Recent Posts

15976

General Software Discussion / Re: ALL cloud applications should offer downloadable installs.

« Last post by mouser on July 13, 2010, 11:38 AM »

I think i agree with some of superboy's points.. the pattern of this new online service business model seems to me:

1. offer a new web service for free, get tons of publicity and sign ups and users.  no ads, great free support, etc.  everyone is happy and everyone flocks to it.  no one asks themselves how such a service can be offered for free..

2. after a substantial userbase is built.. roll out the ads and subscription charges.  people are locked in at this point so there's not much they can do if they don't like it.  migrating away from a service they've put all their data into is difficult.

It's not unreasonable at all to charge for their service of hosting and managing these things -- they offer many benefits.  But the lack of control over your data and the lock-in and helplessness is a serious concern.

I think the question you have to ask yourself before spending time trusting your data and workflow to such online sites is:  how easy will it be for me to get my data out of this service and import it into another if i want to leave.  if the answer is not easy, then avoid it.  the ideal case is a hosted service that also offers the option to install their open source software on your own or a community run server if you need to at some point.

15977

N.A.N.Y. 2009 / Re: NANY 2009 Release: Trout (audio player)

« Last post by mouser on July 13, 2010, 11:28 AM »

welcome to the site ignotus, hope you'll stay around for a while 

15978

Living Room / Slashdot Question: How to Recover Stolen Laptop if you Know Thief's IP Address?

« Last post by mouser on July 13, 2010, 09:33 AM »

Today on slashdot is a great question.  It's from someone who had a laptop stolen, and was able to catch the thief's "IP ADDRESS" (the network address which shows what internet access point they are connecting from).  But he's now in a quandary about how to get someone to track down the ip to a specific person so that the thief can be caught.  I've wondered the same thing..

I even contacted the local FBI office and they said they're 'not interested' in the case despite it now crossing state lines. Am I chasing my own tail here? How can I get someone to pay attention to the fact that all the police need to do is file some RIAA-style paperwork to find the name associated with this IP address and knock on the right door to nab a criminal and recover my property? How can I get my laptop back — and more importantly — stop this criminal in his tracks?

http://ask.slashdot....-By-IP-Address-Alone

15979

Screenshot Captor / Re: Bug capturing Silverlight?

« Last post by mouser on July 13, 2010, 08:53 AM »

it sounds like silverlight must capture all of the keyboard controls, so none get through to screenshot captor..  good thinking about using the button.

15980

Screenshot Captor / Re: guidelines for region selection

« Last post by mouser on July 13, 2010, 08:52 AM »

i've added this to the to-do list.

15981

LaunchBar Commander / Re: Cannot make a visible window modal

« Last post by mouser on July 12, 2010, 06:21 PM »

try alt+tab to get to the window. that may be hidden, or hit escape or enter.
basically this signifies a programming error on my part -- i'll try to track it down.

15982

Living Room / A special gift from Veign.com to DonationCoder - thank you!

« Last post by mouser on July 12, 2010, 09:56 AM »

Chris Hanscom, the brains behind Veign.com, is a developer and web designer, and has been a member and friend of DonationCoder since we started in 2005.  His most recent web project is Open Menu, based on his entry in last year's NANY event on DC.

Recently Chris contacted me about the idea of him donating a copy of Microsoft's MSDN and Visual Studio Bundle to be given away on DC.  It's an extremely valuable thing, and he asked what i thought the best way might be to give it away.

In the past we have had a programming contest for such things, but he and I agreed that this time the best thing might be to honor someone who has been just out of control in the last year or so creating coding snacks for people who request them in the Coding Snacks section.  I'm talking of course about DC member Jody Holmes, aka Skwire (see his page of software here).

Chris readily agreed, and so on behalf of DC i'd like to thank Chris and Veign.com for such a generous gift, and congratulate Skwire on receiving it!




ps.
Chris tells me he will be giving away another copy of the Visual Studio/MSDN bundle on his blog, which is excellent by the way, so stay tuned to that if that's something you are interested in.

15983

Screenshot Captor / Re: Bug capturing Silverlight?

« Last post by mouser on July 12, 2010, 09:54 AM »

Sorry for the delay in replying.

Do you mean that nothing happens when you try to ctrl+click?

If so, try pressing the right Ctrl button, that doesn't require a mouse click.

If i am misunderstanding the problem, please let me know.

ps. sorry it took me so long to reply!

15984

Screenshot Captor / Re: how to remove (or move) "older" folder?

« Last post by mouser on July 11, 2010, 08:45 PM »

uncheck this option:

15985

DC Member Programs and Projects / Re: My new pet project : makes flash games more like desktop games

« Last post by mouser on July 11, 2010, 01:23 PM »

The free edition is usable on SwiffOut sister website http://swiffoutgames.com  (which I'm very proud of too, because it is very nice I think ) where you can play flash games fullscreen for free (swiffout is unlimited on this website, it will not display dialogs or anything ). SwiffOut Games is also a very special website because it is optimized to work with SwiffOut to make things a little bit easier.

cool!

15986

Finished Programs / Re: organize text

« Last post by mouser on July 10, 2010, 07:23 PM »

that's an interesting idea.. i can see cases where this might be useful in different forms.

as a coding snack you might imagine a program that loaded a text file and showed each line in a list, and let you quickly tag each line by hitting a digit 1-9 or letter a-z, so you could really quickly assign a "tag" to each line (or specific lines), and then hit let you perform some actions.

actions could be things like save each tag group to a dif file, or copy all items in a specific tag group to clipboard, etc.

15987

General Software Discussion / MOVED: show some of the content in a tooltip

« Last post by mouser on July 10, 2010, 07:14 AM »

This topic has been moved to Site/Forum Features.

https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=23376.0

15988

Site/Forum Features / Re: show some of the content in a tooltip

« Last post by mouser on July 10, 2010, 07:14 AM »

that's not a bad idea.

15989

Living Room / Re: App Culture vs. Free Culture

« Last post by mouser on July 09, 2010, 02:06 PM »

Related article:
http://infoworld.com...rmine-developers-559

Developers are rightly troubled by the often draconian-seeming policies at Apple's iPhone App Store. But according to analysts at Forrester Research, Apple's model represents more than just an overweening SDK license agreement. It's an entirely new relationship between software vendors and consumers, one that Forrester has dubbed "curated computing."

15990

ProcessTamer / Re: Problem with the program: tray tool not running.

« Last post by mouser on July 09, 2010, 01:23 PM »

thanks for persisting -- that makes sense. 

15991

Living Room / Re: App Culture vs. Free Culture

« Last post by mouser on July 09, 2010, 10:20 AM »

What Renegade said is right, but i think it's actually much much worse.

Look around at all these hundreds of shareware listing/cataloging sites, that work hard to make nice websites where you can find and read about software, download it, see update information, read reviews, etc.  And they do this all without charging the software authors or the users.  Why? Because they are making money on the web advertising from the traffic.

It's not to hard to see why these App Store ideas are getting popular.. They have figured out that if they can create a virtual monopoly in terms of being the *only* gateway by which people find and buy and download software, they can charge everyone and make money off of everyone involved in the process. 

It's a goldmine for them, and the more they can set up a system where by users ONLY go to the App Store to get software (or music, etc.) the more they can charge authors for access to the customers, since the authors no longer have any viable alternative.  Then they double their money with advertising and charging people to artificially promote and place their products, and the situation just gets worse and worse for small developers who are at the mercy of the middle man.

It seems like a huge step backward for small artists and developers, who were just starting to throw off the chains of the big record companies, etc. and connect directly with their fans and end users.  Now we seem to be flirting with the idea of going back to a system where the artists and consumers are again separated by a monopolistic middle-man determined to squeeze as much profit and exert as much control, and set up as many ways to jack up profits through advertising and promotion deals as ever.

I know this sounds a bit extreme but the more i think about it the more concerned i get.

It seems essential to me that we support a development platform where the channel for getting music/software is NOT controlled by an organization whose incentive is to make money from this channel.  It means we have to choose a platform (whether it be computer, mobile device, etc.) where there is a concerted effort to not come between and exploit the developers/artists and the users.

By all means let everyone make some money from what they create.  But stay away from anything where someone else is making a profit by setting up roadblocks between you and the people actually creating things for you.

15992

ProcessTamer / Re: Problem with the program: tray tool not running.

« Last post by mouser on July 09, 2010, 10:01 AM »

first, thank you for being so patient to test and report and not getting too frustrated.

the fact that the list is empty tells me that the program is not seeing a list of running processes.  i need to add something that detects this scenario and at least reports to the user that this means there is a problem.

assuming that you read that other thread about disabled services that can cause this, and have ruled out the possibility that you have run some system tweaker that has disabled this process management service.. it could be an issue with not running with administration privileges.  can you try exiting the tray program completely and trying to run it as an administrator? (right click and choose from there i think).

this weekend i will do more experimenting on a win7 x64 machine and see if i notice anything.

15993

Developer's Corner / Re: Style guidelines for how to structure helpfiles?

« Last post by mouser on July 09, 2010, 08:04 AM »

iphigenie's points about not searchable is key -- you really cannot meaningfully use a screencast as a good reference manual.

a screencast is fantastic for letting you get a feel for the way the application works and how you might use it, or as a teaching tool, but for advanced users who need to locate some detailed information quickly they are no substitute for a good help manual.

you can also use a a help manual to rapidly familiarize yourself with the range and scope of an application and spot features that are relevant to you in a way that is impossible with screencasts.

i think they are complimentary, especially for advanced applications.

15994

ProcessTamer / Re: Problem with the program: tray tool not running.

« Last post by mouser on July 09, 2010, 07:40 AM »

if you right-click on the tray icon and choose "configure", and then you go to the "Processes" tab, and uncheck the checkbox at bottom that says "Hide < 1% Normal CPU", does it show a list of running processes? or is the list empty?

15995

ProcessTamer / Re: Problem with the program: tray tool not running.

« Last post by mouser on July 08, 2010, 09:41 PM »

hi faceless,

it *should* work -- there should be no problem running it on win7 x64.. some people have posted about it here: https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=1092.0

it can sometimes happen if some other tool has disabled a service.

15996

Living Room / Re: Amazon's Kindle eBook Reader

« Last post by mouser on July 08, 2010, 07:11 PM »

first impressions of new graphite kindle dx:
http://www.mobiletec...lat.php?Number=37769

15997

Circle Dock / Re: 7 inch touchscreen

« Last post by mouser on July 08, 2010, 06:30 PM »

sgt can hold onto the money for you mark to buy something else when you see something appropriate.

15998

Living Room / Re: App Culture vs. Free Culture

« Last post by mouser on July 08, 2010, 02:49 PM »

btw for the record i think that 30% is way way too high, and is the kind of mark up that you could only get away with by having a near-monopoly control over access by consumers.

15999

Living Room / Re: More ammunition why patents are EVIL

« Last post by mouser on July 08, 2010, 10:40 AM »

i think this amazon patent example is a terrific demonstration of the irony and despicableness of the patent process.. notice that the patent in question was for an ebook design that amazon doesn't seem to have any intention of using.. it's probably just one of a thousand patents that amazon has hired a team of people to write and file, as a kind of field of landmines to discourage and attack other potential competitors and make money through lawsuits.  If you are a big corporation, filing patent applications is a like a way to feed the lawyer pool you keep in the moat outside your castle.

16000

Living Room / Re: App Culture vs. Free Culture

« Last post by mouser on July 08, 2010, 10:32 AM »

I agree with TheQwerty's point about it providing some value as well.

For me -- the core problem with the App Stores is much more fundamental and foundational, and that is that all of the incentives for such a store push it to favor the money-making applications being sold.  The store makes money when people BUY things.  The author makes money when people BUY things.  The store makes money (like google ads) by selling ads to promote the things you can BUY. But no one makes any money on things that are free.. the store makes no money, the free software authors don't pay for ads, etc.

This means that there is every incentive and a constant financial motivation to promote and encourage commercial applications from companies that will buy ads, and every incentive to make it harder and harder for free software developers to get access and exposure.

In a sense, with the App Stores (much as with google ads), the game is rigged from the start.  Freeware authors are allowed in, but they can never be allowed to displace the profit source that comes from ads and companies selling things.  If free resources ever get within striking distance of impacting the profit from paying companies, additional walls will go up to adjust the scales.  Maybe this means charging for secure certificates, maybe this means excluding apps that don't pass some elaborate evaluation process, etc.

The app stores do provide a service to the end user.. my concern is that there may be a huge risk that once you have an App Store that becomes *THE* gateway that all users use to find and choose software, you have essentially let the big corporations set up a checkpoint that ensures that the big monied developers have preferred access/exposure and that the small indie free authors fall farther into oblivion.