independently for each event.  There should also be a check box to include/exclude each current/outdated event independently.

On XML export, either an RSS 2.0 or iCalendar feed can be created for the checked (enabled) events.  In addition, please include an hCalendar export, supporting microformats, that can be directly posted to a web page.

Perhaps the name of TFLM should be changed to "Extensible RSS Writer".  If there's already a product that can do this selectively like TFLM does, please post its URL.

-----

"Mini" Help & Manual application:  There's a mutually exclusive suggestion--unfortunately.  It might be desirable to employ a very rich XML schema to store TFLM's raw data.  Then its data file could be edited by other high-end tools such as Help & Manual, which uses the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) XML schema for technical documentation.  Unfortunately, this approach is an overkill for most users, and you would then need to employ an XSLT translation script to convert the DITA schema to RSS (or something) to make it usable for most people like Help & Manual does.

43
Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: AntispamSniper For The Bat!
« on: November 17, 2009, 04:53 PM »
The advanced settings, e.g. RegExp based rules, are useful for those who receive hundreds ... of spam messages every day. Using the customized set of rules it is possible to block most of spam on the server ....
Supporting regexp is very important when configuration a spam scanner for automatic deletion. With any other method, you can have false positives. But a skilled person that understands the mechanics of e-mail headers (and regexp's) can craft a regexp looking for a particular spammer's signature method of hiding his return path in the header. In these cases, you can safely delete his spam.

Regexp's can work other ways. For example, I use the regexp
regexp{  Date:[^+-]+(\+[01].|-.[0-29]).0  }
to test for foreign time zones like +0100. Time zones in the US run between -0400 and -0800 generally. Of course, not all foreign email is spam, so this needs to be ANDed with other rules.

44
Did you see the new online version (www.tfdocs.com)?
I haven't looked at it yet, but I will. So the main idea with the online version is to collaborate with others on building a knowledge tree of answers?

Now that both web and desktop applications support XML export, perhaps the XML format should be the new native (default) application format as it is for MS Excel 2007.  If so, that brings us to a new issue.

Microsoft introduced XPF in Windows Vista to compress XML files into an object-oriented binary.  That really speeds load time for Windows Vista and 7 users. I'm not sure where it leaves Windows XP users though since XML files can be very large.

45
When the contents of Form Letter Machine variables start with blanks, they are truncated.  This problem was introduced to the three latest versions of the TFLM, but doesn't appear in the earlier releases.

---------

Concerning a separate problem, if a target file name is given in the shortcut that launches the TFLM, then the program is exited without saving the output file (i.e. without using the Close button), a 0K output file is created on the disk. It would be nice if this empty file was just deleted.

46
I'm looking for an application much like RoboForm that would submit periodical events to different on-line calendars (periodicals).

It would ...
  • ... need symbolic variables like %event_date%, %event_time%, %price%, %location%, that are user defined.  There could be both application global (default values for all events, e.g. %username%) and local variables for a specific event (local defs override global).
  • ... have bookmark URL profiles for each on-line calendar page where symbolic variable data (event info) would be published out.  (This would similar to a RoboForm "custom page" using symbolic variables.  One or two "semi-global" variables might be assigned here, e.g. %site-password%.)
  • ... have a profile definition for each periodical event to be posted defining which above bookmark URLs to publish this information to (on demand).  (Sort of like a RoboForm "identity profile" for an event.)  All "local" symbolic variables would be assigned values in these event profiles.

RoboForm has a SDK for developing such an application, but I don't really have time to write one.  However, I think a RoboPublisher app would be very popular!  Does anyone know of a RoboPublisher app already around?  If so, could this RoboPublisher also the used to publish different for-sale items say on craigslist and eBay as well?

For those interested, there is an online publishing tool discussed here, but it only works for craigslist.

47
... for [V1.16.X, the user] database ... will go into the user's My Documents directory if that has been configured as the location in the program config.  For Vista, this is now default.  For XP, it still defaults to the program directory, but you can manually change it by editing ConfigDir.ini in the program directory.
So if I create the file %ProgramFiles%\TheFormLetterMachine\configdir.ini and place the string: %APPDATA%\TheFormLetterMachine inside, will that redirect the userdata directory for all Windows accounts to their respective My Documents directories?  I'm assuming it will create the require directory in My Documents if it doesn't already exist.

This feature seems to be missing in the V1.16.01 Help file.

48
... one thing you hint at ... is that this will be much more oriented to people who are managing largish size collections of forms and data....
Actually, I believe it's to one's advantage to have as few form templates as possible; otherwise, you're repeating (and maintaining) like information between templates.  I have three templates each with over 60 check boxes and radio buttons.  Perhaps I can send you a sample tree.

I also find the current design reasonable for my work.  The few suggestions I do have were discussed in the bugtracker a year ago, and they're simple mods.

Another application--totally separate from TheFormLetterMachine--would have an SQL database generate output files based on stored database fields.  I have a real need for an application that does this as well, but this is a totally different app which should have a different name (such as MS ACCESS or MS Excel).  That's really not what TheFormLetterMachine is about though.

If someone could recommend a flat-file database that can selectively convert fielded records into a formatted output file, I would really appreciate it.  I produce a monthly news digest of ballroom dance events.  Each record would be one event with fields like date, time, place, price, location.  I need to select the records relevant for the given month, and produce an output file that forms that month's digest of events.  I thought about using MS Excel's output file capability for this, but there's probably a better way using a generalized flat-file database.  Can someone please suggest one?

If the flat-file database can produce an XML output file (digest) that can be posted on the web (monthly newsletter), that would be even better.  In fact, if it can produce an XML output-file schema compatible with an RSS 2.0 feed, that would be perfect.  Then I'll just publish my monthly newsletter as an RSS feed instead.  But this is really a database problem, and not a problem for TheFormLetterMachine to attempt (which is a different application).

49
Currently, TheFormLetterMachine only allows one symbolic variable file at a time and you must choose between them.  It would be significantly better if TheFormLetterMachine operated much like a linker such that multiple object libraries are opened at once and the precedence of the library listing determines which values the overloaded symbolic variables would take.  For example, consider overloading the printf() symbol in debug.obj:

$ LINK main.obj,debug.obj,subroutines.obj > main.exe

would produce a main.exe load module (executable) with additional printf() debugging behavior for tracing the program's progress.  In contrast, if we reversed the debug.obj and subroutines.obj list order, ...

$ LINK main.obj,subroutines.obj,debug.obj > main.exe

then list-order precedence would resolve the overloaded symbols by the subroutines.obj library first instead of the debug.obj library, so the main.exe result would have less debugging objects linked in with it (although non-overloaded symbols within debug.obj would still be included in main.exe).

To use an example more appropriate for TheFormLetterMachine, say a computer scientist is looking for a job in either the graphics, database, or networking fields.  When a recruiter responds to his job ads, he would respond with a precedence listings:

database.var,graphics.var,network.var,general.var --> for database job inquiries
network.var,graphics.var,database.var,general.var --> for networking job inquiries

This means that the precedence list (of overloaded symbols) will need to be juggled for each e-mail response, so there needs to be a "quickie" drag-and-drop GUI to juggle the precedence list each time.  In addition, the command line should accept a var-file list, such that a Windows shortcut can define a given precedence listing.

My only reservations with this approach is that some end users may not understand the concept of "precedence" and "overloading", although they could still use TheFormLetterMachine the "old" way without this understanding.  However, if they wanted to become power users, then they would need to understand these concepts.

50
There's been some talk of re-organizing the form letter machine user interface in a more dramatic way, which i think is probably needed, and i think we should revisit these issues then.
Well, this fix isn't that critical.  Perhaps your time would be better spent on re-organizing the GUI instead.  So, to start a new thread, what's wrong with the current GUI and how is the new GUI design going to be better?

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