Recent Posts

12876

Screenshot Captor / Screenshot Captor: Improved Arrows

« Last post by mouser on September 07, 2011, 11:53 AM »

I'm trying to improve the labeled arrows a bit by adding some options for arrow positioning and background coloring:


Hope this is some consolation for people who haven't been satisfied with the current arrow options.

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Possible bug when using Splice out strip defined by selection

« Last post by mouser on September 07, 2011, 08:04 AM »

Thanks for your patience and reminding me about the weird shadow bug.

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Living Room / Re: Anyone here using a standing desk?

« Last post by mouser on September 07, 2011, 05:43 AM »

ArsTechnica report on standing desk experiment: http://arstechnica.c...n-elevating-desk.ars

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Splicing a vertical section of an image

« Last post by mouser on September 07, 2011, 05:35 AM »

Should be fixed in the latest beta, let me know:
https://www.donation...nshotCaptorSetup.exe

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Possible bug when using Splice out strip defined by selection

« Last post by mouser on September 07, 2011, 05:34 AM »

Should be fixed in the new beta -- thanks for finding this.

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Living Room / Lifehacker: Best and Worst Places to Buy Anything When You Need a Good Return

« Last post by mouser on September 06, 2011, 02:58 PM »

Lifehacker seems less interesting to me lately, but occasionally they still publish a useful article.  This seems like one of those times.

While getting the best price is often your first concern, a great deal is suddenly not so great when you hate what you bought and can't return it. If you're looking for a good return policy, here are some the best places to shop (and places you should avoid).

http://lifehacker.co...a-good-return-policy

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Living Room / Re: What's your experience with 3rd party color inkjet ink replacement?

« Last post by mouser on September 06, 2011, 02:55 PM »

Kevin Kelly has a post today recommending a company (Cobra Ink) that ships you a printer that has been pre-modified with a 3rd party continuous ink system with their own warranty.  Looks interesting.

http://www.kk.org/co.../archives/005846.php

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Bug? Arrow Endpoint Text very slow

« Last post by mouser on September 06, 2011, 11:07 AM »

Does it help if on the Drawing Object Options tab you select "Anti-alias Object Display: Never" ?

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Bug? Arrow Endpoint Text very slow

« Last post by mouser on September 06, 2011, 11:06 AM »

And maybe attach again an image which exhibits the slow editing behavior with the new version?
Perhaps i can replicate it again..

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Bug? Arrow Endpoint Text very slow

« Last post by mouser on September 06, 2011, 11:00 AM »

crap  

I just don't understand it

Is there any way you could make a screencast showing you selecting an image with arrow text, then editing the arrow text and showing the slowness?

The main thing i really need to see is if the font is trying to anti-alias while you are typing.

I may have to upload a test version too that can output some debug information for me to check on.

I just wish i understood what was going on.

Anyone else experiencing slow arrow text editing with the new beta version?

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Living Room / Re: screen pics to DonationCoder forum (trying zScreen)

« Last post by mouser on September 06, 2011, 09:39 AM »

This thread shows how to attach uploaded images as thumbnails or in a variety of ways:
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=1996.0

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Scrolling capture is not working

« Last post by mouser on September 06, 2011, 09:10 AM »

now that I think of it, there was white space below the last visible number - I think I reduced this for the first shot but not for the second.

right.  so to get a smooth shot with no whitespace between pages you would just shorten the window height in notepad until there was not so much extra whitespace at the bottom of the window.

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Living Room / Re: screen pics to DonationCoder forum (trying zScreen)

« Last post by mouser on September 06, 2011, 09:07 AM »

Unfortunately, the correct way to do it is to download the file to your pc, then attach it as an upload when you post.

It might be nicer if we implemented a feature that would ask the forum to automatically grab the image from the remote site and save it as a file attachment on the dc server, but that currently does not exist.

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Highlighting rectangle

« Last post by mouser on September 06, 2011, 08:51 AM »

Thanks for the chart ralfs!
ps you might want to upload screenshots in .png format in the future as the jpg image is a bit lossy.

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Living Room / Re: screen pics to DonationCoder forum (trying zScreen)

« Last post by mouser on September 06, 2011, 08:46 AM »

Do we have a preference on .png vs. .jpg or anything else?

Screenshots should almost always be .png not .jpg.
Jpeg does a terrific job of lossy compression of photographs, but the lossiness is unacceptable in computer screenshots.  Png is lossless and gives good compression on screenshots where there is often large areas of solid colors.

Do we have a preference as to the pic being on a remote server or being uploaded to the DonationCoder server.

We *STRONGLY* discourage people from linking to pictures on a remote site.. Mainly because DC lives forever but other sites do not.  Better to have all pictures attached to forum posts where they will live and die and move with the forum content itself.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Cnet's Download.com and the installer scam

« Last post by mouser on September 06, 2011, 08:18 AM »

Well Softonic is really walking a narrow line there.

First the good things they are doing:

From the main page for the program they have a prominent link to the program homepage.  To me this seems like an obvious no-brainer thing to tell people but we've already seen that cnet is going to extreme lengths to hide this information to keep people from leaving their site.  So anyway that's good.

And they are at least including a link to the real original download of the program on the download page, at the bottom.

And they are at least explaining prior to user clicking download, that the user is going to first get the Softonic downloader which may install adware stuff, before they get the real program they want.

Now the bad:

Instead of presenting the user 2 downloads, one from the program authors home page and one with the softonic downloader, they are presenting their downloader as the right way to download, and then an additional link at the bottom labeled "Alternative Screenshot Captor download from an external server (availability not guaranteed by Softonic)"  -- you can see they are trying hard to push people to download using their installer.

Just like Stoic Joker says -- they are deliberately trying to trick people to avoid the author's original site, as if it was somehow untrustworthy.


To me this is a clear case of trying to trick people to download your crap adware installer.  Is it as bad as cnet? No, clearly not.  But is it bad enough to warrant us trying to rally the troops to force softonic to improve this?  I'm not sure.  What do you guys think?

We are starting to see some glimpses into a really ugly possible future for free software (and uglier for donationware) if these 3rd parties can perfect a way of getting in between authors and users and profiteering from their role as middlemen snake oil salesman.

It's almost as if we are being told: Adware is the future and it's going to be injected into your software whether you like it or not.  If you don't put it in yourself someone else will and they'll get the profits.

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Scrolling capture is not working

« Last post by mouser on September 06, 2011, 08:04 AM »

The extra white space cannot be solved -- it has to do with the way notepad displays windows contents and never displays a partial line at the bottom.

Ok so this is a key clue for me that my code is not properly accounting for windows 7 themes..  I will try to fix that first, and then see what problems remain for people after that.  At least that gives me a much narrower scope of issue to focus on for now.

Thanks 

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General Software Discussion / Re: Cnet's Download.com and the installer scam

« Last post by mouser on September 06, 2011, 07:34 AM »

As for softonic targeting adwords campaign and making subdomains for software to rank higher than original developer, that is easy to confirm.

This is done to several of my software programs by competing companies (Techsmith which is otherwise a very nice company regularly buys google ads to redirect people to their SnagIt program when they search for my Screenshot Captor).  I find something very distasteful about that, but not to the degree that I feel the need to protest.

For me the buying ads against someone else's software is not in the same ballpark as the downloader type scam that cnet is/was engaged in.

So if someone has evidence that softonic is going to try to copy cnet with this installer thing I'd like to hear about that specifically, so we can organize some protests and start spreading the word to boycott them.  But for now I don't see any evidence of it.

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N.A.N.Y. 2012 / NANY 2012 Release: Web Link Captor, aka LL Robot

« Last post by mouser on September 06, 2011, 07:23 AM »

NANY 2012 Entry Information

One of the things I will release for NANY will be a small desktop application, temporarily named LL Robot Web Link Captor.

Nothing very fancy (It's fancy   ) but I think it will be useful to bloggers.  It was inspired by App's father's blog on jazz music, but it has nothing to do with Jazz.

I'll post a beta as time approaches.

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Scrolling capture is not working

« Last post by mouser on September 06, 2011, 07:01 AM »

Tomos, that is an important clue.

So can i confirm -- with "windows 7 basic" you get a good capture, but with other themes you don't?

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General Software Discussion / Re: Cnet's Download.com and the installer scam

« Last post by mouser on September 06, 2011, 06:22 AM »

After CNet downloader, we have a new brand in this market - softonic download manager. Forcing users to download installer.

I can't tell from that link what is going on with any softonic download manager.. does anyone have any more information on this?  If they are doing something similar to cnet without a way to opt out we need to start protesting it.

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Splicing a vertical section of an image

« Last post by mouser on September 06, 2011, 06:20 AM »

and which area were you trying to splice out?

what i might do is just add a check so that if its not obvious whether you are trying to do a horizontal or vertical splice SC will ask you.

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Living Room / Re: Looking for beta-testers

« Last post by mouser on September 05, 2011, 10:54 PM »

Ha vlastimil has a fun sense of humour.  From this page:

It is the year 2011 and the brand new RW Paint is going to get a command line interface. Excited? No? Too bad.

 

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Scrolling capture is not working

« Last post by mouser on September 05, 2011, 03:58 PM »

i wonder if the problem is windows (7) themes..

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Highlighting rectangle

« Last post by mouser on September 05, 2011, 02:56 PM »

Thanks for the report. 

After a while maybe we can determine that we really only need one of those blending modes and that i can either get rid of the options for blending mode and force it to that, or just have a checkbox to toggle between previous and new blend modes, rather than have that current combo box with lots of choices.