Messages

176

General Software Discussion / Recommend less known macro apps and text expanders

« on: January 20, 2012, 09:35 AM »

The major players are obvious:

Macros:

• Win Automation
• Macro Toolsworks
• Macro Express

(all quite expensive, especially the Pro editions; some have smaller editions with a subset of functionality but essentially the same design, which I'm omitting here)

Text expansion:

• PhraseExpress
• Phrase Expander (was Direct Access)

And of course AutoHotkey, far superior IMO to most if not all of them in efficiency, functionality and reliability, but with a fairly demanding syntax (I'm trying to mince words here :-) and no nice UI to organize your scripts and expansions.

Less well-known (to me! so far!):

• Quick Macros (lightweight but fast and powerful; scripting language rivals AHK for obsurity and opaqness, if there is such a word)
• Breevy (very nice, lightweight and fast expander, but with limited functionality, e.g. only abbreviations but no hotkeys)
• MouseRobot (looks interesting, just downloaded the trial).

So... anything else worth including? I am not looking for tiny apps with a specific, limited functionality; only for apps with feature sets comparable to those listed. I am not including app launchers here, for example; they are a different story and there's no god but FARR.

And in general, what are you using? Any good / bad experience with any of the ones I mentioned? Other, better alternatives? (Except for AutoHotkey; I love it too, no need to gush  :-)) Annoyances?

177

Living Room / Re: As a counter-point to the SOPA/PIPA demonstration

« on: January 20, 2012, 06:19 AM »

...and whoa, the indictment contains details of the "conspiracy members' " (aka Megaupload staff) private conversations and private emails to each other. That's before any boxes were seized or defendants questioned.

178

Living Room / Re: As a counter-point to the SOPA/PIPA demonstration

« on: January 20, 2012, 06:00 AM »

Back on topic...

http://www.scribd.co...6408/Mega-Indictment

That's the indictment against "the Mega Conspiracy".

-Renegade (January 20, 2012, 05:11 AM)

Interesting read,thanks! "Mega Conspiracy" is almost as good as the Axis of Evil.

They did have the "uploader rewards" program. That may well be one of the nails in their coffin (or prison gate).

179

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo

« on: January 19, 2012, 09:14 PM »

New version released January 20: 1.0.5.108

See the top post in this thread for download links.

This is the primarily a bugfix release. I planned new goodies, but bugs come first. Still, a few minor requests have made it into this build:

ADDED: When you copy or paste a clip, Echo would always update the clip's timestamp, so that the clip would move to the top of the list when sorted by date. This is now optional: Preferences -> Pasting clips -> UpdateClipTimeStamp. This setting is still True by default, so that Echo's behavior does not change unless you modify this setting. (Thanks, Easye!)

ADDED (by popular request): Option to minimize Echo when the Close button on the title bar is clicked. This option is disabled by default. To enable it, click Tools -> Preferences -> Display -> MinimizeOnCloseButton and set the option to True. When enabled, you must use the File -> Exit command (or press Alt+F4) to really quit Echo.

ADDED (by popular request): If the activation hotkey is pressed while Echo is already the active application, Echo will be minimized. Effectively, the activation hotkey acts as a toggle. To restore the old behavior, click Tools -> Preferences -> Keyboard -> ActivationHotkeyToggle and set the option to False.

ADDED: The connection indicator icon in the status bar may now display a third state: suspended (yellow marker). This indicates Echo remains connected to the clipboard, but capturing clips is temporarily suspended, for example because a clip is being edited. (Capturing clips while editing is not yet possible, hence the indicator.)

FIXED: A bug that caused an error when a system clipboard format was added to the list of captured formats (thanks, Sascha!)

FIXED: A bug that caused Echo to "hang" for a few seconds and then display an error message as it could not open the clipboard in the Available Clipboard Formats dialog box when the Refresh button was clicked.

FIXED: A bug that would sometimes cause an error when editing a clip in-place.

FIXED: Echo was showing the "Connected to clipboard" tray notification too eagerly (even when it had not actually re-connected)

180

Living Room / Re: As a counter-point to the SOPA/PIPA demonstration

« on: January 19, 2012, 05:29 PM »

Aside from whatever one might think about SOPA/PIPA, isn't this an indication that SOPA/PIPA isn't necessary?  Apparently they can already do the kinds of enforcement actions that I thought were the reason for SOPA/PIPA bring introduced.

-mwb1100 (January 19, 2012, 05:14 PM)

Totally, but if (if!) we accept that copyright infringement is theft, then neither is DMCA and other copyright enforcement laws. The very proliferation of these laws - the legislative shock and awe, legal terror, if you will - is a strong indication the MPAAs and RIAAs of this world realize they have an increasingly weak standing. (And there's also ACTA!)

I'm afraid it's going to get much worse before it gets any better. Not just on the copyright front.

As a sidenote, the Anonymous have responded. Try accessing www.justice.gov or www.universalmusic.com now.

181

Living Room / Re: As a counter-point to the SOPA/PIPA demonstration

« on: January 19, 2012, 05:10 PM »

"money laundering", my posterior.

One takeaway from this should be that none of those arrested were US citizens or were on US soil. Seizing equipment is one thing, but now we all live under US law, such as it is. (That "now" should read "we have for some time now", but it's a prime example.) Say thank you to your respective governments, everyone!

There's also this.

182

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo

« on: January 19, 2012, 09:01 AM »

Clipmate has such a feature ;)

-Sascha (January 19, 2012, 08:28 AM)

Oh, I know. So does Mouser's Clipboard Help & Spell. Both are more suitable for long-term storage, where clips almost become notes. (I do recommend you check out CH&S if you haven't yet. If you store code snippets, that's probably long term, and CH&S may indeed be more suitable.)

Me, I think I should better keep these account numbers (etc.) in another application, maybe Evernote or something similar. CintaNotes is great, too (except for editing clips in a separate window).

It's a (somewhat :-) interesting philosophical question. What is the difference between a captured clip -  which is typically a transient, throw-away piece of data, and 99% of the time you won't cry if you lose it, and indeed you lose them all the time when you press Ctrl+C - and a note, which you think of as something permanent that you probably don't want to lose (and it probably has a title).

Applications that do clips and applications that do notes may look quite similar on the surface: categories to one side, list of items on the other; but the underlying philosophy is quite different. You would not have an automatic "purge database" function in a note taking app, for instance, but you do have it in a clipboard extender, because you don't want the database to continue growing forever, and search speed is more important than holding fifty thousand clips. In a note-taker, you may prefer to sacrifice some speed for the ability to hold all your life's notes in one archive. Or, you don't want a note-taker to capture clipboard, because it will accumulate a ton of useless trash, making it harder to find your important notes. And so on. So these philosophical issues translate into design decisions, and Echo is not a very good note-taker.

183

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo

« on: January 19, 2012, 07:53 AM »

I fully understand your reason!

Maybe a Tooltip will do the job (like Dittos F3) - it should be a preview - no more, no less :)

-Sascha (January 19, 2012, 07:18 AM)

That's a possibility, although you cannot scroll a tooltip :) and it requires the mouse. Also, a tooltip would only show the "display text" part of a clip, which for larger clips may not be the complete text (depending on your settings).

I've been thinking about a read-only side panel that can be hidden if not used. Maybe even with an optional binary / hex view so that you can inspect all formats of a clip besides just the plain text.

And though I hate to admit it, I'm starting to feel a need for some additional metadata on clips. Not necessarily categories or tags, and not a tree hierarchy at all - just some way of "naming" or describing clips to find them easier. For example, every month I pay my bills online and need to find and paste a bunch of bank account numbers. But I can't find them by their digits :) So it would help to name a clip "electricity bill account", "tax account" etc.

This text must of course be searchable and displayed somewhere, so it's a major addition. But if I decide to add that, then Echo will need a side panel anyway.

First though I need to work on that clip length bug :)

184

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo

« on: January 19, 2012, 05:24 AM »

it would be nice, to have a preview-pane for the selected clip (first one for multiselect).
Most of my clips are code-snippets with more than 2 lines (MaxLinesPerItem := 2) and it is not very useful to load them to the editor for a preview :)

-Sascha (January 16, 2012, 01:45 AM)

I understand. The issue here is that adding another pane to the main window would change the overall behavior of the UI in a way I don't want. Echo (like Ditto) maintains what I call a "unified focus": you never need to tab from one control to another, e.g. from the clip list to the search box, in order to scroll the list or perform a search. No matter which part of the UI is focused, you can scroll the list and enter a search string at the same time. To me, this is the single most important feature of the program, because it lets you do the job with absolute minimum of key presses, and you never have to think of "where you are" in the UI.

Doing this for two controls (the list and the edit box) was possible though somewhat tricky, because Echo has to fight the regular Windows behavior to achieve this (and there are minor inconsistencies that can't be helped, like the behavior of Home/End keys).

I'm not sure it could work for three or more controls, though. This is basically the same reason Echo does not have categories or tags: they would require a third focusable panel, which really breaks the whole concept.

But I've added your request to the wishlist and I'll think of how I could do it without breaking Echo :)

185

N.A.N.Y. 2011 / Re: NANY 2011 Release: Ethervane Radio 0.2.4

« on: January 19, 2012, 05:03 AM »

Nice radio player!  I have been playing around with it a lot.  I was curious if it is still being developed?

-MrEprize (January 16, 2012, 03:01 PM)

It absolutely is. It's just that the radio was in many ways a first for me: my first database-backed application, first app that handles internet streams, first app that relies on heavy thread use, first app that's nearly 100% asynchronous, etc. So there's a number of things I did not get right the first time and that need much more work.

If so I would like to offer a suggestion about AAC streams. 
I have a low bandwidth impairment and usually listen to 40-48k AAC streams because they tend to not stutter every 5 minutes.  My request would be a separation or indication of AAC streams, stream rate would be handy also.  I am sure other people would benefit also from these additions.

I totally agree. At the moment there is no way to select a particular stream. The app simply tries all available streams in sequence until it finds one that works. This is one of this things that I'll have to address, but I can't say when this will happen.

186

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo

« on: January 15, 2012, 11:04 AM »

The "All Clips" view show that there are short clips

-rashford (January 15, 2012, 07:45 AM)

Could you email me the database you used to create these screenshots?
(marek (at) tranglos (dot) com)

The SQL Echo executes is correct  (and indeed identical whether the "AND" or the "OR" option is selected, as it should be in this case). So my next guess is that perhaps the clip length stored in the database is incorrect for some reason.

In your screenshot of the main screen, the first clip is selected. The clip seems to consist only of the word "And", but in the info bar says its length is 39 characters. This is wrong and it is why the clip does not get selected for the filter. Can you check if the length of other clips is correct? Or is the clip actually longer? What does it look like in the editor?

On edit: I can confirm that when you edit a clip, under some conditions Echo does not save the new length of the edited clip. That would cause clips to be incorrectly included (or excluded) from the "Short" view.

However, in your screenshot I can see that the clip "And" on top has not been edited, and yet its length is still incorrect. Can't explain this one yet.

187

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo

« on: January 15, 2012, 10:47 AM »

Hi Tranglos. Regarding the "Short" view on my 64-bit computer: I tried your suggestions but still got the same result (short clips aren't displayed on the Short tab). Relevant screenshots are shown below.

-rashford (January 15, 2012, 07:42 AM)

Thanks for the screenshots. And thanks for finding a living, squirming bug, too!

I don't yet know why this happens, but it seems that when there is only one filter defined, the result is wrong if you select the "Match any filter (OR)" option, above the filter properties. If you click the other option (AND), you will get the correct results, so as a workaround this is what you can do now. Of course the AND/OR choice should have no effect when there's just one filter.

Scratch all that, sorry, that's all wrong. Back to square one on this.

188

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo

« on: January 14, 2012, 09:38 AM »

feature requests
close to tray on pressing the X

-Sascha (January 11, 2012, 09:37 AM)

Done. Will be available in the next release.

189

Living Room / Re: Planning a major programming project - tips requested

« on: January 13, 2012, 02:55 PM »

I highly recommend mouser's Idea Explosionifier

-app103 (January 13, 2012, 11:44 AM)

LOL, this is epic. And true!

190

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo

« on: January 13, 2012, 01:18 PM »

Is there a setting anywhere to have the clip time NOT be updated on pasting? I've searched through the settings and couldn't find one that did this (but I may have missed it).

-easye (January 13, 2012, 11:16 AM)

It's not possible at the moment, but I see your point. I will add this in the next release.

191

Living Room / Re: Planning a major programming project - tips requested

« on: January 13, 2012, 10:10 AM »

I have found that the "plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." philosophy is extremely insightful but often impractical.

-mouser (January 13, 2012, 09:34 AM)

I agree. And there always comes a point beyond which you will not be willing to throw all the code away, because rewriting it from scratch would just take too long. That's why I'm suggesting coding the little self-contained parts first. To try out what works and how it works. You can skip much error checking or knock yourself out with exceptions if you prefer, you don't care about the UI, you can pepper the code with verbose logging and profiling, all the things that will help you learn what you are doing, without a care in the world.  I suppose it is a personal thing, but it's very specifically the method that has allowed me to go back to creating working apps after a five or so years of feeling totally not-up-to-it.

But often that's just not a practical option -- and furthermore, I do think there is some real value in planning out an application -- just sitting down with paper and pencil and imagining all of the operations and the workflow.  If you simply sit down and code until your application is done and expect that first version to be well organized you will end up in trouble.

That last thing is very true. But what I'm trying to say is that planning is extremely hard - for me it is, anyway. A pencil and a napkin, sure, all the time. But in my experience I don't even know very well what to name my classes and methods before I actually type it all up see what it means and how it relates to the existing code (without necessarily compiling and running it). Probably half the time I spend coding is refactoring the things that initially came out of my head. Refactoring is typically understood as a technique for maintaining code, but for me it's a huge part of creating it in the first place. I have to see the code to really understand it. Once as a kid I got a serious knock on the back of my head, maybe that's why

Perhaps another way of saying this is that planning is critical -- but you can "plan" by jumping in and writing a first version to throw away, or you can plan before you ever start coding.

And at least be prepared to throw away your plans

192

Living Room / Re: Planning a major programming project - tips requested

« on: January 13, 2012, 09:46 AM »

This will be a large file containing user data. There will be external files stored in their raw formats (jpeg, pdf, etc). I was debating about an already designed database system like sqlite, but also know that I have written my own file save procedures in the past and it has worked out nicely.

I was advised AGAINST XML because of the sheer complexity of implementation. There is no desire to export this data, as my application will be the first in its industry.

-Josh (January 12, 2012, 10:28 PM)

I don't think you can underestimate interoperability and ease of access. Users will thank you for it, if they ever need to access the data outside of your app.

I wouldn't say XML is complex, as long as you can use a 3rd-party parser that does the heavy lifting for you. But it is (a) relatively slow to read (b) wasteful when the tags take up more bytes than user data (c) potentially memory intensive, depending on the parser and how you use it; (d) brittle, because a single wrong byte may prevent your app from loading any of the data (that's particularly important if your users may ever fiddle with the data files themselves).

But XML is very useful and flexible when you need or expect to (a) represent hierarchical data; (b) store data of different types, including binary; (c) modify and expand the capabilities of your app or your data files. You can easily add a new tag to store a new piece of data, which earlier versions of your app may just ignore without breaking. Doing the same in custom binary files takes more work, as you have to introduce some sort of "file version" marker and check for it all the time (version 1.1, so expect a date now; version 1.2, time is now stored as UTC; version 1.3, added a comment field here...) That last thing is much easier to do with XML.

You could also design your custom "binary" format that is structured like XML, with numeric identifiers instead of tags. That worked for me once, but after that I decided SQLite was easier and faster and more capable to begin with.

SQLite is really neat in that it doesn't need a server or any complex installation (or any db license). If you use MySQL, who's going to install it, and who's going to do tech support for MySQL issues, for example? For me, the main advantage of a database is that you can read and write small portions of your data instead of the whole datafile at once. And you get a lot of built in logic for free via SELECT queries that you would otherwise have to devise yourself. Frequent disk access is an obvious downside, although you can configure your SQLite database to stay in RAM (by specifying a sufficient cache size or even explicitly copying the db to RAM).

Another downside of SQLite for me is: interminable query strings everywhere. I do keep them all in once place actually, but unless you generate all of your SQL at runtime, you may end up with hundreds of SELECT statements that are hard to maintain. If you add a column to a table, you need to go through all of them to see which ones must be modified. I hate that part, and you can of course parametrize the queries and glue them together from pieces, but the pieces still remain as string constants, and that's bad. Still, right now I wish I'd written almost all my apps with an SQLite backend, and I'll be using it for practically every future project I can think of. It's really flexible, and by far the fastest database engine on the desktop.

193

Living Room / Re: Planning a major programming project - tips requested

« on: January 13, 2012, 09:23 AM »

Also, I would like to add what I somehow forgot to ask....What steps do YOU, as coders, take when you are planning a project?

-Josh (January 12, 2012, 10:46 PM)

Step one: stop planning, go ahead and start coding. Seriously. The moment you write the first line of code you will start getting a much better understanding of (a) what it is you are making, and (b) what difficulties to expect. And the more code you write, the better your understanding will be.

Step two: plan to throw away the first attempt. All of it. Plan to change the language, to change the data storage mechanism, change everything. This goes together with step 1, because the sooner you begin, the easier it will be to let go of what you've done and start anew with a better grasp of what the project entails. I'm not saying you will throw it away; I'm saying it happens (or should happen) most of the time.

Or, if you're not quite ready to start just yet and don't like the idea of throwing away several months' worth of work, then start coding little "testbed" projects right away. Little parts of your future app, its individual subsystems. You need to know what IO mechanism fits your app best, so just write the IO code using XML or SQLite (for example) and see how it feels. Then throw away the testbed code, because it will probably be quick-and-dirty, but by then you will know what works for you, for this specific task.

That comes from my experience, YMMV, but I have seen similar advice given by truly seasoned programmers. I imagine there are pros out there who can design everything in their heads and then just do the mechanical work of putting it in code, but it certainly doesn't work that way for me. It's exceedingly hard to see all the possible pitfalls, problems, design decisions you'll have to make until you write the actual code - and then it becomes obvious. (Maybe it's just me, I suck at chess and that's kind of similar.)

I have thrown away much more code than is running in the apps I've ever published. I was designing KeyNote 2.0 "mentally" for four years, I literally dreamt about it, before I decided I wasn't up to it (and other things intervened). But most of all it was some sort of fatigue coming from several years of living with the abstract ideal of what the new version was supposed to be, without really doing anything about it.

I have another vaporware project that I've been designing since 2001. That's right, almost 11 years now Someone called this "analysis-paralysis" and that's quite apt. All the projects that amounted to anything have been projects that I just sat down and wrote like there was no tomorrow.

194

Living Room / Re: At last, KeyNote done better :)

« on: January 13, 2012, 05:56 AM »

It seems they released a freeware version with (slightly) limited functionality now.

-Jibz (January 13, 2012, 05:39 AM)

Nice! Although without the RichView component you don't get tables, proper hyperlinks and other advanced formatting, so it's more like KeyNote then

195

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo

« on: January 12, 2012, 09:22 PM »

Right-click on ethervaneecho.chm (to open the file properties) and click on "Unblock" button.

-PhilB66 (January 12, 2012, 09:13 PM)

Thanks Phil, this one is new to me!

Also, Hermano: see if you can open other programs' help files in the .chm format. You may need to have a version of Internet Explorer installed, though this is probably not required on Windows 7.

196

Living Room / Re: At last, KeyNote done better :)

« on: January 12, 2012, 05:05 PM »

Do you think that "live search," "search as you type," "walk down the list" or whatever you want to call it, is a good match to a tree-structured notekeeper?  Aren't they rather different paradigms?  If you do a live search in a tree-structured outliner, what should you show?  Only the nodes that match, or their parents that might not, and in either case, temporarily lose the tree-structured organisation?

-rjbull (January 09, 2012, 10:20 AM)

Yes I think you should show a flat list of matching items. There really isn't anything else you can do, and this solution has the obvious downside of losing the hierarchical "context", but when you design things, you're always making trade-offs.

Whether it's instant search or a "press Enter to go" filtering, it's a very powerful feature that helps you narrow down the scope of what you're looking at and concentrate on the results. So IMO the trade-off is totally worth it, especially that the flattening of the tree is only temporary.

In fact, apps like RightNote (all serious note-takers) need instant search (or filtering) in two places: not just for the text of the notes, but for the tree as well. I have a couple of KeyNote files with thousands of nodes in the tree (archives of code snippets, for example). It's next to impossible to locate one node among so many; even harder to find multiple nodes that would match some imagined filter.

I only wish I had realized all that 12 years ago

In RightNote and other database-backed applications there is the problem of performance. You just can't beat direct memory access for speed. With a large database, no matter how indexed, a true instant search may not work very well, as the search will introduce a perceptible delay. So it might be perfectly OK to wait until the user finishes typing the search terms and hits Enter - that way there is only one small delay instead of many (in-between pressing each key).

(Sorry for the late reply. TheBat! filters messages containing "KeyNote" in subject into a separate folder for me and I haven't looked in there in a while.)

197

Living Room / Re: Do things feel different today than in other decades?

« on: January 12, 2012, 04:39 PM »

Today, I read the EXACT SAME STORIES in the news and watch them on Youtube:

-Renegade (January 11, 2012, 07:24 PM)

Did you see this? That's precisely what Winston's job was, except now it's in near-real time.

OTOH, I don't believe this is actually new. I think it's been happening all along, but now (a) it's more in-your-face, more shamelessly done, and (b) we read more about it, which is partly due to the Internet, and partly due to (a).

Oh, and (c): we may read more about it, but the institutional press has become so corporatized that it no longer takes a stand on these issues or cares about them. What was a political scandal in the 70s won't raise a brow.

Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower, recently said that all the illegal actions Nixon and his henchmen took against him in 1971 are now legal. Just that, legal. And he was told by several editors that today neither NYT nor WP nor any other big newspaper would print documents like these. That's a big difference, too.

198

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Copy Text From Error Windows

« on: January 12, 2012, 04:18 PM »

Why would Microsoft use the standard Microsoft Windows dialogs...?  

-yksyks (January 12, 2012, 01:39 PM)

...or menus, or toolbars, or even edit controls. In a normal "Open file" dialog box you can right-click the edit box and paste the filename. In Office, you can't. (You can still paste by Ctrl+V though).

It may be because some Office apps were initially designed outside of MS, but if that was the case, they've had more than enough time to standardize. Maybe MS thinks Office should behave and look slightly different from the rest of Windows, so that people know what they paid for, who knows. Certainly in the case of common controls there is less functionality in Office than in the OS itself.

As for the OP question: for those dialogs where Ctrl+C does not work, would it help to make a screenshot and paste it into Evernote or maybe OneNote? Can these apps OCR such a screenshot well enough? (It's probably faster to just type the text yourself most of the time anyway.)

199

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo

« on: January 12, 2012, 07:40 AM »

I had meant "double-click" in my original post.  In any event, your recommendation to select "sfPlainText" does not seem to work for me:  clips are still being pasted with original formatting rather than in plain text.  Unless you are aware of a bug with "sfPlainText", I suppose the problem may well be on my end.  I'm running Ethervane Echo in portable mode on a Win7 64bit machine.

-jash (January 11, 2012, 08:54 PM)

This should totally work. One thought: are you perhaps trying to paste a clip immediately after capturing it? If so, that may not work, because Echo will not change the contents of the clipboard on the fly like that. The feature will only work when you "physically" go to Echo, select and clip and press Enter, double-click it, etc. (see also footnote at end of this post :-)

If this is what you are already doing, could you check two things for me? First, go to Tools -> Available clipboard formats (or press Ctrl+F), and look at the list on the right:



When you use the "...as text" versions of Copy and Paste, Echo selects all the formats marked as "Yes" in that list. By default four formats are marked as being "text" as in the screenshot. Echo should display "No" in that column for all other formats. If any other formats have "Yes" next to them, select those format s and click the "Toggle text" button below.

If this looks the way it should, then please try this procedure:

1) Let Echo capture a clip that contains formatting (from Word, etc). You can check the same dialog box as above to make sure that "rich" formats are present (the list on the left this time).

2) Now copy or paste the clip as you normally would (press Enter in Echo).

3) Go back to the same dialog as before (press Ctrl+F) and check what formats Echo has just put on the clipboard. The list on the left should look like this:



In the screenshot you can see that Echo has placed only the four basic text-only formats on the clipboard (plus two internally used formats that don't actually contain any data). If there is a bug in Echo, you should see some unwanted formats here.


(the promised footnote:)You can also use the new "paste as text" hotkey feature, added in the latest release. This is a system hotkey that will paste current clipboard contents as text-only in any application, without going through Echo. It works by removing all other formats from clipboard. This hotkey is enabled by default: Shift+Wn+Insert.

200

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Release: Ethervane Echo

« on: January 12, 2012, 07:06 AM »

I added cf_dib, cf_dibv5 and cf_bitmap. Those formats where listed on the 'Formats currently on clipboard'-List after copying a bitmap from my screenshot-tool.
But I am not able to change the text-only-property for those entries. It will always be reset to 'Yes'. Maybe that will be the reason.

-Sascha (January 12, 2012, 01:53 AM)

Hi Sascha! I'm afraid I will disappoint you this time, but if you go back to the OP where Echo is described, you'll see that Echo only captures text (unlike Ditto). It's also mentioned at the top of the help file, though I should think of a way to make it even more pronounced.

More precisely, Echo can capture any format you define in that dialog box, but it will ignore clips that don't contain text as well. (And it is possible for clips to contain both text and bitmaps, e.g. Excel copies data like that). So Echo can capture cf_dib, but only if the clip contains cf_text or cf_unicodetext as well. Clips that don't have either of these formats are ignored, because Echo could not display them or search for them of they do not contain text.

This is a fundamental concept for the whole program, so it's not a feature I can add.

If you do need images, may I suggest you try Mouser's Clipboard Help and Spell? It captures all clips, including images, and is more suitable for storing clips long-term.