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We are going to wake up one day and find out that half of the content on the internet (facebook accounts, twitter accounts, reviews, kickstarter donations, amazon reviews, etc.) is fake paid content designed to manufacture momentum and positive press.

I wouldn't worry that half of the Internet is written by AI, if three fourths of the readers will be bots - statistically we still get ahead...

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Post New Requests Here / Re: Alt-tabbing selected applications
« on: May 21, 2012, 10:20 AM »
With two windows it works, but sometimes I need more. Also, if I get a quick look at another, non-work related application, this disrupts the alt-tab sequence.

Instead, I have begun to use the Win7 feature... I order all my work related apps in the task bar (some are already pinned, so always appear in the same place anyway) and use Alt + number to select the relevant window.

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Post New Requests Here / Alt-tabbing selected applications
« on: May 09, 2012, 06:49 AM »
I am not sure if it should go here or into general apps, as there might be a tool for this, but I cannot find anything...

Basically, I want to select two (or more) apps from the list of running apps (in Win7). Then I want Alt-Tab to switch only between those applications.

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Living Room / Re: Don't be a free user?
« on: December 15, 2011, 02:56 AM »
How times have changed!

If the users get Thingamajig Suite for free up to version 4.12 and then they don't get 4.13 (or 5), they are "screwed"? Even though 4.12 is perfectly usable and useful (in spite of little quirks and bugs)?

It is interesting to note how the focus has shifted from the product itself to the development (or support, if you may) of the product. Back in the old days (ekhm, ekhm) you got the floppies and that was it - that was the final product of the developers' minds. To get any improvement you had to wait three years for the next version, if any... Nowadays, if you find a perfect freeware gem and you see it has not been updated in nine months, you don't bother to download it...

It is good that now people know the difference between initial cost and TCO, but let's find some balance here... There are projects which require intensive maintenance and there are those which do not. Naturally, if I move all my contacts and photos and blog intensely on the new social networking site and it suddenly disappears from the face of the Earth, I have every reason to be irritated - here my time investment was so high that the fact the the initial cost was insubstantial (i.e. zero) is not that important any more. On the other hand, if I get this little puzzle game, I can play it all night long and more, even though the authors have long moved to more lucrative ventures...

Edit: I've just read through the blog entry to the end and it is clear the author is putting free webservices in opposition to free software. In that case, disregard the above.

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I see two problems here: first of all, all the described solutions could more or less do what you want. If you knew any of them, that would be exactly the easiest solution. It is rather difficult to say which of them would be easiest when starting from scratch...

The other problem is that the requirements must be specified very precisely. Typography is more than "stuff with fonts". If one program is better than another with "typography" (which might not be the best way to put it, but let's leave it at that), it means that the final result looks or "prints" better - that is, you have more control over the placement of the elements, text and graphics are properly aligned (and tenths of milimeters count here!), justification is both precise and flexible, etc. I have laid out scientific books in Word and did a decent job with it, but any professional could tell that the tool used could be better.

This is important, as my preferred solution i.e. Word mail merge tools, could work well enough for you, but the printed output could be unacceptable for other people involved (this might also be an issue with Access).

Why Word mail merge? Because it is dead simple. You could start with a simple template and a table of elements and build it up to direct Access access (sorry :) ) and macro-managed scenarios. I will not go into details, I think the help is accessible enough as it is - basically you set up one document with text placeholders and conditional fields and then feed it with another document, database, text file, etc. (By the way, Indesign also has a similar function - data merge http://tinyurl.com/c66x7m Maybe you should take a look at that first?)

Access seems to be very well suited for this as well. However, as I do not know it thoroughly, it would not be my first choice.

Finally, I would not dismiss xml - this is exactly the stuff was invented for. There are myriad solutions for going from database to xml and from xml to finely printed documents, you don't have to go fully DTD and xsl to do that any more (but you can).

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