Recent Posts

10826

General Software Discussion / Re: New App - Floating Ruler - Feedback?

« Last post by Renegade on September 30, 2006, 09:09 PM »

app103,

Thank-you again!

There are some things in there that I was planning to add into it but was just lazy: A real absolute pixel ruler where the other sliders are now (additionally), a pin, a magnifier, saving settings to load on the next run, and some options to control behaviour. No plans for any screen capture as Screen Captor is already very good and I don't see what purpose that serves for a ruler.

I did find something wierd in .NET v1.1 though while making it. With a transparent form, if you maximize it, then restore it, you end up with a "screen shot" starting from 0,0 in the restored region, which stays there. I couldn't figure out how to work around that so I ended up using a form border. A bit lame, but it works.

However, I need to get back to 2 other projects at the moment. Maybe my ADHD will kick in though and I'll get distracted though. 

Cheers,

Ryan

10827

General Software Discussion / Re: New App - Floating Ruler - Feedback?

« Last post by Renegade on September 30, 2006, 10:45 AM »

...
It would be nice to have some sort of accelerater to extend the ruler lines rapidly (3200x1200 desktop).

-cranioscopical (September 28, 2006, 04:37 AM)

I hear, and obey...

You can now maximize it, but will still need to work manually for dual monitors.

Here's a screen shot:



I've also upgraded a lot of the stuff there.

The options icon is a place holder for now.

There is a set of axis controls now as well. and they make it MUCH easier to use now. You can still control things with the fine-grained control as before though.

You're also alerted to the absolute and relative positions of the crosshairs in the titlebar. Yadda yadda.

Hope it's useful for people. I'll release it later on when I have time. Right now, you can download it here:

Floating Ruler

Cheers,

Ryan

10828

General Software Discussion / Re: FairUse4WM : Strippingng DRM (digital rights management) from windows media

« Last post by Renegade on September 28, 2006, 03:03 PM »

Grrrr... 

Legal or not... It's still supposed to be "FAIR USE". The RIAA, MPAA, NMPA, MPA... These guys are archaic and need to get a life. Their revenue model has shifted from the entertainment industry to the litigation industry.

Yes. A pet peeve of mine.

You can find more information about that program at Hydrogen Audio. It's somewhere in the forums.

And there's no real point in trying to protect audio or video as it can ALWAYS be ripped.

Grumble... Grumble...

It would be better if the RIAA, MPAA, NMPA, MPA, etc... all tried to deal with their CUSTOMERS in GOOD FAITH. They don't.

10829

General Software Discussion / Re: New App - Floating Ruler - Feedback?

« Last post by Renegade on September 28, 2006, 02:56 PM »

Ah... Ok... I think I know why that is... I think you have your ContolLight and Control set to the same color somehow. I used Windows theme control colors to accomodate themes. I'll go back and change the transparent color to mauve.

And I'll add in a maximize as well. That will require that I add in something to move the lines as well, but I should be able to get that done this weekend.

Cheers,

Ryan

10830

General Software Discussion / Re: New App - Floating Ruler - Feedback?

« Last post by Renegade on September 28, 2006, 03:54 AM »

That's strange... You're clicking and dragging from the "form" part? (red circle below)



The code for dragging is:

Code: C# [Select]

1. private const int WM_NCHITTEST = 0x84;
2. private const int HTCLIENT = 0x1;
3. private const int HTCAPTION = 0x2;
4. protected override void WndProc(ref Message m)
5. {
6.         if(m.Msg == WM_NCHITTEST)
7.         {
8.                 m.Result = new IntPtr(HTCAPTION);
9.         }
10.         else
11.         {
12.                 base.WndProc(ref m);
13.         }
14. }

Not sure why that wouldn't work for you... I've only tested it on 2 machines, but didn't have any wierdness.

10831

General Software Discussion / Re: New App - Floating Ruler - Feedback?

« Last post by Renegade on September 27, 2006, 05:29 PM »

You should be able to just click on the form and drag it instead of using the number controls. I have no idea if it would work on Windows 98 though...

I'll see what I can do to add in a secondary measurement for browsers. That would be useful.

Thanks for the feedback!

10832

General Software Discussion / New App - Floating Ruler - Feedback?

« Last post by Renegade on September 27, 2006, 11:28 AM »

So I'm finally fed up with messing around with dumb ways to do things, so I wrote a stupid little application today to give me a simple on-screen ruler to measure alignments in other programs. (e.g. Visual Studio, Photoshop, appTranslator [the real motivation], etc.)

It's a .NET v1.1 app, so you'd need that installed. (Decided not to go with v2.0 but I'll do that later.)

Anyways, I'm looking for feedback. Please be brutal. But keep in mind what it is supposed to be used for...

I know it sucks a bit right now, but it does what I need it to do for now. i.e. Let me visually align things on-screen.

It's kind of like guidelines in Photoshop, but for any program.

Here's the download:

Floating Ruler

Just as a silly aside, the app is 72kb, but the zip is 212kb and 428kb unzipped. i.e. Bloated installer. But it works...

Cheers,

Ryan

10833

General Software Discussion / Re: Finally made a descision

« Last post by Renegade on September 27, 2006, 11:16 AM »

For $1,000 I'll tell you a little secret to make money from free software. 

10834

General Software Discussion / Re: foobar...honestly...WTF?! WTF?!

« Last post by Renegade on September 25, 2006, 08:03 AM »

Learning a scripting language just to play some music is a bit overboard. Is there any real benefit?

10835

General Software Discussion / Re: kmplayer, whoa!!!

« Last post by Renegade on September 24, 2006, 11:08 AM »

Ummm... Which one?

There are two of them. One is a Linux KMPlayer. The other is a Windows application...

10836

General Software Discussion / Re: Best jukebox that is NOT iTunes?

« Last post by Renegade on September 24, 2006, 10:58 AM »

I have zero loyalty to software when I find something better... But at the moment, this is my list of media players & what I'll use them for, and WHY:

Player	Used For	Why
ALSong	Listening to music	The PLAYLIST makes life easy. Worlds beyond anything else out there that I've seen. I can't tell you how much I love the playlist...
Music Match Jukebox	Alarm clock	I need to get up in the morning
PowerDVD 4	DVDs	It works (but crashes when I click stop), and it was free with my DVD burner
ALShow	Videos	It's just easy to use and plays everything I need (DVD support is sketchy, hence PowerDVD)
Real Player	Some RealMedia files	Nothing else works properly
iTunes	Synching podcasts with my iPod Nano	Too lazy/busy to try an alternative.
Foobar2000	Anything that doesn't work in another player	Good file support
Windows Media Player	Verifying files	Just to check that files work in it

Most of those are all quite good at what they do (iTunes excluded). Each of them has their shortcomings, and strengths.

Just so you know, I work for the company that produces ALSong and ALShow. I use them both at home (ALShow at home mostly, and ALSong at the office.) I listen to music 9+ hours a day. I've tried to be fair in my assessment, but take it as you will.

I have not ordered those.

I have not tried MediaCube or some others. I do like nice interfaces and am willing to sacrifice some functionality for usability in consumer level software. (Professional level software is a different story.) e.g. Foobar2000 has very good functionality, but lacks some usability. So that's a 'fallback' application for me. Access is highly usable, but I prefer MS SQL Server as it's just better for everything that I need.

10837

General Software Discussion / Your Newest Favorite Firefox Extension :)

« Last post by Renegade on September 24, 2006, 10:29 AM »

I found this link at Jos:

Pornzilla

Your newest favorite Firefox extension~!   

I nearly died laughing while reading the site. It's just hilarious. It goes on and on about porn and how great Firefox is for porn. Read the "About" at the bottom of the page. Classic!

10838

General Software Discussion / Re: foobar...honestly...WTF?! WTF?!

« Last post by Renegade on September 24, 2006, 10:24 AM »

I think foobar is one of those software where, because it's aimed at powerusers, they have intentionally made the software as hard to figure out as possible.  OK, it's a poweruser program, but it's also a freakin media player, not some complex, flight-simluation software for corn's sake.

-superboyac (September 24, 2006, 03:15 AM)

You're pretty much bang on the money.

Foobar is like 7-zip (and quite a few others). Good software, with an impossible interface. Neither of the rise to the level of decent usability. The programmers aren't interested in that aspect of software. They're much more interested in the 'guts'. And since they're both open source, anyone could come along and create a decent interface for them.

But then again, they're free. You get what you pay for. In this case, you're paying nothing to get what some kind programmers are interested in. And they're just not that interested in fancy GUIs.

10839

General Software Discussion / Re: My favorite software! What's yours?

« Last post by Renegade on September 21, 2006, 08:22 AM »

Productivity:
Editplus - I just use it all the time.
Visual Studio - I just love Intellisense! Makes coding so much faster.

Raising Hell... Err... I mean for privacy:
TOR

That Tor stuff... Man... It is SOOOOO open to abuse...

10840

General Software Discussion / Re: idea for donation coder CD

« Last post by Renegade on September 20, 2006, 12:01 PM »

I think the idea of an ISO download (torrent or otherwise) is good especially if it focuses on DC sourced software.

However, burning CDs to send seems a bit pointless given the rate at which apps are updated - by the time they arrive in the post it will be out of date!

-Carol Haynes (September 20, 2006, 08:14 AM)

Agreed. Torrent is the best way to go. I'd run a torrent server IF I could do it reliably. Right now I don't know of a Windows torrent server that runs as a service. I have some bandwidth to chew up, and can use that. (As long as it didn't get crazy on me.)

Cheers,

Ryan

10841

General Software Discussion / Re: Bad Design is Harder than Good Design

« Last post by Renegade on September 20, 2006, 11:56 AM »

omg...I can't stop laughing.

Zaine...your turn! We need some S-ware screencasts from you. 

-app103 (September 20, 2006, 02:13 AM)

Oh yes! There's so much bad stuff out there! Just make sure to keep the profanity level relatively high 

So Zaine... Got any ideas for a screencast? 

10842

General Software Discussion / Re: idea for donation coder CD

« Last post by Renegade on September 19, 2006, 08:56 PM »

IMHO - ISO via BitTorrent would be ideal.

10843

General Software Discussion / Re: Bad Design is Harder than Good Design

« Last post by Renegade on September 19, 2006, 08:53 PM »

It only gets worse. 

If you noticed, in the first video where I pointed out how you need to double-click to expand/collapse in the main Anycall program... Well, in the second part where you see the music stuff - you SINGLE CLICK! Not only do they screw things up, but they can't even screw things up consistently. Simply beyond pathetic.

Oh - And did I mention that it took me like 6 hours to be able to upload the first MP3? 

Hardware manufacturers should not try to write software...

10844

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Guitar & Drum Trainer v3.1.4 released

« Last post by Renegade on September 19, 2006, 12:47 PM »

Guitar & Drum Trainer v3.1.4 is out with some new interface changes to make it a bit more attractive.

GDT helps you improve the quality of your practice time and become a better musician. If you're already good, then GDT can help you transcribe music, or just make life easier with pitch shifting music to your instrument.

You can slow down music, pitch shift, loop music, filter instruments with a 31 band EQ, increase your speed and accuracy with the GDT Speed Trainer and a lot more.

You can get more information here.

Peace, Love, and Eternal Groovieness 

Ryan

10845

General Software Discussion / Re: idea for donation coder CD

« Last post by Renegade on September 19, 2006, 12:22 PM »

Good idea - especially if some of us developers can volunteer our software to be on it~! 

10846

General Software Discussion / Re: Help! How can I grab embedded streaming videos?

« Last post by Renegade on September 19, 2006, 12:21 PM »

You can always just record the screen and save that... Things like Camtasia will do it. Not a great solution, but it's guaranteed to work.

10847

General Software Discussion / Bad Design is Harder than Good Design

« Last post by Renegade on September 19, 2006, 11:57 AM »

I just can't get over how hard some software developers try to make life harder. Here are a couple videos that show really bad design that I know would have taken more effort to do than to make it easy for users. These are really standard type things that everybody in the world can do properly without making things difficult. In the second video, it shows that you need to restart the software after changing a tab! Complete insanity.

SPH-V9900 (1)

SPH-V9900 (2)

10848

General Software Discussion / Re: Read which Linux distro users think is best and why ...

« Last post by Renegade on September 18, 2006, 06:46 PM »

Don't know if they've been mentioned on JoS before, but these videos of Linux XGL Desktop look seriously cool:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vykigxsd0oo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lawkc3jH3ws
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgNxlb2fgiQ

From: JoS.

Looks pretty sexy.

Would be nice if MS could manage some stuff like that. Unfortunately, they're really just a corporate use OS and the consumer end doesn't get much real attention. (Follow the money...)

10849

General Software Discussion / Re: What happened to Big Bang Enterprises?

« Last post by Renegade on September 16, 2006, 01:14 PM »

Time to look for other DNS servers maybe???

10850

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: Your favorite or most useful

« Last post by Renegade on September 10, 2006, 08:02 PM »

Themes

There is only one theme: miniFoxFlat! Gives you back your real estate without ruining anything. Small, compact, highly usable.
I love it! 

-housetier (June 27, 2006, 08:14 PM)

Just installed that - nice - very small. Not very aesthetic, but extremely functional.

It basically removes about 2 pixels of height and width from every element, making it extremely compact.