Messages

326

General Software Discussion / Re: Latest MS updates borks WinXP?

« on: August 16, 2007, 11:40 AM »

Thnaks Dirhael. I've made the change (from optin) and will see how it goes. I *swear* I changed this setting years ago (maybe it was to optin?).

-Darwin (August 16, 2007, 11:36 AM)

I'm a fellow "TLB evangelist" and have had the same explorer.exe problems a few times in the past, and what solved it then was to disable DEP...so I'm hoping it will do the same for you to If not, try checking your event log. It should be able to at least give you a clue as to what's going on.

327

General Software Discussion / Re: Latest MS updates borks WinXP?

« on: August 16, 2007, 11:26 AM »

Hmm... explorer.exe just crashed again, but recovered itself. It happened when I was navigating TrueLaunchBar links... I wonder if there is a connection to the problem I had yesterday? Over the last two days I've noticed the display of TLB gettings messed up and freezing for brief periods of time. Perhaps I should contact the developer. Well, at least post in the user forum. Right, off to do that now.

-Darwin (August 16, 2007, 10:46 AM)

I would try to disable DEP, if that's enabled on your system (which it should be by default, provided you have a relatively updated PC). To do this, open your C:\boot.ini (might be read-only, so right-click, properties and remove that checkmark) and add the following:

[Select]

/noexecute=alwaysoff

(it might already be set to /noexecute=optin, but if so just change it to alwaysoff instead)

DEP is a quite common reason for explorer.exe crashes, and is best left disabled. In theory it should provide you with some additional security, but in the real world it just doesn't work properly on the current Windows platform.

328

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: xplorer², a powerful windows file manager and explorer replacement / alternative

« on: August 15, 2007, 12:22 PM »

Ok - much better looking, probably the vista aspect ..  but wth am I talking about.. looks.. lol, its about power! TC has a lot of power and is one of *the* best file managers for Windows.. taking that in, I'm sorry about my remarks on TC..  I obviously haven't gotten personal with it, but that was my first impression.. 

-mitzevo (August 15, 2007, 11:55 AM)

No I know, it really doesn't give a good first impression with the stock settings. It's powerful even without plugins, but most functions are hidden out of sight until you start using it for a while and check the menus etc. It also doesn't help that it's configured with a ugly MS sans serif bold font by default...in fact, that's the very first thing I change after I install it as I think it's hideous!
That said, you can be thankful that you didn't install the pre-7 versions, as they looked awful without tweaking the interface (IMO at least)

329

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: xplorer², a powerful windows file manager and explorer replacement / alternative

« on: August 15, 2007, 11:37 AM »

Well today I tried TC.. I wasn't impressed.. The interface resembles Win 3.1 - some thing historical.
Sure, it has a lot of followers, and is probably very fast and powerful, but still, not my cup of hot chocolate..

I had a quick look at the options/functions/features of TC.. x² seems to cover most of them that I saw

TC looks pretty awful  compared to x², but of course never judge a book by its cover.. nor a program by it's interface (in most cases..)

Check the following post to see how x², DOpus and TC compare with a few things:
xplorer² blog: objectively superior file manager?

-mitzevo (August 15, 2007, 03:01 AM)

Hey, don't you come here calling my TC awful!

...seriously though, it's an acquired taste. I've always loved it for its power, which applications like X^2 and indeed most other file managers never even comes close to. Where's all that power you ask? In the plugins of course. I don't think there's anything besides making me a cup of coffee that there isn't a plugin for. It's not my primary file manager, as I do prefer to use Dopus most of the time. When I need some special tasks done however, it really is the right tool for the task. It is also a keyboard users dream come true which is nice

So, back to the ugly thing, here's my custom setup and I don't think it looks all that bad...

330

General Software Discussion / Re: Google now includes StarOffice as a free download!

« on: August 14, 2007, 08:36 AM »

I used to have StarOffice 8 installed (academic licensing meant I got to use it for free) and it is a lot more polished that OpenOffice.org  (I had an early version of OO.org 2 installed previously). The extra fonts make a difference - one of the things that you are "paying" for is the technology for font smoothing, which makes everything look better. Compatibility with MS Office docs seemed better to me too. In the end, having Office 2003 Pro, I coudn't see the point of keeping StarOffice installed, but I was impressed. Even if I had to pay for it (what is it now - $70 or so) I would as I think it is well worth it.

PS Dirhael posted while I was typing the above - if you qualify for StarOffice academic licensing and are able to download direct from Sun, the Google Toolbar is not an issue.

SO: if you qualify for academic licensing (and their conditions are liberal and they don't make you go through any hoops to prove that you qualify) the regular download from Sun is an EXCELLENT alternative to MS Office and WordPerfect Office.

EDIT: corrected several embarrassing spelling mistakes 

-Darwin (August 14, 2007, 08:02 AM)

Thanks for the info, I didn't know they offered academic licenses just like that. Don't think it'll make me switch from MS Office just yet as I still find both StarOffice & OOo a bit to slow, and the spreadsheet application isn't worth much if you're working with larger documents. Still, it's a great product overall and at a fraction of the cost of a Office license (which is priced out of this world, just like Adobe's programs).

331

General Software Discussion / Re: firefox vs. opera: FF is slow when hitting 'back', opera just uses cache

« on: August 14, 2007, 08:25 AM »

Opera are trying to "simplify" the UI and so options like this are only available via editing the site prefs INI file manually. To do this:

1) In Opera, make a site-specific prefs entry for SiteX (context-menu > Edit site preferences...).
2) Go to your profile directory (look in opera:about to se where it is) and find override.ini. Open it in an editor of your choice.
3) Find the site you added, and append:

User Prefs|History Navigation Mode=3

to that entry, for example:

[Select]

[ebay.co.uk]
User Prefs|Ignore Unrequested Popups=1
User Prefs|Accept Cookies Session Only=0
User Prefs|Local CSS File=C:\Documents and Settings\styles\ebay.css
User Prefs|User JavaScript=0
User Prefs|Always Load User JavaScript=0
User Prefs|Enable Referrer=1
User Agent|Spoof UserAgent ID=1
User Prefs|History Navigation Mode=3

In this example, this forces Opera to use fast navigation for ebay.co.uk - so i ensure I get lightning fast navigation there no matter what my default global setting is :-) Setting the number to 1 uses the compatible heuristic - which I use for [mail.google.com]. I also add some personal modifications to the CSS (change link colours and fonts to my liking), turn off my UserJS (aka greasemonkey) scripts as I don't use them for EBay, and allow EBay to set permanent cookies (my default sets all cookies as session only). thos last options are fully available via the UI. Site-specific preferences is such a fantastic feature, and it is coming to Firefox too in V3 :-)

-nontroppo (August 14, 2007, 08:18 AM)

Yeah I know, I use site specific preferences for UserJS & CSS all the time...but I did not know that I could set the navigation mode there as well. Thanks a lot for the info, it should come in handy! I use mode 3 all the time, but as you briefly mentioned already, some sites do need mode 1 to function correctly and it always seemed strange having to change this option globally when I needed it. I probably should have looked this up on your great Opera wiki before asking though, as I'm sure there's some info on it already

332

General Software Discussion / Re: firefox vs. opera: FF is slow when hitting 'back', opera just uses cache

« on: August 14, 2007, 08:03 AM »

Note, Opera has slowed down its RAM cache a bit in recent builds for sites who use onUnload Javascript and some other heuristic triggers (to allow AJAX history navigation to work etc). You can regain Opera's phenomenal speed by setting:

opera:config#UserPrefs|HistoryNavigationMode to 3

Then, using Site specific preferences you can enable compatible mode only for sites like GMail that benefit from it.

Firefox's recent history cache is still both slower and much more memory hungry than Opera's. I've tested this by opening Google Image Searches for Picasso, Magritte and Dali (20 images per page). Then navigation through ten pages (thus 200 images per tab and 600 images total). Firefox fails after 5 (default settings) back navigations in total. Opera can render *all* of the 30 pages and 600 images immediately using some 40% less RAM!

kimchii — that Proxo filter will not stop Firefox from having to rerender web pages. You probably have Fastback enabled in Firefox. Your filter *will* stop sites forcing you to revalidate HTTP resources, though will make forums etc not automatically update unless overridden.

-nontroppo (August 13, 2007, 04:37 PM)

I never found out how to enable the new history nav mode on a site-per-site basis. Care to enlighten a fellow Opera user?

333

General Software Discussion / Re: Google now includes StarOffice as a free download!

« on: August 14, 2007, 07:56 AM »

It also includes a google toolbar inside all of the office applications which I think doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I managed to get rid of it, but then I discovered that they even included an option to search google for the selected word when doing a spellcheck as well (as the first choice no less). While none of these things are a problem as such (we're getting it for free after all), I find it intrusive and completely unnecessary in a office suite.

334

General Software Discussion / Re: RSS Reader?

« on: August 13, 2007, 09:27 AM »

I installed Snarfer and concluded that it's not for me.

It doesn't have

1) Portability
2) Ability to star important/useful feeds for later reference.

Hope I am wrong.

-sri (August 13, 2007, 09:18 AM)

You're not wrong, it does lack those features and more. For me, it's not a problem though so I'm happy with it.

335

General Software Discussion / Re: RSS Reader?

« on: August 13, 2007, 09:13 AM »

Lately, I've become quite fond of Snarfer. I has a small memory footprint, newspaper view & a comfortable interface. It's all good

-Dirhael (August 13, 2007, 04:45 AM)

Did you try FeedReader? I like FeedReader since it's also light-weight + it's portable.

-sri (August 13, 2007, 08:15 AM)

Yes I did. FeedReader is nice, but it uses more memory (on my system at least), feels a lot slower and it also had problems when I tried to add certain feeds. I like it (especially the news bar feature), but I don't feel that it's ready to take on the job as my primary reader. Not that I'm perfectly sure that Snarfer is either though...

336

General Software Discussion / Re: RSS Reader?

« on: August 13, 2007, 04:45 AM »

Lately, I've become quite fond of Snarfer. I has a small memory footprint, newspaper view & a comfortable interface. It's all good

337

General Software Discussion / Re: Do you know a good image viewer with CMYK support ?

« on: August 11, 2007, 05:57 PM »

Ok, so I installed and tested a whole bunch of viewers to see if I could get this working for you...but it would appear to be close to impossible. Here's the result so far (all programs are the latest builds available):

• Thumbsplus 7 = No go.
• Irfanview 4 = No go.
• Wildbit Viewer 4 & 5 = No go.
• Photo-lux 3.5 = No go.
• Acdsee 9 = No go.
• Faststone Image Viewer 3.3 = No go.
• Windows Photo Gallery (Vista) = No go.

338

General Software Discussion / Re: Anyone actually use windows system restore if so,does it work.

« on: August 09, 2007, 07:41 PM »

My experience with it in the past have been that while it can help, it also creates just as many problems as it solves. Why? Simply because it isn't a complete backup/restore system. Because of this, it can leave lots of broken applications on your system it you don't install them in the default Windows folders (program files etc.).
However, if you did a restore point just before the cleaning and have made no changes to your system after that I think you should be just fine.

Personally, I'm using Rollback Rx and I'd recommend it or something like it in the future

339

General Software Discussion / Re: Top 3 programs you use

« on: August 09, 2007, 07:47 AM »

Just 3? Now that's a difficult question to answer, seeing as I always have much more than that running. Well, I'll try to answer anyway I suppose

1. Opera - For absolutely all of my browsing and e-mail needs.
2. E Text Editor - Quite possibly the best thing since sliced bread. Text editors doesn't get better than this (on Windows at least).
3. Directory Opus 9 - Don't know how I ever lived without it in the past.

There are of course other applications I use just as much, and I feel kinda bad having to leave them out of such a list

340

General Software Discussion / Re: What's your music player of choice?

« on: August 05, 2007, 12:43 PM »

I mainly use Foobar 2000. There are many reasons why this is, but the main things that always makes the other players fall short for me is:
- Replaygain is natively supported. I can't stand playing more than a few songs without this feature. WinAmp have some half-assed support for this (well it used to anyway), but it's much more difficult to use in that player + the fact that I don't like skinned interfaces.
- Speed and resource usage.
- Customization. I don't think there is much you can't get this player to do with some scripting or a plugin.

When I need a portable player, I prefer to fire up Billy. What other player can load all of my music library at around 10 000 files, provide me global hotkeys and still only use ~2-2 MB? If it had replaygain support, I'd probably never use anything else..though an option to read ID3 tags is nice every one in a while

341

General Software Discussion / Re: 12 Windows Explorer Alternatives Compared

« on: August 05, 2007, 08:47 AM »

I do know of a sure fool-proof way to make it crash though...

-Dirhael (July 29, 2007, 04:48 PM)

Can't reproduce. I'm using thumbnails on huge folders with small image files since years without any crash. Maybe one of your tile files makes trouble? You can send them to me in a zip (if that's okay).

Donald (XY's author)

-DonL (July 30, 2007, 03:02 AM)

Absolutely, I'll send them to you when I get back from my vacation. I should clarify though, this problem only happens if the images are GIF's. I have never encountered the problem with jpeg's and png's. Really appreciate you looking into such a insignificant problem, I don't think many other developers would have taken the time

-Dirhael (July 30, 2007, 04:45 AM)

My intuition was correct (but you could not find it as easily as I can from here): It is *one* pic that is truncated and throws XYplorer out of the tracks: wp_floral_931.gif

I did not fix the image but I fixed the crash. The next version will just display "Bad Image" and go on working.

Thanks for spotting this!

Don

-DonL (August 05, 2007, 01:29 AM)

No thank you for fixing the problem, and to think that you got it done it just a couple of days!

Never imagined to see a fix so soon, especially for something that most people would never have a problem with

342

General Software Discussion / Re: 12 Windows Explorer Alternatives Compared

« on: August 04, 2007, 11:14 AM »

...
Servant Salamander - Absolutely no support for unicode. It won't even let you launch files with unicode names from it! Useless for me and many others. They have been promising unicode support for what seems like forever now, but nothing has happened yet. ...

-Dirhael (July 29, 2007, 05:57 AM)

dirhael: 1st of all, i agree that Salamander's dev team have progressed very cautiously (about 10 years to move from version 1.52 to 2.5  ) but to be fair they have a whole page in their help file dedicated to explaining and using workarounds in the mean time..

Unfortunately, Unicode is not supported in Altap Salamander 2.5. We plan to support it in feature versions. Now we will describe how to deal with foreign names of files and directories. If you didn't encounter problems with names of files and directories, you can skip reading of this chapter. ...

-the help file

-lanux128 (July 30, 2007, 09:00 PM)

It's true that they do have such a page, but unfortunately none of the methods they list is a proper workaround. In fact, none of the methods would help me at all as I need more than one Asian fallback language at any one time, and using Windows Explorer is most definitely not an option.
Let's just wait and see what happens with the future releases instead

343

General Software Discussion / Re: 12 Windows Explorer Alternatives Compared

« on: August 04, 2007, 11:11 AM »

... Really appreciate you looking into such a insignificant problem, I don't think many other developers would have taken the time

-Dirhael (July 30, 2007, 04:45 AM)

A crash is not insignificant to me. Hey, I'm a developer with an attitude!

-DonL (July 30, 2007, 09:25 AM)

Hehe, good to hear I'm back from my vacation now, so as soon as I'm done uploading the archive of gif's to my server, I'll send you a mail with the link and some more detailed tests I just did to verify that the problem still exists even with the latest version.

344

General Software Discussion / Re: Some HomeSite Replacement Help?

« on: July 30, 2007, 09:54 AM »

It's just that it has fallen behind much of the competition in some areas

Could you care to explain? Things like macro recording?

I'm confident all the good shortcuts can be recreated with DirectAccess and the developers are very responsive. It's juts a lot of work, although with the upcoming command pack sharing features it should become easier.

The various visual studio editions have the right features that I would be looking at, but I'm juts not sure how well they support the html /css.
Perhaps in combination with Topstyle all the bases are covered. We're looking to move towards that because we're moving from classic asp to asp.net here at work. I love the intellisense, and topstyle has that for html/css, but a lot of alternatives just have syntax coloring which is a real miss.

-justice (July 30, 2007, 07:52 AM)

Well yes, macro recording would be one of the things it's missing. Other things include the fact that the project managment isn't all it could be, the editor itself is very inflexible when it comes to actually being able to customize it. It also really just supports HTML & CSS. Yes you can add your own keyword files, but they actually just offer you syntax colouring within html documents and not proper support for the languages by themselves.
Another important thing it needs is more advanced snippets/clips. If all you want is to paste predefined text, then the current implementation might be enough. After trying the more advanced options provided in editors like TextMate/E, Komodo and others it just isn't enough anymore. It would also be nice to see some support for version control, as it is very useful for larger projects and already present in several other editors. There are other smaller things I'd like to see improved as well, but you get the idea.

Anyway, is still is a great CSS editor but for the insane price I expect more. It may have been worth the price a few years back, but not today.

345

General Software Discussion / Re: Some HomeSite Replacement Help?

« on: July 30, 2007, 07:39 AM »

I'm using Direct Access in combination with Topstyle. Topstyle has all the great html shortcuts and css handling, and any serverside languages I add in autotexts with Direct Access, i guess it's the closest to snippets.

Now with Topstyle being semi developed again... it looks good. I don't know why Nick can't commit to editors for some reason

E does look good and there was another textmate inspired editor for windows, but can't remember the name. I just don't want to depend on unproven beta software at the moment.

-justice (July 30, 2007, 07:26 AM)

I belive the editor you're thinking of is InType. Unfortunately, it isn't really much of an editor yet. It's alpha software, you can't add bundles yet, no tabbed interface and no project management. Right now it's not much more than a pretty face.

I'm interested in seeing if Nick actually starts taking care of Topstyle again, but I'm having my doubts about anything more than bugfixes. It's a shame though, as it really is a nice program. It's just that it has fallen behind much of the competition in some areas, and it's not flexible at all if you want to work in languages other than CSS & HTML.

346

General Software Discussion / Re: Some HomeSite Replacement Help?

« on: July 30, 2007, 06:57 AM »

I would have to say that to me, it sounds like E would be a close to perfect fit. With its support for TextMate bundles, it makes developing (X)HTML (or any other language for that matter) a breeze. For instance, the CTRL+B for bold, CTRL+I for italic etc. are all there. It has a built-in bundle editor to create your own snippets and commands in seconds, so if the command you're looking for isn't there, it should be easy to add. For me personally, the command I use most frequently in xhtml when using E is to type the name of the tag, followed by ALT+< . To explain better, let's say that I typed div and then pressed [alt]+[<]. This would give me <div></div> with the cursor already placed between the opening and closing tag. It might not sound like much, but it is a real timesaver. Another really nice thing is that if you have selected some text, and press " (or <, >, ' etc.) it will wrap the text with that symbol instead of overwriting....and yet another thing is that most commands are context-sensitive. Let's say that you are working with a file containing both xhtml and PHP. In the html part of the file you then press [alt]+[enter] to get a <br />, but it you were in the PHP part it would instead give you a \n (line-break char).

There are of course many more nice things you can do (block selections in it is a real killer feature), but the ones listed above was just some of the things I didn't know I missed in previous editors until I tried it.

347

General Software Discussion / Re: 12 Windows Explorer Alternatives Compared

« on: July 30, 2007, 04:45 AM »

I do know of a sure fool-proof way to make it crash though...

-Dirhael (July 29, 2007, 04:48 PM)

Can't reproduce. I'm using thumbnails on huge folders with small image files since years without any crash. Maybe one of your tile files makes trouble? You can send them to me in a zip (if that's okay).

Donald (XY's author)

-DonL (July 30, 2007, 03:02 AM)

Absolutely, I'll send them to you when I get back from my vacation. I should clarify though, this problem only happens if the images are GIF's. I have never encountered the problem with jpeg's and png's. Really appreciate you looking into such a insignificant problem, I don't think many other developers would have taken the time

348

General Software Discussion / Re: 12 Windows Explorer Alternatives Compared

« on: July 29, 2007, 04:48 PM »

Absolutely zridling, Xyplorer is a really nice tool, and when it gets updated with unicode support it'll be even better. I don't think it'll be my primary tool anytime soon, but as it comes with a fantastic life-time license it doesn't really matter.

I do know of a sure fool-proof way to make it crash though, and it has done it since I first tried Xyplorer in the 5.x versions. What you need is a lot of gifs (I have a folder with around 1000 small ones, mainly tiles I use in various projects). If you have that, just try to let it generate thumbnails for them all. It always crashes. Still, that's highly unlikely to be a problem for most people, if anyone at all, but just thought I'd let you know if you want to try crashing it

349

General Software Discussion / Re: 12 Windows Explorer Alternatives Compared

« on: July 29, 2007, 10:09 AM »

Unicode support.

-Dirhael (July 29, 2007, 05:57 AM)

Excellent point.  Lack of unicode support is a deal killer for many.  (Not a problem for me, though.)

In some cases the core code of these file managers is probably legacy from the 90's (TC and Salamander, for instance).  In those cases, it appears to be rather difficult to support unicode.

For what it's worth, the Salamander team seems to have dropped everything else (development of tabs, quickview, more than 10 favorites, etc) to implement unicode.

Apparently TC is written in Delphi 2!  From what I gather, many if not all of the TC file list controls, trees, what have you, are custom coded from the basic Windows listbox control.  All would have to be re-written to some extent (IMHO).  For a single developer (in TC's case) that's a monumental task.  Maybe not worth it psychologically.  For many it is really difficult to get motivated to write the same application twice.

Though a large portion of these file manager's user bases do not require unicode, for global credibility it seems de rigeur.

-JohnFredC (July 29, 2007, 08:54 AM)

I think I read on the official TC forums, that Christian planned to implement unicode support in either v7.5 or 8. I guess we'll have to wait and see, but I'm hoping for the best. Still, TC does handle unicode files to a certain degree already even if some things doesn't work, so it's not a deal-breaker. Servant Salamander however really needs to be updated, as it can't handle such files at all.

I don't have all that many files with unicode names (it's mostly music and videos that are affected, so maybe somewhere between 500-1000 at any given time on my local drives), but I still need a file manager to be able to actually manage all of my files, not just a selected few. Thankfully, Dopus handles everything I could ever wish for and then some, but I still would like to see the final batch of the AAA file managers catch up.

350

General Software Discussion / Re: 12 Windows Explorer Alternatives Compared

« on: July 29, 2007, 05:57 AM »

As I'm on vacation at the moment, and stuck with a slow dial-up connection, I'm not able to download and install all the file managers listed above by JohnFredC (though I have some with me on a USB stick, like Dopus9, Xyplorer & TC). What I wanted to say though is that you did not mention one of the things that kills some of those applications for many users; Unicode support.

FreeCommander - Don't recall if it has it, been a while since I tested it (hated the interface, so it was a short test at that).
Total Commander - No full unicode support, but at least it lets you work with your files to some extent. It's just that some features does not work at all with these files.
Directory Opus - Full unicode support.
SpeedCommander - Full unicode support.
Servant Salamander - Absolutely no support for unicode. It won't even let you launch files with unicode names from it! Useless for me and many others. They have been promising unicode support for what seems like forever now, but nothing has happened yet.
Xyplorer - No unicode support, but for what it's worth it will at least it lets you launch the files. Be aware that it misbehaves if you ever try to rename a unicode filename, or at least it does it the build I have installed.
Xplorer2 - Don't really remember...been a while since I tried it, but I think it supported unicode.

There are a some other points I'd like to make, and a few of yours I'd like to challenge/don't agree with, but I'll wait until I'm back on my regular workstation. Nice list though