Messages

26

The Getting Organized Experiment of 2006 / Re: Getting Organized in 2007

« on: September 01, 2007, 07:26 PM »

Time to clean up my Windows desktop...lots of old unnecessary stuff.

27

General Software Discussion / Re: Stay Away From Microsoft VISTA

« on: September 01, 2007, 09:46 AM »

I'm not talking from a programmer's perspective, but Vista has been a great operating system for me particularly in the area of performance. Some people say that it is quite sluggish, but I've found almost all of my apps to run much faster than they ever did in XP. I have a feeling that this is because of their new SuperFetch technology, which XP has something kinda like it but not nearly as good.

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Automatically finds boundaries of non-rectangular/themed windows?

« on: September 01, 2007, 09:40 AM »

Thanks mouser, I'll have to give that a shot.

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Why I gave up on it

« on: August 29, 2007, 09:04 PM »

That may not be a bad idea. Create things like an "arrow" pack and a "button" pack.

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Initial Recommendations

« on: August 29, 2007, 07:20 PM »

Okay...those frames and masks rock. I actually never even noticed that feature.

Update: Those masks are really great. They're a nice way to spruce up the normally dull edges.

31

Screenshot Captor / Re: Initial Recommendations

« on: August 29, 2007, 06:29 PM »

Oh yeah, and two other things I thought about that would be cool:

• Make the ESC key exit the editor. Alt+F4 is too hard for me to press to close it.
• A torn edge effect

Also, I plan on reviewing this app in great detail within the coming weeks. I'll probably write the article late next week and it will post in about two-weeks. So if you've got any upcoming features you're working on that you would like me to mention in the article feel free to let me know. Or if you plan on releasing a newer version soon I'll hold off on writing the article until then. Thanks again mouser!

vista capture of rounded windows will be fixed asap.

-mouser (August 29, 2007, 04:54 PM)

Hopefully that includes the capture of shadows...because that would be super sweet and make my job a lot easier. Vista's screenshots look a lot better when they include the shadows, and I think that was what jtbworld was trying to point out in his screenshots. You might easily be able to accomplish this by letting the user define a padding amount (in pixels) to be included when doing a window capture.

can you explain crosshairs suggestion a bit more?

-mouser (August 29, 2007, 04:54 PM)

I suppose a picture is worth a thousand words...the crosshairs on FastStone Capture extend all the way across the screen which astonishes me how much I miss this feature. In the picture where the crosshairs meet is where my mouse is currently positioned.

Along the same lines as the previous bullet...I would like an option to save my settings. If I ever format my drive I would hate to reconfigure everything. I'm sure there is a way that you can backup the profile though.

all settings for all of my programs are saved in an ini file (i loathe the registry), the only thing i don't remember is if in Vista what directory it saves it too..

-mouser (August 29, 2007, 04:54 PM)

I never actually "installed" the program, just extracted the EXE for Screenshot Captor. I love programs that I don't have to install, and the portability is a huge upside. I just noticed that all settings are nicely tucked away in the installation directory...THANK YOU! Now I just have to backup that directory and I'll have the program and my settings.

32

Screenshot Captor / Initial Recommendations

« on: August 29, 2007, 04:49 PM »

I've been using Screenshot Captor for a few days and thought I would give my recommendations as to what would make this a perfect app.

• As jtbworld pointed out in in this post the screenshot capturing in Vista could be a little more snazzy.
• The toolbar in the editor window should by default be placed along the top. After I moved it the app seemed a lot more usable, and more like other programs that I've used before.
• The crosshairs when selecting a region of the screen to capture should stretch from the top to bottom and left to right much like FastStone Capture does. I think this feature makes capturing the area you want a little easier
• Other screenshot apps show a little zoom box (similar to what's in the Screenshot Captor's editor) when you're selecting a region of the screen to capture. This often lets you get extremely close to the area you want to capture without having to guess, and prevents needing to crop the screenshot in the editor where you have full zoom capabilities.
• There's a lot of different algorithms available for scaling images...a brief summary of the benefits each one offers might be helpful. I use Bicubic the most, but that's mostly because I don't know where/when the others would be better.
• Maybe a basic and advanced mode when configuring options. I'm a power user all the way, but all of the different options were pretty intimidating at first. I spent about an hour configuring and playing with all the different choices until I got it just right, but less advanced users might prefer a simpler interface for adjusting options.
• Along the same lines as the previous bullet...I would like an option to save my settings. If I ever format my drive I would hate to reconfigure everything. I'm sure there is a way that you can backup the profile though.

I know the list probably looks long, but these are just things that came to my mind while using the program. Most of them are petty little things that probably don't matter that much.

Thanks for the great app mouser!

33

Screenshot Captor / Re: Automatically finds boundaries of non-rectangular/themed windows?

« on: August 29, 2007, 04:34 PM »

I've just started using this as my primary screenshot application, and it's pretty nice. I think jtbworld is right that Screenshot Captor should automatically include Vista's shadow as well, but what would be super awesome is if it handled Vista screenshots more like Window Clippings:
http://www.windowcli...ngs.com/Screenshots/

I love how nice the screenshots look in that program, but I hate the lack of editing that is included.

34

Living Room / Re: Deja Vu: More Sony Rootkits (They just don't learn)

« on: August 28, 2007, 07:26 PM »

You would have thought that Sony learned from their first mistake. They must think consumers are ignorant and don't notice these things.

35

Older Newsletters / Re: Newsletter for August 27 - Codename "Mouser reinvents the wheel"

« on: August 28, 2007, 02:15 PM »

I'm new to this forum, but I've followed the site religiously for quite some time. It's a matter of making people realize what's discussed in the forum. I think you probably should look at what forum posts people are hitting when coming from search engines. Then take some of those most popular posts and throw them on the homepage of the site. After all, if it's something people are searching for then I'm sure a lot of other people would find them useful.

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Problems with Opera

« on: August 28, 2007, 12:08 PM »

I also just noticed that you can't capture the "content area" of Opera using the object selection capture. It just does nothing when I try to capture that.

Edit: Just noticed that disabling Red Box fixes the issue.

37

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Quality Comparison: 8 x freeware PDF Readers / Viewers

« on: August 28, 2007, 10:52 AM »

Foxit just released version 2.1 the other day as well, and has several new features.

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Living Room / Re: "Content-Aware Image Resizing!! OMG!!!!!!!".. Calm down: it's useless

« on: August 27, 2007, 10:34 PM »

Glad you like the signature.

It actually just uses our FeedBurner feed to rotate through our items. It's a feature FeedBurner offers called Headline Animator:
http://www.feedburne...378E19529782B35E.fb1

You can use a custom background with it, and rearrange the positiong of items. It only takes a few seconds to make after you've created your background image.

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Living Room / Re: How do you organise your 'My Documents' folder

« on: August 27, 2007, 10:23 PM »

I actually create another subfolder called "Ryan's Documents" which is where I place everything you would expect to find in My Documents. This is because a lot of applications like to create folders in My Documents, and every night I have an automated backup system scour my "Ryan's Documents" folder for backups. I would hate for it to backup the folders left behind by meaningless applications.

Within the Ryan's Documents I have a ton of subfolders that are crazily nested within eachother in hopes of maining organization between school work, work stuff, and other items that are important to me.

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Living Room / Re: "Content-Aware Image Resizing!! OMG!!!!!!!".. Calm down: it's useless

« on: August 27, 2007, 10:19 PM »

I think this does have it's place in the photo editing arena, and is something we could see in future versions of Photoshop or even better Paint.NET. It's not something the people would use on a regular basis, but look at how easily and cleanly people can be removed from photos.

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General Software Discussion / Re: New interesting features for Firefox 3

« on: August 27, 2007, 10:15 PM »

One of the biggest problems with Firefox 3, however, is that the performance is much worse than what they require before they'll release it. Last I heard Firefox 3 has an 18% worse memory footprint than Firefox 2, and they are hoping to get that equal to or better than Firefox 2. I think it is going to be quite a struggle for them though.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Top 3 programs you use

« on: August 27, 2007, 10:12 PM »

I use Opera, FeedDemon, and Post2Blog the most. Of those three FeedDemon is the only one that's not free, but in my opinion anyone that is addicted to RSS feeds needs a powerful feed reader like FeedDemon.