Recent Posts

251

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: [Bug] Menu displaying

« Last post by oblivion on January 25, 2013, 12:46 AM »

Left-clicking does not produce same bug as right-click?

-mouser (January 24, 2013, 08:41 PM)

No. The menu is positioned just above the taskbar as it should be.

252

General Software Discussion / Re: PicPick vs FastStone Capture vs Screenshot Captor vs Jet Screenshot

« Last post by oblivion on January 24, 2013, 09:52 AM »

For what little it's worth -- particularly given that there doesn't seem to be much to choose on the  functionality front -- SC is my preferred option of those mentioned here. I agree that the UI feels perhaps a tiny bit cluttered but it's never let me down yet, it seems to be able to cope well with everything I've ever needed from it, AND, apparently unlike the others with the possible exception of PicPick (which I can't use at work) it has a portable version. [I FAR prefer portable software these days: my preferred computing environment is the one that only exists when I plug in my portable HD and fire up LaunchBarCommander (from which everything else flows!)]

I don't do the scrolling capture thing often, but the one time I needed it (and I badly needed it to work quickly and effectively, can't remember why but it was a big window, maybe four horizontal screens by eight vertical) after not too much effort, I got what I needed.

253

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Earlier versions of Serif software at bargain prices until 4 Jan. 2013

« Last post by oblivion on January 17, 2013, 07:16 AM »

For what little it's worth, I've used most of Serif's "big hitters" over the years. I also vary between slightly and deeply unhappy with some of their sales techniques (they phone me to keep me "up to date" every so often and I generally end up getting quite annoyed if I get one of the sales monkeys who's been taught to use the customer's first name in every sentence alongside asking questions to which the psychologically obvious answer is "yes" which of course creates a drive to go on saying it) but their products are mostly at least okay and sometimes excellent.

PagePlus has been a pretty fair PDF generator for quite a while, but its ability to edit PDFs from other sources has been limited, at least up to X5. (I have X6 but have so far only used it for one major piece of work.)

DrawPlus is, as several have said, a pretty decent vector graphics editor. Xara is faster and possibly more capable but it doesn't think the way I do and I generally get on better with DP. (My favourite Serif deal was when they offered me DP and a graphics tablet at what was -- for the time -- an extremely good price. I've been addicted to graphics tablets ever since and only use a mouse when I absolutely have to.) Most of the avatars I've ever used have been homebrewed using DP. The current one's no exception

PhotoPlus isn't the best photo editor around (although it's pretty capable). I tend to split my time between SageLight for tweaking the overall image, PhotoPlus for adding things like text or for lifting things off backgrounds, and Xara for object removal. As I do far less of the latter two things, you might correctly guess that I don't use PhotoPlus all that much anymore.

I have used WebPlus. I don't much like it, but I've been asked to make a couple of static websites for people in the past and because that's not really my main area of expertise (something of an understatement, if I'm honest!) I've been happy to use anything that lets me do design and doesn't make me worry about anything too complicated. Given that, it's fine -- but I looked into the Serif-hosted bits of functionality a year or so back and found the whole idea gave me the heebs.

Serif's techies have usually been better to deal with than their sales guys. Their technical support -- on the odd occasions where I've needed it -- generally has been quite good. There are odd exceptions -- there's a file dialogue bug that they've been aware of for some years that I think remains unfixed, for instance -- but if you can either put up with or get shot of the aggravating salespeople, most of the products are at least acceptable and at best significantly better value for money than their competitors.

254

Living Room / Re: Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz dies at 26

« Last post by oblivion on January 13, 2013, 06:00 PM »

I have obviously spent a very long time with my head under a rock. I spent some time today, having seen this post here and deciding I needed to know more about the whys and wherefores of this, reading various news reports, analyses and the like, and found out a lot that I don't think I'd properly realised about the US justice system. Despite paying a fair amount of attention to the Bradley Manning case, I somehow felt it was the exception rather than the rule.

Clearly, I was wrong.

Even though I'm currently reading a polemic disguised as a work of fiction by Cory Doctorow (Pirate Cinema, got it via the Humble ebook Bundle, and very good it is too), who has also written this tribute, I hadn't quite got to grips with the pervasive nature of the concept of "intellectual property" and the way the legal industry has found to keep itself in dollars by continually redefining crime in its respect in more and more abstruse ways.

And although the treatment of Aaron Swartz by the US justice system is utterly reprehensible, I'm quite sure there's no room for complacency for those of us who aren't US citizens.

I hope some lessons are being or will be learned.

But I fear they will not be. There's too many lawyers' jobs on the line.

255

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: [Bug] Menu displaying

« Last post by oblivion on January 09, 2013, 06:12 PM »

You are repeatedly pressing the HOTKEY to show the quick paste menu.. I thought you were bringing up the tray icon menu.

Ok I can reproduce this now.  I will fix -- though it's not really a problem per se, it is disconcerting.

-mouser (December 17, 2012, 05:44 AM)

The tray icon menu is another thing. On my Vista system, if I right-click on the tray icon the menu appears briefly where I'd expect -- above the notification area -- then leaps up 1/3 of the screen so it's approximately vertically centred. It's been doing it for a while, it's most disconcerting, but it doesn't do it on the XP or 7 machines I use. Have I set an obscure option that I shouldn't have? I don't think this USED to happen...

256

N.A.N.Y. 2013 / Re: --> DonationCoder.com NANY 2013 Roundup Summary

« Last post by oblivion on January 08, 2013, 06:09 AM »

Congratulations, all -- from the weird to the wonderful, there's a ton of effort expended above and I bet few get the thanks they deserve

257

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: OpalCalc 1.43

« Last post by oblivion on December 26, 2012, 09:34 AM »

Thanks for the heads-up, Renegade! I shall be downloading my update momentarily. (Christmas stuff? Nah. That was yesterday. )

258

AutoHotkey / Re: Clicking in fields

« Last post by oblivion on October 31, 2012, 11:59 AM »

All my "too complicated" lights have come on at once.

-oblivion (October 29, 2012, 12:01 PM)

Yeah, it's not for the faint of heart.  However, it is reliable.

-skwire (October 29, 2012, 01:58 PM)

My "too complicated" lights have continued to blink, at least intermittently. However, I've done pretty much what I said I'd do if I couldn't find anything simpler: I've downloaded a graphic that sits directly above the input field using UrlDownloadToFile, then used ImageSearch to provide its coordinates, which I then add a bit to and feed to Click.

It still feels clunky. But what the heck, it works -- and I don't have to try to decode what's going on at COM level, which can only be a bonus.

Thanks, both!

259

AutoHotkey / Re: Clicking in fields

« Last post by oblivion on October 29, 2012, 12:01 PM »

If you're using IE, you can use the COM interface available in AHK_L.

-skwire (October 26, 2012, 01:29 PM)

All my "too complicated" lights have come on at once.

I'm not a proper programmer, honest!

260

AutoHotkey / Re: Clicking in fields

« Last post by oblivion on October 29, 2012, 11:34 AM »

You can locate the position of the text label that's usually on the left side of the input, and click a few pixels right of that? AHK or AutoIt can do that for you.

-Ath (October 26, 2012, 01:08 PM)

I know what I'm looking for on the screen but I can't work out how to find it. I thought ImageSearch was going to help but that looks more like a brute-force mechanism for finding a graphic I already have in a specified area of the screen. That's not quite what I'm trying to do: I'm trying to say "please give me the coordinates in the active window of xyz bit of text or a graphic called abc.jpg"

Do I have to use, say, FileCopy to copy a nearby graphic from the webpage, then ImageSearch to locate it? That feels clunky but I can't find anything better...? 

261

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Vladstudio hallowe'en offer

« Last post by oblivion on October 28, 2012, 03:17 PM »

Dramatization of my apartment:

http://cdn.decalgirl...ns/_full/library.jpg

 

-TaoPhoenix (October 28, 2012, 08:01 AM)

Oddly, my wife bought that design for me for my kindle last Christmas. I then bought the same skin to fit my Sansa Clip+. It wasn't until today, when I was browsing all those great wallpapers, that I realised who'd created the design originally!

262

Found Deals and Discounts / Vladstudio hallowe'en offer

« Last post by oblivion on October 28, 2012, 07:13 AM »

For anyone who likes art, wallpapers, so forth, the zombies have cut quite a lot of cash from the cost of a Premium account with Vladstudio (Ubuntu users may recognise some of his artwork.)

$1.99 for a lifetime membership, until after Hallowe'en. Bargain.

Vladstudio

Mwah-hah-hah-hah-haaaaaaaaaaaaah...

263

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: Database error

« Last post by oblivion on October 27, 2012, 04:38 AM »

The bug was only affect upgraders on the first run of the new version.  No point re-downloading new version if you have 2.16.02 and have already restarted it.

-mouser (October 26, 2012, 05:22 PM)

Phew. I was really worried for a while, there -- like, has my database been scrambled or something. Thanks as always, mouser!

264

Clipboard Help+Spell / Database error

« Last post by oblivion on October 26, 2012, 03:54 PM »

I've just developed an error with the new version of CHS.

Error DBG109: DBISam Engine error #11949 SQL parsing error - expected column name but instead found WindowTitle in SELECT SQL statement at line 1 column 112

Help!

Running under 32bit Win7

265

AutoHotkey / Clicking in fields

« Last post by oblivion on October 26, 2012, 11:54 AM »

I have an AHK routine that picks up some information and pastes it into an input field on a webpage.

What I'd like to be able to (but can't) is use some sort of keyboard shortcut that put the cursor into said textfield then hit ^v to paste the text. The reason I can't is, apparently, that the developer of the code for the relevant webpage wrote it in dotNet and (he says) there's no way to communicate back out of it to the host PC to set up a keyboard shortcut. So that's that, and all I can do is take advantage of the fact that the field never moves relative to its containing frame, pick an appropriate coordinate and click there.

There's a lot to go wrong with that approach. If IE develops a left-hand bar -- history, for instance -- we'll be clicking in the wrong place.

Can anyone suggest any other possible approaches?

266

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: File manager Desk & Archive

« Last post by oblivion on October 25, 2012, 12:33 PM »

Looks like an interesting approach to file management but the portability thing would be a must, for me. My portable hard disk is my primary operating environment most of the time

267

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Listary Pro for only $9.95 on Friday 19 October

« Last post by oblivion on October 22, 2012, 01:25 PM »

My two penn'orth... Listary for me does stuff that my file manager of choice (Opus) doesn't help with. The point of Listary interacting with file dialogues is not to enhance the file manager in current use, it's to bring the file manager into most file dialogues.

For instance: I often create pdfs via a pdf printer. Listary remembers the places I routinely save pdfs and offers them to me. It doesn't do that when I'm just saving files, because it's a different dialogue generated by a different program. It's significantly more reliable than Windows "recent places" thing (which I never found works well) and with a bit of work I can set up a favourite locations list too.

Its only deficiency from my point of view is, in comparison with the program I used to use (FileBX) it doesn't switch file dialogues into details view and sort most recent first automatically, which fbx did and I still miss. But it's a brilliant program for anyone who uses multiple storage locations on their system, in my view. And it's portable too.

268

Screenshot Captor / Scrolling capture wonderfulness

« Last post by oblivion on October 02, 2012, 05:22 PM »

I got presented, late this afternoon, with an 800 page PDF that had clearly never been intended to be printed. Actually, most of it didn't need to be, but there are four pages with a lot of detail, in tables, set out in a tiny font that, even blown up to A3, still comes out no bigger than about 5pt.

Nothing I have that can edit PDFs could do anything helpful.

Eventually, after much messing around, I did this:

Use a freebie PDF splitter (I used PDFill -- I don't like it, it crashed twice, but it did the job on the third attempt) to pull out the relevant pages into a standalone PDF.

Use SumatraPDF (I don't like Adobe and avoid it whenever possible) to display the new file and zoomed in until the text was all extremely visible.

Used ScreenshotCaptor in its capture scrolling object mode to capture the document to a PNG that can then be cropped and scaled appropriately and printed using a poster-printing mode.

And It Just Worked. Well, I helped it by counting the vertical and horizontal moves (15 x 4, in case you care) but I didn't even have to fine-tune the final join. Perfect.

More brownie points for me and every chance of upsetting a number of people who clearly believe the best way to hide important information is to print it extremely small and protect the PDF against text copying. Hah.

Okay, it's sad, I was on my own and nobody was around but I actually said aloud "Mouser, you're a genius!" (If you were listening VERY hard, you might even have heard me.)

  

269

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: XYplorer on BDJ on September 5th

« Last post by oblivion on September 05, 2012, 05:04 AM »

...and a bump to remind you

270

General Software Discussion / Re: Ritlabs "support" gem

« Last post by oblivion on August 24, 2012, 09:43 AM »

I note The Bat Pro is on BDJ today, with a 50% discount.

It's sad, really: it's a really decent, capable, configurable email client that I've loved for years -- until it (or rather, Voyager) ate my email archives, proved immediately afterwards that its backups weren't anything of the sort, and immediately after that their support wasn't worthy of the name. I went to Thunderbird too.

I still miss The Bat -- but not enough that I'm prepared to trust it with valuable data again.

271

Found Deals and Discounts / XYplorer on BDJ on September 5th

« Last post by oblivion on August 14, 2012, 06:00 AM »

Got this a couple of hours ago:

Hello XYplorer User Forum member,

on Wednesday, Sept 5, 2012, XYplorer's Lifetime License Pro will be
available at BitsDuJour with a 50% discount. That means you can save $30 /
€25. You might make a note for yourself and spread the word to your friends
and colleagues.

Consider this a "spreading of the word."

272

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Giveaway: Wondershare Fantashow (movie/slideshow maker)

« Last post by oblivion on August 03, 2012, 07:56 AM »

In case it interests anybody, on my site there is a new giveaway for Wondershare Fantashow.

-rgdot (July 11, 2012, 10:51 AM)

I left a comment but got no response. (I even went back and checked a few days later.) Just looked again today and my comment has evaporated. 

273

Living Room / Re: MP3 players for podcasts

« Last post by oblivion on July 24, 2012, 12:00 PM »

Easiest would be to just swap SD cards.

-40hz (July 24, 2012, 07:07 AM)

Cheapest, definitely. But the database rebuilding process is time-consuming and to go through that every time I put the 32Gb SD back in :shudder:

I don't know about you, but I never felt the need to keep a full podcast list on my portable device.

That's not what I do. I never -- or very, very rarely -- listen to podcasts more than once, but I tend to accrue them slightly faster than I listen to them, with the result that I have a backlog. So my PC has a folder of unheard podcasts on it, and my MP3 player gets loaded with the oldest few from that folder -- depending on available space -- which get deleted from the PC straight away and deleted from the MP3 player in due course, once played. I don't want to get to a position where I've emptied the playlist, so once I've listened to maybe 2/3 of the 10-20 podcasts on the player, I delete the listened-to ones to make space and copy a new batch to the end of the playlist.

Is that weird? I'm starting to think nobody else does this, or anything like it...  

And since that's such a small number of items to keep track of, it's easy for me to just 'drag and drop' without getting too fancy about it.

Mostly, that relies on playback being acceptable if the order isn't an issue or if the player's very good about playing things back in the order delivered. My Zen wouldn't do that -- it always tried to sort things by artist -- and while I think the Clip might be better at handling things in the order written to disk, I'd rather take control, if possible.

I'm currently experimenting with Mediamonkey. It will export an m3u playlist directly to the player that I then have to hand-edit to remove the drive letter from each line, but it might do most of what I want, one way or another. (I just have to wait 20 minutes, while the media's refreshed, to find out!)

This is so blasted complicated that I am beginning to think that it IS me that's weird, here.  

274

Living Room / Re: MP3 players for podcasts

« Last post by oblivion on July 24, 2012, 05:33 AM »

I'm not an MP3 "power user" if you will, in that I haven't taken the time to figure out playlists and some of the other options. The way I work it works for me.

-bob99 (July 20, 2012, 08:14 AM)

I think maybe I need to become a bit of a "power user."

I have a Sansa Clip + already, with vast amounts of music on it, spread between internal memory and a 32Gb micro SD card. I'm currently trying to work out if I should buy another one just for podcasts, buy an SD card just for podcasts that I swap with the music card when required, or something else entirely.

My podcast management process with the Zen has been relatively painless: use MediaMonkey to delete the podcasts I've listened to from the top of the playlist (which helpfully deletes not just the playlist entries but also the associated files) then use the Zen media management software to copy the next oldest podcasts off my hard disk to the bottom of the playlist (which transfers the files and makes playlist entries in one go.) [Mediamonkey won't file-transfer to device-hosted playlists -- or I can't make it do so, anyway.] Finally I can reorder the playlist so I get the right sort of mix (for instance, I'd rather alternate between comedy and serious than have too many of one sort one after another) and still ensure that I don't listen to something newer than something else I haven't heard yet. That gives me a playlist I can return to, it means I don't have to do any navigation if I'm listening in the car or vacuuming the house -- my two main things for this.

The difficult bit, I think, is keeping the playlist in synch with the files. I could edit the playlist with a text editor but that won't do the file management. I can move files around anyway I like but filenames aren't as helpful as the ID tags that the media software shows me.

Rockbox's native playlist features are -- I gather -- really powerful but the Clip + just doesn't have the most usable screen/interface for this stuff.

<sigh> I think I feel a request to a programmer coming on...

275

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: OpalCalc 1.43

« Last post by oblivion on July 20, 2012, 10:14 AM »

Yes Win calc is treating it as (5 - 4 + 2) ÷ 10 × 2, but I'd rather use the standard mathematical precedence where divide and multiply have higher priority - i.e.: 5 - 4 + (2 ÷ 10 × 2). What do others think?

-Twinbee (July 20, 2012, 09:53 AM)

Proper mathematical precedence, definitely. If I wanted a stupid calculator, I'd use the one they sell in the supermarket for $1.56 (at current exchange values according to OC.)